Experimental music – DJ Koze: indescribable!

In the past, when there were records that sold millions of times, describing music was a simple matter. When the guitars howled, it was rock. Funk was recognized by the fact that he went directly into the abdomen and legs. Pop, on the other hand, was the joy girl, who reed up with beautiful melodies.

It was not uncommon for music genres to be bound to social conditions. Gospel was called it when pious black people got into ecstasy during church singing. Country, on the other hand, was spoke when white cow shepherds told their lives around the campfire. A lot of things mixed with the triumphal march of popular culture. The cow’s son, who had grown up with country, but preferred to hear punk, stired both to Cowpunk. And rockers like the Red Hot Chili Peppers made their music dancing through radiohythms.

Soon the reviewers with the labeling of the hybrid genres no longer came after. They didn’t always find the right vocabulary. Anyone who thinks of rap at trip-hop is wrong. Because the hip-hop beats do without speech. And why guitar bands like Oasis run under Britpop (and not under Britrock) is as puzzling as the units there.

Sometimes it is practically impossible to track the ramifications of a genre. Doctoral thesis is not sufficient to describe the family tree from Drum and Bass. Anyone who can explain the difference between 2-step, Dubstep and Breakstep from the rigid-up qualifies for the question of millions at Jauch.

This creates a dilemma for music critics: you have to translate sounds into words. But how should this succeed if the vocabulary is not understood! To make matters worse: until the 90s, the stylistic ingredients mixed in the 90s so that they were enough for an entire LP. It was enough that the reviewer analyzed a single song to describe the complete album (even all albums in the case of Modern Talking).

In times of Spotify song hopping, however, each song has to offer different surface stimuli to address the different target groups. You can’t actually hear plates from Ed Sheeran or Miley Cyrus in a row because the diversity of style works. Critics must therefore take each song individually in order to convey a comprehensive picture to readers.

Which brings us to the new album from DJ Koze. “Music Can Hear Us” is a work that drives every reviewer crazy. In the broadest sense, it can be described as a rhythmically underlaid electronic sound carpet with analog definants. A little vague, right?

Anyone who searches the reviews for Koze’s album feels the effort of the critics of fulfilling a song composition, in which one can no longer see the forest for the trees. Even the former editor -in -chief of the “MusikExpress” Albert Koch surrendered to “Manic Eklecticism”, who “produced a manifesto of stimulus overflowing”.

Also “taz” reviewer Julian Weber is at a loss: “The music (…) is so much culture when there is being on the road that several conferences at the Körber Foundation could take place via cultural appropriation.” Nevertheless, he tries to give the musical bastard a name: “Let us call it songwriter-house, perfect to torn barefoot on the glowing lava of a vulk.”

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For the English daily “The Guardian”, on the other hand, it is “an album made of shimmering electropop songs, interspersed with pumping house and techno tracks”. However, it does not fit that individual songs put on “the upscale hit card” (“Rolling Stone”).

So that doesn’t help you either. Where the technical terms fail, you try metaphors. For the “taz”, the album is like a trip “with the gondola into the sound mountains”. The “PitchFork” review platform sees him “a guided meditation”. And the RBB broadcaster Radio Eins prefers to let the artist have their say: »For some time now I have been working on the idea of ​​revolutionizing space tourism. Specifically: travel without moving. This is what comes closest. “

Well, and how does “Music Can Hear Us” sound? Just crazy. I haven’t heard such unusual sounds for years. I know this is not a review. But does that speak against the album?

DJ Koze: Music can hear us (Pampa Records)