January 26, 2018 - Pampa Records
DJ Koze is back on his and one of our favorite labels here in the office. We don’t know what Pampa Records does for anyone else, but it does everything for us. Pampa Vol. 1 was the album of the summer for 2016, a year that really can only be described as a blur. Lots of stuff happened that year, and we don’t remember any of it except for Pampa Vol. 1.
DJ Koze (Stefan Kozalla) released this extended version of Seeing Aliens ahead of the tentative Knock Knock LP release in May of this year. The forthcoming album has a lot of big and small, long and short-named collaborators that Kozalla has collaborated with and taken inspiration from, and it’s certainly looking to be an exciting album to witness for 2018.
The A side of this little banger, ‘Seeing Aliens,’ is in typical Kozalla style. Languid, honey-dripped synths are layered and layered until it seems too much, then it all disappears for a moment. And then everything pops back into the rhythm, leaving the listener very, very satisfied, we must confess. 10/10 listening experience here. Those moments where the audio layers peak almost uncomfortably always give way to a little silent gap that makes you realize how much you actually missed all those layers. It’s not an easy feat in music production, and Kozalla really hit the mark here.
The B side, ‘Nein König Nein,’ takes a teeny step back, with lots of altered guitar samples, ping-pong delay, and a tickling of female vocals that hit the spot. These elements dance around each other for about six-and-a-half minutes and then give way to a really addictive looped section with a syncopated 16th note cut that does that AMSR thing all over itself and then bleeps out of existence. We think this is going to be a really cool moment in the full album, but for now it’s begging for live DJ edits and reworked performance tools.
We know this month’s reviews have seemed the opposite of Hating Music, but come on, we had to get comfortable some how. You don’t just jump into a freezing cold pool of ice water, do you? You’ve got to start in the hot tub, get nice and cozy, maybe have a few frozen strawberry daiquiris while you look out over the side of the cruise ship you’re sailing on, and decide, yeah. This is the life, actually. 🍍