Sound advice

The link to this interview with DJ hero DJ Koze is currently doing the rounds on email, so I thought it might be nice to also share it with you here for some weekend reading for anyone else who doesn’t trawl the pages of Resident Advisor as a matter of course.

James and I first ran into Kosi one snowbound winter evening in Montreal where the two were booked to play together at La Nuit Electronik, and we were most happy to find that he is very much on our wavelength, both musically and personally, as well being quite possibly the funniest living German. Actually, we were already pretty confident that we would get on after hearing the tales from the legendary Taico Club festival in Japan, when DJ Koze met Nathan Fake and his travelling visualist and partner in all crimes Vincent Oliver, and ended up inviting his exhibitionist new best friend Vincent onstage with him for a spontaneous outburst of breakdancing. I have been assured that the visual evidence of this bizarre occurrence lurks somewhere on Youtube, although I have yet to unearth it myself.

So it is no surprise that Kosi’s disgruntlement at the formula-based conservatism in dance music is a textual echo of sentiments expressed around these parts on an almost daily basis. James and Kosi once even concocted their own card-based solution to that age old plague of the harder-faster brigade, whereupon it would be politely explained that persons requesting that they up their tempo might be better off going to see another DJ play that evening. But it was this quote in particular which caught James’ attention:

“I think it is fairly easy to rock the house, but so hard to look out of the window.”

Indeed, we have pondered this conundrum together on many an occasion, like at last night’s Poni Hoax gig at the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen (and in particular during the god-awful between-bands-DJ’s indie-dance set), where the dark gothy new romanticism that we really love (as heard on the perfect The Paper Bride) was largely overshadowed by their more brash punk funk tendencies. Sure, the ramshackle mixed-up crowd were doing their best Dad-at-a-wedding dancing impressions throughout, but I think musicians of all genres would be wise not to interpret the immediacy of a crowd’s reaction to their most lowest common denominator surefire crowd-pleasing elements as a sign that those songs are the “best” ones. James has previously talked about how easy it is to prompt this type of reaction in a crowd, and we are glad to see that DJ Koze agrees that there ought to be a bit more to the art of DJing than this. To focus your efforts on extracting those overt signs of “pleasure” from the crowd is not only a cheap route to personal gratification, it also inevitably encourages a DJ to select from only the most conservative palette of music, and dance music is in serious danger of stagnating in an infinite loop unless more DJs learn to forgo the instant thrill of a whoop from elements of the crowd in favour of taking some musical risks with what, and how, they play.

And for once Resident Advisor’s comments section may give us cause for hope, where the universal message is one of promising proclamations of DJ Koze’s legendary status, but I do hope that means that the world really is paying attention to his rallying call against the current conservative malaise that blights techno. Those fortunate fellows over at Resident Advisor have also managed to bag DJ Koze for their Christmas Party on 20th December alongside equally fun-loving mobile simians Modeselektor, Lawrence, Move D, doP and Trus’me, and I would promise to see you there, but a) it is at Matter, and b) I have just been invited to a rather unmissable sounding intimate evening of living-room-based audio experimentation across town on the same night. But be sure not to let that stop you popping along if you fancy it!