dj koze - kosi comes around

Enjoy! Xpost

"Pick Up" made me think of "Music Sounds Better With You" when I first heard it, the structure is similar to my ears.

Haven't had a chance to play this but I am very excited to see The Gist being sampled!

Worth noting there’s extended versions of both pick up and seeing aliens. They bang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9Kmpwbc9rY

extremely into knock knock

I know it's everyone's favorite, but I'm pretty obsessed with "pick up". like a melancholy air france. so basically the best music ever

it's sad to think / I guess neither one of us / wants to be the first to say / goodbye

where are brad and tim

Omg a dj koze produced Bjork album would be so good, I hate what Arca has done with her sound.

If you like pick up peep the 10 min edit.

Also the seeing aliens extended destroys the original.
This is my favourite record this year. Sound wise it towers over everything in terms of innovation and ideas

Like that casino slot machine sound on track 2 is so weird but works perfectly

listened to the 10 min version a couple of times -- what am I missing that is different, other than an extra 4 minutes?

other early favorite for me is "planet hase". sounds like balearic dam-funk

Kevin you’re not missing anything really - it’s jusr longer with a longer fade but it seems to just loop the original elements yeah. Also of note there’s b sides to this record. Pm me if need be

thanks ross, I heard “love truck” else is there?

am really into “baby” now

There’s also nein Konig nein

pick up 12" is just about my favourite record i've bought all year

much more into the back half of this than the front

Same man

Pacing is so weird on this record. The Murphy and pick up tracks bring it back to life and it soars onwards. It’s like he reverse engineered the comedown - the high comes later

I think my prior comparison to dark night of the soul stands.
Like the sparkle horse - Lynch record this is featured with guests and there’s an aesthetic diversity? But personally I prefer the banging second half

Been digging through the eps too and recommend

XTC - solid aside and fairly banging bside
Rue burnout - nice piano house track

Feel like this could do with having a few tracks and/or singers shitcanned. Like I don't know who Eddie Fummler is but I never want to hear his 'Moving In A Liqueeeeeed' vocal ever again.

There are almost no good reasons for vocals on electronic tracks. You don’t need a singer to validate your music. At least he isn’t singing himself. Electronic producers who also sing are the worst.

When you consider that wipes out a massive chunk of all house music that's quite a statement. Problem here is that Koze himself can't really write songs, or the vocalists he chooses can't. They all sound like these disembodied heads grafted onto the top (same was true with Matthew Dear on the last record), by and large the tracks would lose nothing without them there. It's no coincidence that the three vocalists who do work here (Roisin Murphy, Speech, even Kurt Wagner) come from much more songwritery backgrounds.

His comments about house music annoyed me as well, for reasons I can't quite put my foot on:

"But the mood of house music is really limited. It was sensational for me to discover Kerri Chandler, for example. I thought, wow, this is deep and cool. But I began to hear more emotions in folk music. Why do we have to stick to two house chords? This is what I'm trying to work on. We can have more emotions in this music, but we have many formulas that always sound the same.

Like I vaguely get what he's going for here - building tracks out of four or eight-bar loops does tend to limit harmonic development but it's a structural necessity for house music and doesn't necessarily limit emotional range. But Koze's tracks are all built out of loops and samples as well, there might be more piled on top of them but the basic mode of construction is essentially the same - ie nothing like folk music or other supposedly more 'songful'/'emotive' genres.

Brother - save that for the controversial opinions thread, that’s just uh what???

Matt I get your point and will concede not all of the vocals are successful here - I hate the Jose gonzalez song. Clearly koze stepped outside his normal remixes - eps to make a “proper record” for better or worse. His reasoning about house music above is pretentious imo, it comes across as some Mighty Mouse shit. By and large I’m tired of all artists talking about their art and wish they would do what peej does and have some class n let the music speak for itself.

Anyway you’re otm that this is nothing like folk - perhaps the problem is koze is straddling the line between pop songs and house music without fully giving over to either, which makes the album a flawed masterpiece imo

Artists often convince themselves that they're being really transgressive when they're not. Maybe helps them break through internal barriers, idk.

Also bld is a big Underworld fan. But also doesn't seem to be joking. So again, idk.

You're ... welcome.

My comments are coming from decades of defending electronic music from Rock fans who dismissed it. Ross' use of 'proper record' is getting at the issue. I feel some electronic producers, take Matthew Dear for example, believe vocals add weight and realness to their electronic sounds. This may not always be the case, and yes, I love Underworld, I love Bjork, I love Someday and It's Alright and all the vocal house classics. Koze has been using vocals for a while, so I realize this likely wasn't the right album/artist to drop that comment on, but hopefully my position is clarified. I love electronic music, and I believe electronic music is as meaningful and powerful without lyrics or vocals, and sometimes, I believe artists use vocalists to legitimize their work unnecessarily.

I feel like the vox are cut up and produced to sound like samples and that that’s the point; the “sloppiness” is intentional and sort of an homage to the range of vocal presences in electronic music. While certainly ‘integral’ a lot of vox on early dance feels sort of “grafted on” on a mix level, imo, but then that’s just part of the overall sound. But yeah they’re def not pop songs. It really does sort of have an avalanches vibe

i wanted to like this record but i'm just not feeling it. most of the lyrics are embarrassing including the roisin murphy ones and "pick up" is good but there are literally hundreds if not thousands of equally good filter disco house bombs out there. i want to like his production and do to a degree but i get tired of what to me sounds like what paintings made on an ipad look like if that makes any sense.

a good vocal track is everything but they seem to be hard to do lately? maybe for artists leaning indie-tronica? louie vega seems to put out a classic vocal track once or twice a year.

Electronic music can be enjoyable with vocals, with bongos, with airhorns, with MLK speech samples, who gives a fuck? The thing that killed rock music was precisely this gatekeeping, purist bullshit that stagnates a genre.

^^hear hear

this is Angelique Kidjo in p4k today:

I get tired of people who call themselves purists. Before you start talking about “purity,” look at yourself: Are you pure? What is pure in your surroundings? What is pure in nature? The rhetoric of purity, that’s what brought Hitler to power—looking for a pure race. We are not perfect, and that’s why we are brothers and sisters. The fact that we keep ourselves divided is exactly what the people in power want us to do.

Ah, good old Godwin's law.

pet peeve: godwin's law refers to invocation of the third reich as a debate tactic following a long back and forth, not any mention of hitler

Moka otm

heh, 'invocation' not really the word I was going for there tbh but you get me

The vocals are innocuous enough on this to not bother me, grafted xpost was a good choice of words.

I do think the beeDEEGEE record handles vocals better as an album full of guest stars. The vocals seem less of an afterthought

The problem with Koze albums is usually that he doesn't fuck around with the vocals enough, this definitely has its moments in that regard but he's such a great remixer when he doesn't have too much respect for the singer.

His remix with Dani siciliano is peak vocals for koze

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4fSS36Xve4k

pet peeve: godwin's law refers to invocation of the third reich as a debate tactic following a long back and forth, not any mention of hitler

uh - I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one

Of course this is pedantry, but it might alleviate that pet peeve of yours ;)

godwin's law is dumb tbh

The problem with Koze albums is usually that he doesn't fuck around with the vocals enough, this definitely has its moments in that regard but he's such a great remixer when he doesn't have too much respect for the singer.

― Matt DC, Friday, 8 June 2018 12:43 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this is part of a broader drawback of this album which is that he doesn't approach it enough like a producer/remixer, with a few exceptions.

I mean a lot of this is great but I'll keep drawing for the two Reincarnations comps ahead of it, I think.

I said in another thread that it seemed to me a bit of an accident of fate that Koze had become such a feted artist ahead of, say, Kalabrese, and listening again to the latter artist's 'Rumpelzirkus' album from 2007 I tend to think that album is like if Koze remembered to keep his jokey side present but sufficiently in check to focus on compelling grooves for a while.

Godwin's Law: You can't mention Hitler online, nor quote anyone mentioning Hitler

Maybe appropriate for that Kidjo quote on precisely those grounds.

And to invoke this within the context of 'purism'. I dunno, there's been tons of flat-out amazing dance music produced from a purist mindset all the way across electronic music from Detroit techno to Marc Acardipane to FWD>> Not sure why we have to reach for Hitler so quickly, seems like a fetish or something.

Anyway, also haven't managed to get into this record yet, have no profound thoughts or observations about it.

Also not sure why Pick Up has seemingly been automatically nominated as hit worthy. I mean, it's fine. I don't hate it, but seems pretty innocuous.

Tim otm re approach.

It seems he’s going for a more accessible ideal than some of his bsides or eps which tend to have long drawn out reveries. Also, lord knows why he truncated seeing aliens as the 8 minute version is deeply weird and jarring in the best way. Also the pacing is so weird on this record, opens up with a tim burton esque track which would give no indication to a new listener to keep going imo. Also as stated the 2nd half is much better. Plus would’ve preferred the original “I haven’t been anywhere but it’s on my list” yo colours of autumn which takes the guitar loop sample and adds rapping

Fuck how many times can I say also. Early morning sorry

Pick up makes me think of the article about Avicii talking about the key to universal appeal is to have lyrics that are easily understood by anyone & emotional but kind of empty of meaning, something like that

Lyrics to pick up aren’t empty tho

We’ve all felt that way

Finally, a 12-inch release for Al Kent's infinitely superior Gladys Knight/Melba Moore mash-up - which is everything Koze's boring "Pick Up" could have been, if only he could have been arsed. I've been waiting for this for months, since hearing it on the radio just before Christmas.

https://soundcloud.com/milliondollardisco/pick-me-up

if I play scratch that sufficiently loud, I can hear the backing for pick up very faintly in the background. which could mean murphy recorded the vocals for scratch that over pick up and koze just spun it into a new track. or it could mean kozes just fucking with me, which feels just as likely.