It was fitting that Germany's Stefan Kozalla-- aka DJ Koze/Adolf Noise and one-half of techno-pop duo International Pony-- wound up the dance producer tapped to remix Battles' slippery electronic-rock single "Atlas" back in 2007. Obviously there was the track's queer bounce, the future-retro glam-rock rhythm partly inspired by Battles' interest in German "schaffel" techno, a sound pioneered by the Kompakt label, one of Koze's benefactors. But also: Go back and listen to Battles' Mirrored. Then throw on Reincarnations, this bulging new collection of Koze remixes. Rhythmically, they have next to nothing in common. Instead, they're two albums that delight in the goofy-unto-surreal things electronics can do to the human voice.
There's hardly a track on Reincarnations that's not peppered with tweaked vocals. Koze is a devotee of the ancient art of the vocoder or its modern-day software plug-in equivalent. He loves to use gender-flipping filters to turn his singers into robot androgynes. And he's not above a David Seville-ian blast of pitch-shifting just for fun. Sometimes, as on the sublimely silly "Minimal" by Matias Aguayo, the vocal is outlandish enough that Koze can more or less stay out of its way. And other times, as on Matthew Dear's "Elementary Lover", Koze the remixer overstuffs the track's four minutes-- from arch, starched whiteboy funk to a Venusian stadium rock outro. If you're cringing slightly at the thought of yet another techno remix album filled with identikit instrumentals, know that Koze's vocal play on Reincarnations adds new facets to already interesting tracks and turns boring cuts beguiling.
And lest you think his cut-ups are all laughs, there's nothing comedic about Koze's take on the laid-back funk of Heiko Voss' "Think About You". Instead he stretches the "I" in the "I think about you" refrain into an angelic background hum that sets the whole track swooning. It's a subtle move that points up the other thing that makes Reincarnations so listenable: Koze's craftsmanship, which is often put in the service of the kind of spaced-out, gentle loveliness that characterizes the "Think About You" remix. He may have a shameless a weakness for novelty shock tactics, but Koze's also a big softie with deft touch. The aforementioned "Atlas" remix is on the one hand truly perverse, stripping away that big, booming, instantly recognizable schaffel beat for fractured mid-tempo micro-rhythms. But its oddness becomes enchanting when the drums drop out entirely for a twinkling breakdown straight out of the late-1990s IDM school of music box melodies. Indeed, Koze's breakdowns alone elevate many of these tracks, even the "already good" ones: the water-torture pauses in Sascha Funke's "Mango Cookie"; the rave-y bleeps colliding with smeary swells of strings on Malaria's "Kaltes Klares Wasser (DJ Koze & the Tease Remix)".
Reincarnations isn't flawless. Koze's take on Lawrence's "Rabbit Tube", for instance, settles for the kind of passable but generic minimal techno that's so temple-clutchingly dull across an entire album. But the fact that the "Rabbit Tube" remix acts more as a palette cleanser here, slipped between Koze's sonically restless techno-pop (Wechsel Garland's "Swim", with its long, silty intro) and dancefloor experiments (the drunken jazz of Noze's "Danse Avec Moi"), points out how effectively Reincarnations is programmed, if nothing else. That ear for sequencing means Koze's fashioned that rarest of remix albums: the kind might play start to finish, and more than once.
