Stefan Kozalla is a peerless figure in a crowded field. Once the enfant terrible of Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, the German producer made his name in the early aughts with an idiosyncratic take on the bold colors and broad strokes of storied minimal-techno imprint Kompakt. He released one of the subgenre’s definitive late-period records on his own label—which became a fantastical sandbox for friends and fellow weirdos—then transcended it entirely on 2018’s Knock Knock, one of those Technicolor albums that renders real life sepia-toned by comparison. “It’s less competition to make music without the dancefloor in mind,” DJ Koze mused on a recent Resident Advisor podcast. “Not without reason, you have all these military terms: ‘You killed it!’ ‘It’s a weapon of mass destruction!’ ‘It’s a bomb!’” Rather than scaling EDM’s steep cliff face, he’s burrowed into it, carving out a hermitage in the stone.
That’s not to say there haven’t been setbacks. The enthusiasm around Hit Parade, the 2023 LP Kozalla made with art-pop matriarch Róisin Murphy, cratered when transphobic remarks posted to the singer’s personal Facebook page were made public. Koze didn’t share an official statement at the time, but I can’t help but hear the first words spoken on his new album, Music Can Hear Us, in that context: “I would like to start with a quote from Rumi: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,/There is a field. I’ll meet you there.’” Hit Parade was supposed to be his star-making moment as much as Murphy’s, the final stage in a transmutation from eccentric dancefloor wizard to global pop savant. It’s taken a couple extra years, but Koze has finally arrived: Music Can Hear Us is a giddy collision of good taste and what John Waters called “good bad taste,” brought into harmonious coexistence by an artist whose greatest asset is his inextinguishable supply of curiosity and childlike wonder.
Following its brief foray into Sufi theology, seven-minute album opener “The Universe in a Nutshell” unfolds like a guided meditation as whorls of trilling violin and wordless hums sprout from a reverberant tabla pattern. Koze layers glockenspiel, chimes, and all manner of whimsical noise, but in his typically pranksterish fashion, the track culminates not in a beat drop—there are few to be found anywhere on the record—but with a harpsichord riff descended from the Brothers Johnson’s cover of Shuggie Otis’ “Strawberry Letter 23.” Like the cut-up Beach Boys stylings of Panda Bear, this is pop music whittled down to just the best parts, a box of Lucky Charms that’s only marshmallows. “Tu Dime Cuando” pulls off a similar sleight of hand, conjuring a phantom bolero out of Sofia Kourtesis’ sing-songy hook.
Music Can Hear Us lays out DJ Koze’s panculturalist ethos clearer than any of his prior studio releases, island-hopping from wispy echoes of son Cubano (“A Dónde Vas?”) to Japanese-language doo-wop (“Umaoi”) to, uh, Damon Albarn-fronted Afrobeats? It’s easy to cringe at two white guys in their 50s cashing in on the chart-conquering sounds of young Africa, but Koze treats the new crayons in his box as reverently as the old, sketching out a comfortable niche somewhere between King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music and the more modern stylings of Nigerian Alté.
Hearing the famously stoic Blur and Gorillaz frontman break into laughter during “Pure Love”’s verses, I was reminded of an anecdote from the Hit Parade sessions, where Murphy described how personal voicemails she’d sent to Kozalla popped up on later versions of the record. Who’s to say Albarn didn’t record 20 perfect takes and Koze opted for the one where he flubbed a line? The effect is intoxicatingly candid, that of circumventing a collaborator’s on-record persona to capture something of their true essence.
While it delights in a life spent abroad, Music Can Hear Us also digs deeper into Kozalla’s home turf. “Der Fall,” sung by Pampa associate Sophia Kennedy, plays like a pastoral folk song recorded behind the Berlin Wall. “Unter meinen Füßen fängt/Der Boden an zu schwanken…doch Ich find daran Gefallen,” she sings: “The ground begins to shake beneath my feet, but I like it.” The other side of Koze’s call for unity is the rupture it might take to get there. “Wie schön du bist” features a prominent sample of “Bleib Doch,” from singer-songwriter Holger Biege’s 1978 album Wenn der Abend kommt. Born in East Germany, Biege fled to Hamburg without an exit permit in the early ’80s and was temporarily separated from his family. Each Koze song is like this—a mini-thesis on some forgotten footnote of music history—but here his longstanding fascination with golden oldies gets personal. Kozalla would have been 5 or 6 years old when “Bleib Doch” came out, and “Wie schön du bist” beams us directly into the mind of a kid hearing his new favorite song on the radio for the first time.
This is DJ Koze’s alchemy—the ability to return any dusty piece of ephemera to mint condition. On mid-album stunner “Unbelievable,” fellow German singer and producer Ada is a dead ringer forthe mid-century pop vocalist Connie Francis, resplendent in a computerized hall of mirrors. “I must be dreaming, yes dreaming/You’re so heavenly,” she sings, but Koze’s not content to let any emotion sit idly by; puppy love bares its teeth and sincerity is cut with camp. “What About Us,” featuring the Notwist’s Markus Acher, is a kaleidoscope of digi-bells, skittering trap hi-hats, and strummed zither that instantly joins the ranks of Koze’s best ballads. But in place of sweet nothings—“Honey honey/On my nose/On your titties,” “Das Wort heisst love”—it trades in existential dread: “Above our heads the sky’s exploding/We hold a world that disappears.”
To show the next generation how it’s done, DJ Koze throws two absolute heaters into the back half of Music Can Hear Us. “Brushcutter,” with Marley Waters, is Koze’s take on breakbeat, loaded with enough sawtooth synths to cut through the high of anyone who, say, took one too many pills in Ibiza. And for those missing a “Pick Up”-style floor-filler, the showstopping “Buschtaxi” boasts a drop that lands like a swan dive and a belly flop all at once. This is the album’s title made literal, a living tapestry of rainforest sounds—snakes rattling, frogs croaking, monkeys swinging from branch to branch.
This could be the defining project of DJ Koze’s oeuvre: an extended attempt to rewild that which has been made palatable, sociable, and civilized. “I’m a big fan of getting rid of my mind,” Koze told Resident Advisor, “’cause it’s a cage of hyped TikTok apes, spitting in my soup and getting on my nerves.” In his kingdom of ends, Rumi and Kant and Laozi and the Talented Mr. Tripley himself sit side by side in the astral plane, “pure love loves purely,” and the shaky ground of autonomy gives way to the common good. Call it hubris, call it quixotic. Music Can Hear Us makes that dream feel a little more in reach.
