DJ Koze is back and, on his new EP Spiralen, once again remains true to himself. With his unmistakable feel for playful sounds and oddly beautiful dancefloor moments, he once more builds himself a small musical world entirely his own.
The title track makes clear straight away where the journey is headed. Rhythms layer over one another, repeat, circle, trace their orbits. The kick remains soft, the percussion hops around the pulse slightly offset, small particles of sound flash up and disappear again. The EP is markedly more danceable than the last album Music Can Hear Us, without, however, giving itself over completely to the club or to grand rave ecstasy. DJ Koze does work with beats to which one automatically nods along, yet instead of blunt four-four dominance he relies on movement, lightness and flow. Then there are lines such as: »In your eyes, spirals are turning / They pull me deeper than any reason / The world goes soft at its edges / And everything flies into no man’s land.« Together with the hopping, slightly displaced beats, this produces exactly the feeling the title promises: one begins to reel, briefly loses orientation and simply lets oneself drift.
As so often with DJ Koze, everything here seems astonishingly unforced. He never takes himself too seriously, and that is precisely where one of his greatest strengths lies. Spiralen shows once again that a grand gesture is not always needed. Sometimes a few clever ideas, a good feel for atmosphere and the courage to repeat are enough.
Spiralen EP
