Matt Black Coldcut Plays the Carlton Club

Legendary DJ, VJ, artist, activist plays a rare and special gig at the Carlton Club. 20 Nov.

Matt Black is half of legendary DJ duo and multimedia pop group Coldcut, formed in 1987, and founders of Ninja Tune, the UK label. In 2020 Ninja Tune celebrated 30 years as one of the world’s leading electronic music labels and a beacon for the independent music spirit. In 2017 Coldcut celebrated 30 years in electronic music with a string of gigs, releases and special projects. A new album ‘Keleketla’ was released July 2020 to ‘universal acclaim’ (Metacritic).

Matt is known for innovations in DJing, remixing, mashup, VJing, software, digital art and multimedia. Over 34 years as part of Coldcut he has combined cutting edge artistic expression with positive activist themes in such pieces as Journeys by DJ, The Only Way is Up, People Hold On, Stop This Crazy Thing, Timber, Panopticon, Re:volution, Energy Union, Walk a Mile, True Skool, and many more. Coldcut hA-Ve worked with a wild range of artists, activists and other groups and luminaries eg Steve Reich, James Brown, Mark E Smith, Queen Latifah, Jello Biafra, Saul Williams, Robert Owens, Lisa Stansfield, Crass, Roots Manuva, Lee Scratch Perry, Adrian Sherwood, Tony Allen, Joe Armon-Jones, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the RCA, Greenpeace, and A-Vaaz.

In 2011 Matt designed the iOS app Ninja Jamm, a music app which has had over 600,000 downloads; in Feb 2020 the new advanced version Jamm Pro was released. Matt uses his software to perform, lecture, and give workshops on audiovisual art, technology and music- so people can use these tools for their own art and music.

In 2017, 2 more apps he designed were released: Pixi a visual synth, and Robbery a satirical video game. Midivolve, a music software collaboration with Ableton was released July 2017. The Zen Delay hardware unit released 2019 is also his co-creation and was rated as one of the top effects of the decade by Music Tech.
At Splice festival 2017 Matt showcased his experiments with Style Transfer, a cutting edge new style of visual processing using AI techniques. For his A-V show, done in conjunction with his partner filmmaker Dinaz Stafford, Jamm triggers visual clips so every sound has a matching visual.

Matt collaborated with artist Wolfgang Buttress (the Hive, Kew) for BEAM A-V installation Glastonbury 2019. In lockdown 2020 Matt revived PirateTV the streaming project he started in 1998, and has streamed over 70 shows A-V shows since. With Dinaz Stafford he created a surround-sound piece themed on environment and activism for Greenpeace at Glastonbury 2025.

Matt's stated ambition is to 'create positive art, music and spiritual technology that blows the mind of the entire planet and advances cooperation'. He continues to produce, lecture, DJ, VJ, record, make films, develop software and bridge the worlds of technology, music, art and activism.