A Quiet Night With DJ Koze

In electronic music, a “comedown album” is mellow, mid-tempo, made for cushioning the post-rave crash. But there’s a kind of comedown LP that feels like a retreat from an artist’s previous work, and the newest release by the beloved Frankfurt dance producer DJ Koze presents us with both. Music Can Hear Us is a playful, submersible piece of work that largely sidesteps the minimal techno grooves with which Koze made his name. The deeply layered psychedelia here is consistent with his previous work — the frayed edges, the occasionally unsettling tones, the cosmic yearning cut with wryness. But something’s missing, and it isn’t just consistently prominent beats. In a catalog not especially heavy on brawn, this is Koze’s most purely amniotic recording. 

That, of course, is intentional. The first words of the album quote the Sufi mystic Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The album is structured, cannily, to gradually gain rhythmic mass, but it takes a lot of time and pointless frippery to get there. Much of it feels merely indulgent; on that level, it peaks, or hits bottom, with Damon Albarn giggling as he screws up a line on “Pure Love.” It’s an intricately brocaded trifle—but try as he might, Koze’s ministrations can’t buoy things. 

Toward the end, the album picks up considerably: On the curling, undulant “Die Gondel,” handclaps, gunshots, faux-flutes, and dive-bomb bass drops are beguilingly filtered underneath vocalist Sophia Kennedy’s vocal, like a door slowly opening onto a block party, while “Buschtaxi” has driving, dawn-over-the-rooftops feel (not to mention the animal noises of a safari). But lush as the greenery is here, sometimes a field is just a field. Listen closely enough and you can hear music, too, becoming impatient.