Ninja Tune

Ninja Tune is an independent record label based in London, England, UK. It has a satellite office in Los Angeles, California, US covering the whole of North America. It was founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More, better known as Coldcut and managed by Peter Quicke and others. Music Week has written that Ninja Tune is one of the most credible independent labels in the UK.

Inspired by a visit to Japan, Black & More primarily created Ninja Tune in 1990 as a means to escape the creative control of major labels, and to act as a vehicle to release music of a more underground nature, free from the restraints that were put on them via their brief stints with Arista and Big Life. The label has been called "visionary" and "reliably excellent". It has signed a diverse range of uncompromising artists, encourages interactive technology, embraces the audio-visual world, has created its own publishing company, Just Isn’t Music, and finds innovative uses of software.

The label’s first releases —the first five volumes of DJ Food's Jazz Brakes— were produced by Coldcut in the early 1990s, and celebrated by the music press and beat aficionados. They were composed of instrumental sample-based cuts that led the duo to help pioneer new instrumental hip hop beats genres (alongside the Mo'Wax label and Ninja Tune artists such as Funki Porcini, The Herbaliser and DJ Vadim) and, to this day, are recognized as being indispensable tools for DJs.

Ninja

A ninja (忍者) or shinobi (忍び) was a covert agent or mercenary in feudal Japan. The functions of the ninja included: espionage, sabotage, infiltration, assassination and guerrilla warfare. Their covert methods of waging irregular warfare were deemed "dishonorable" and "beneath" the samurai-caste, who observed strict rules about honor and combat. The shinobi proper, a specially trained group of spies and mercenaries, appeared in the Sengoku or "warring states" period, in the 15th century, but antecedents may have existed in the 14th century, and possibly in the 12th century (Heian or early Kamakura era).

In the unrest of the Sengoku period (15th–17th centuries), mercenaries and spies for hire became active in the Iga Province and the adjacent area around the village of Kōga, and it is from the area's clans that much of our knowledge of the ninja is drawn. Following the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate (17th century), the ninja faded into obscurity. A number of shinobi manuals, often based on Chinese military philosophy, were written in the 17th and 18th centuries, most notably the Bansenshukai (1676).