#820 DJ Koze - Amygdala

I think an email I wrote to Orion sums this up as well as I'm ever gonna:

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I think music ran out of notes. Everyone's moving towards these weird, slurred, dissonant half-melodies where every tone is dragged kicking and screaming into some post-note cranny so that it will sound alien enough to grab the attention of jaded twentysomethings. From dubsteb to witch house to whatever the fuck oneohtrix point never is doing, for the most part its wankery for its own sake.

But maybe we've moved past that phase in any artistic innovation where we have to just get over the hump of doing it for its own sake and can start actually using it skillfully, because there's a lot of the same sludgy tricks on this DJ Koze album Amygdala. I don't know that you'd actually like it - its a bit druggier and drudgier and sludgier than things I hear you hearing, but I'm weirdly compelled by it and have nowhere else to turn. It mostly pulls off a really nice balance, sounding dense and otherworldly, but also downright listenable - pretty and toetappy in turn, just enough of a housy beat to run a thread through it. Nices Wolkchen is a track that mostly sums it up, starting off sounding slurred and overblown, starting off like its going to be an experimental noise wank, and then straightforward techno, and then ending up something else, melting into a graceful little space, with that warm, buzzy bass tone and cymbal taps and vocal squiggles rising and falling tactfully from 2:09 to 2:56, simmering all the way down to a 4/4 click, setting up easygoing expectation, before flickering just barely back into place. Its an artful piece of songwriting, actually. Someone bothered to build something instead of just looping a knob twiddle or two. It legitimately doesn't feel like someone just starting and stopping loops in protools or whatever, either, it doesn't sound made, which is something I love in art in all media, and a conversation unto itself. Homesick is weirdly enjoyable too.

I think I mostly mention it because its superficially something I should hate, but I kind of like, which is always compelling.

[send]

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oh, god Das Wort definitely should have been my secondary mention: that song is delightfully strange, especially in the second half, which just veers off into a few leftfield directions that aaaaalmost make sense without making any sense

[send]

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Which is to say: 4.5/5