ZEN TV featuring Kid Koala, Coldcut, Hextatic and Blockhead.

Friday Feb 27th @ The Forum, Kentish Town, London

On February 27 music aficionados from all over London filed into The Forum for ZEN TV, a brilliant Ninja Tune-produced concert that brought many of the labels top acts together for the evening line up. The crowd was no doubt attracted by the hand-picked samples and ingenious graphic visuals of Cold Cut, Kid Koala and Hextatic, the label’s three biggest stars, as well as Blockhead. The Ninja Tune performers bombarded the stage, one after the other, with calculated beats and fantastical images that left the audience dazed.

Hundreds of music lovers experienced a night full of mix-mastered samples that ranged from hip-hop to well, basically every other genre of music ever heard. Accompanied with a wide range of unimaginable visuals, this was definitely a Ninja-fied event.

No less than twelve turntables and four i-books were positioned across the stage of the airy Forum, enabling the Ninja Tune music makers to do what they are known for best, cut and past graphic visuals together with samples of music.

On the balcony level of the Forum you could take in the entire view of the stage and triptych of screens. One was set up in obvious movie screen fashion, but along the walls to the left and right there were additional screens that projected the same images. Two permanent projections of the Ninja Tune mascot rigorously stared over the crowd like Big Brother, clad with mysterious grins.

Blockhead, a lesser-known dj duo on Ninja Tune, warmed up the thin crowd from the stage that resembled more or less an abandoned TV station. The DJ pair looped images of dead-end urban streets to their hip-hop beats and then visually ascended into space with a spoken word sample that pondered the question ‘how the is moon lit?’. Wetting your palette for the rest of the ZEN TV concert, Blockhead made an escorted landing back to earth, clearing the runway for ColdCut, the original creators of the audio-visual symbiosis that is zenertainment.

Coldcut chillingly took the crowd, which by this point in the evening had become a full house, on an emotionally charged rollercoaster of sound. The Ninja veterans, creating the label in the early 1990s, had nothing to prove as they remain a household name in the homes of keen and respectful music lovers. Coldcut’s playlist was cheerful, melancholic and humorous as it went from jazzy streams to the electronic pop of Royksopp to obscure 80’s hip-hop pop in the form of Neh Neh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance. All these pieces of Coldcut’s ‘music puzzle' served as the soundtrack to the background visuals, which at one point showed three orange Muppets arguing amongst each other as well as singing along to the tunes. After Coldcut’s fun was up the stage was left open for the one man Canadian band, who goes by the name of a bear. Koala, that is.

The talented Canadian fingers' immediately began to flirt with the vinyl as the graphic visuals were substituted with a live black and white video camera that caught Kid Koala’s every move. He manipulated the music with such cleverness you could only think his type was from another planet. He worked so quickly that even while you watched him in action, in front of your face you still didn’t believe it was him producing such exquisite sounds. With their eyes glued to the screen the audience became so entranced by the rhythm that momentarily we all forgot where we were. But just as we were slipping away into oblivion, the words KID KOALA would blink up on the screen in black and white, as if to reassure us that it was him spinning those records, in the flesh.

Kid K flew from The Cure to Bjork but then to display an even more enigmatic arrangement he threw in some INXS ‘Shine Shine let it all out, these are the things we can live without' along with House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around.’ On which note The Forum erupted. All praise for the Vancouver-born Koala, who modestly responded with a snug, innocent smile, as if to say ‘this is my job. It’s music and I love it.'

ZEN TV at The Forum reiterated the fact that Ninja Tune is not a pure bred label. It takes the best of the best in music and graphic art then mixes it up to produce a crazy multimedia cocktail that is well potent. To find out more about the label, the artists and upcoming events check out ninjatune.net and tune in to channel ZEN.