You Don’t Know: Ninja Cuts (Disc One)
Ninja Tune
The first thing that strikes me as clever about Ninjatune’s latest and fifth compilation, You Don’t Know: Ninja Cuts, is the simple ambiguous meaning of the title.
Consider this: If you know about Ninja Tune artists, you generally know what to expect—broken beats, experimental electronic, jazzy downtempo, elements of hip-hop. But as you learn to know about Ninja Tune, the listener almost never knows exactly what to expect from its diverse releases.
That in a nutshell is what makes Ninja Tune a unique label of ever-growing creativity and hard-to-classify experimental music.
On the first of the three disc set, it begins in typical Ninja Tune fashion with the bass-heavy grime induced Modeselektor remix of Ghislain Poirier’s excellent “Blazin’.” From there the mood shifts through the likes of Roots Manuva’s catchy “Seat Yourself,” Pop Levi’s infectious “Dita Dimone,” Diplo’s rare 12” track “Epistemology Suite 3: Don’t Fall,” and quintessential Amon Tobin with “Bloodstone.”
At times the selections range from spacey IDM (Daedelus) to outright driving funk (The Herbaliser) to horn-heavy broken beat lounge-like material(The Heavy) to the bouncy (Mr. Scruff + Quantic) and then into chillout mode with Fink and the Cinematic Orchestra.
So much is covered here, it leaves one to wonder what disc two and disc three have to offer. For a teaser stay tuned for the likes of Coldcut, Wiley, DJ Shadow, and TheDeathSet.
