DJ KOZE
PART AFFABLE ECCENTRIC, PART SENSITIVE ARTIST, OFF-KILTER HOUSE AND TECHNO SPECIALIST DJ KOZE MIGHT SEEM ALL WHIMSICAL AND KOOKY, BUT HE’S ALL BUSINESS WHEN IT COMES TO MUSIC.
Stefan Kozalla, better known as DJ Koze, does the eccentric musician thing pretty well. When interviewing him prior to this year’s Eastern Electric festival, we asked him who at festival he was most looking forward to seeing. The answer was a whimsical “me”. Crack took some time aside to talk to Koze to see if we could punctuate the mystique and wangle some biographical details out of the man; peel back the layers of charming eccentricity and get to The Real DJ Koze (whatever that is). Is the lack of information deliberate? “Of course”, he says.
This much we do know: Koze started out in Germany’s (then) fledgling hip-hop scene about two decades ago. After buying the music he loved, the next logical step was to start mixing it. He quickly became extremely good. Soon after joining the International Pony collective, Koze was a DMC Championship runner-up. But he no longer steps up to the microphone with IP — that “would be embarrassing”. Still, these early years in hip- hop shaped the DJ Koze sound: “the influence of early 90’s hip- hop like Pharcyde, De la Soul, Tribe Called Quest and all the others, has still an effect on my approach to production and musical taste, even if it’s a different genre”, he says. But would he ever rejoin International Pony? “Maybe if we were really broke we’d do a reunion. Playing modern versions of our hits with a huge bass drum under it in furniture stores.” Koze’s continuing critical and commercial success is Ikea’s loss. Now famous for helming the Pampa label, and as a solo artist in his own right, Koze’s humour and unorthodoxy serves as welcome antidote to the vapidness of 10-a-penny tech-house currently doing the rounds.
Given this experience with hip-hop, we thought we’d pass one of our pet theories across Koze: house and techno producers who started out in hip-hop tend to create more complex rhythms than those that didn’t. Agree? Disagree? “Maybe right”, he replied. “To speak for myself, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the straight bass drum. If you come from hip-hop you got a wider rhythmical demand. I always try to find ways to let the rhythm sound interesting and morphing.” Interesting and morphing rhythms have been the core of Koze’s sound, plus all the weird vocal and electrical noise snippets that immediately mark-out a Koze track from the rest.
His new album, Amygdala, bears this “off-kilter beats and+ melodies” signature too. Named after parts of the limbic system responsible for processing fear and anger, Koze gave two answers when asked why he went for it. The first was typically intriguing, without (also typically) giving much away when he said, “fear is an interesting topic in my life”. And the second was typically jokesy – “Amygdala is a nice looking word.” So there are (at least) two sides to Koze: the sensitive artist on one hand, the affable eccentric on the other. You can hear both on Ich Schrieb’ Dir Ein Buch 2013, one of the standout tracks from Amygdala, with its (German) vocal snippets, broken beat and emotive strings, it’s immediately identifiable as one of Koze’s.
So does he set out to make Koze music, or is it a more organic process? “I try to keep true to my style without repeating myself. I always try to find new ways of generating my Trademark Sound in any new production”, he says. Collaborations probably aid this process, and Amgydala has loads — Matthew Dear, Milosh, Caribou, Apparat — a veritable A-list of stars of the alternative electronic music scene. It’s a great album, which may have led whoever was responsible for the press release writing ‘this is Koze’s Sgt. Peppers’s’. Hubris? Boldness? “I liked it”, says Koze. “Not in the way that I think I can compare myself to the Beatles, but… Amygdala is a long journey”. And before we can really interrogate what he means by that, he makes another joke – “How could [reviewers] not jubilate? Anyone disliking this album is risking their authority as a good music journalist!”
2013 has more Koze left in it: a remix package for Amydala, including versions from Matthew Herbert, Wolfgang Voigt and Roman Flügel; plenty of festivals; and plenty new music for Pampa. But he wouldn’t tell us much. Well, of course he wouldn’t. He’s DJ Koze.
– – – – – – – – – –
Words: Robert Bates
CONNECT TO CRACK
