DJ Koze, Grimes, Oneohtrix Point Never
Pitchfork #51 - 49
#51 DJ Koze, Knock Knock (2018)
Rating: 2
DJ Koze is Stefan Kozalla, a German electronica and hip-hop artist who turned 50 this year. He was part of the Hamburg music scene in the early 90’s and was a member of the hip-hop group Fischmob. He started his own music label, Pampa, in 2009.
This is his third studio album, recorded in Spain. It’s a broad mix of dance genres, notably less experimental than his earlier albums. My gut phrase is that the album is just…a really good DJ set. Like a DJ, mixing all kinds of other sounds, sampling catchy loops or showcasing vocal talent on top.
“Bonfire” has a wobbly synth riff and samples Justin Vernon from a Bon Iver song. “Music on My Teeth” has a cozy coffee-shop vibe and features José Gonzalez. “Moving in A Liquid” sounds a bit like Disclosure. “Muddy Funster” has what sounds like Native American flutes laid with Auto-Tuned vocals by Nashville’s Kurt Wagner of Lambchop. “Illumination” features Irish pop singer Roisin Murphy and sounds like a rave.
So I’m torn about this - When your clear imprint is editing and jumping from style to style, is THAT a style? Or does that mean you don’t really have a style? Don’t get me wrong, editing and producing and DJing are all things, and he’s very good at them, he knows what he’s doing. But to me this record has a strong “Various Artists” collection vibe. The Guardian writes:
It’s a collection of music so eclectic that it could easily sound scattered and messy – the distance between the trebly, lo-fi strum of José González collaboration Music on My Teeth and the warped deep house and naive, untutored vocals of Planet Hase is pretty huge – but it holds together, largely as a result of Koze’s evident interest in melody. - Alexis Petridis
So, like, it’s not avant-garde, but it’s very pleasant. If you know one single from this album, it’s likely “Pick Up,” a relatively club-set track featuring a sample from Gladys Knight.
The album has a chill presence. I think it may have something to do with a metronome, these aren't really hard-driving beats. It grew on me as I stopped paying attention to it and did housework, and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe I’m just over-calibrated to the far-out and self-indulgent albums that tend to make this list.
Pitchfork writers:
DJ Koze doesn’t sing on his records, but his personality nevertheless shines through with every wonky beat—and electronic music’s premier troublemaker with a heart of gold was never more lovable than on Knock Knock. His productions have always been somewhat at odds with the sorts of Ibiza mega-clubs he’s often booked to play—intimate instead of bombastic, squirrelly instead of grandstanding—and Knock Knock makes the most of his idiosyncrasies — Philip Sherburne
#50 Grimes, Visions (2012)
Rating: 3
As far as career legacy goes, this breakout album is about just two tracks, “Genesis” and “Oblivion,” both of which got huge critical praise and established her unique style. This was technically the third album for Grimes. The first two albums were self-produced and released the previous year. The first was cassette-only!
The name Grimes, a pseudonym for Claire Boucher, was born when she posted music to MySpace. The site allowed you to tag yourself with three music genres, and she picked grime, grime, and grime - and she’s not grime.
At the time, she was a college student at McGill University in Toronto, studying Russian literature and neuroscience, but then got addicted to the music lab. She had been born and raised in Vancouver. She toured with Lykke Li in 2011, then signed a record deal and released this, Visions.
This is a case where the alleged story behind the album’s production skews how I see and hear it. I say “alleged” only because Grimes clearly has a strong interest in painting a holistic image of herself - the aesthetics, the fashion, the videos, the stage presence. But with her I don’t even care if the origin story is completely true. Believing it makes it an incredible work of art.
This album was created in three weeks, entirely by herself on Garage Band. She says that she blacked out her windows, didn’t eat anything, didn’t sleep for nine consecutive days, and stayed absolutely cranked on amphetamines.
“Once you hit day nine, you start accessing some really crazy shit. You have no stimulation, so your subconscious starts filling in the blanks. I started to feel like I was channelling spirits. I was convinced my music was a gift from God. It was like I knew exactly what to do next, as if my songs were already written” - Grimes
There’s a story that in 2009 she stocked a shanty boat with live chickens and potatoes and floated down the Mississippi River. There’s a story that in Summer 2011 she dropped acid every day and played shows in Mexico City, with “an amazing crew of super intellectual lesbians who had this insane hairless dog.” They would smoke a bowl and go to the Natural History Museum.
She talks and lives branding. And her story. And controls it. She writes all her music, produces it herself. She even does all her own album cover art. It’s like a new, cyber-ized, feminized version of indie. She does make an excellent point:
“The way that you present yourself visually totally dictates your audience and everything that anyone thinks about you. What's the difference between Napoleon and everyone else? Napoleon had great image branding. When people think of Napoleon they're not thinking of the Egyptian campaign or whatever, they're thinking of his f*cking hat and his f*cking hand in his waistcoat." — Grimes
There’s plenty of contradiction to beguile us. Take “Oblivion.” She says the song is “about being violently assaulted…I got really paranoid walking around at night” It shows in the lyrics:
I never walk about after dark
It’s my point of view
‘Cause someone could break your neck
Coming up behind you
But the video is a deliberate ironic paradox - she spins around in a soup of bros, gonzo in big crowds watching masculine sports. Much of it seems spontaneous. Shirtless locker room hunks slam dancing around her. The dudes are all sexualized, and she is notably not. She wanted to portray a powerful, fearless, deadly woman — female power in a male dominated environment. And the song itself is total Grimes celebration trash-pop. It’s mesmerizing:
I don’t try to decode Grimes. OK, you can believe it’s some sort of stage persona. But if you actually marry Elon Musk and name your own living child “X Æ A-12” maybe it’s really your life, right?
“I succeeded because I discarded everything else in my life.” - Grimes
The music? It’s a gem of what it is. Spare pop, simple keyboard sounds, circular riffs. Dancy. Vocals distinctively high-pitched, manipulated, overdubbed hundredfold, and often reverbed beyond recognition. Like a noisy introvert.
Pitchfork writers:
Claire Boucher’s first two albums as Grimes submerged her pop instincts deep within experimental manipulations. Visions, her third record, glints with the excitement of a newly unlocked talent and the thrill of wielding it. Its songs are twisted flashes of pop melodies laid over frothy techno pulses, where something vaguely sinister underlines the sweetness of the vocals. - Anna Gaca
#49 Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica (2011)
Rating: 2
This album has a secret.
But first - The name Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN) is a play on a Boston radio station’s name, “Magic 106.7” - (y’know, “one oh trix”) It’s a stage name for Daniel Lopatin, who has a long history of electronic and experimental sounds going all the way back to high school in Massachusetts.
There’s an early 2000s underground art and music scene called “hypnagogic pop.” It’s lo-fi, psychedelic, and nostalgia-based all the way down to the recording equipment - it was heavy on cassette distribution. Maybe like you’re hearing it on a transistor radio. It’s related to “chillwave” and “vaporwave.” But we’re really in the weeds on genres, it’s enough to say that the nostalgia lo-fi stuff was where Lopatin focused.
This album was the first LP he recorded in a pro studio. The secret? It’s almost entirely based on samples of TV commercials from the 80s and 90s! He says he listened to thousands of them, 30 seconds at a time, looking for small bits to sample and build tracks around. Lindsay Rhodes of Stereogum said he’s “almost more of a philosopher/sound-collagist than he is a musician”
It was mainstream stuff - McDonald’s, Cocoa Krispies. As an example, the track “Sleep Dealer” is built on this (super-cheesy) Wrigley’s commercial from 1988. Don’t recognize any match? EXACTLY, Lopatin took tiny pauses and noises, micro-snips of dialogue or even breathing, and pulverized them into unrecognizable sustained sounds. In this case, in the music maybe you can hear the tiny piano hit at 0:05 of this ad.
That why I call it a secret. Imagine the archival integrity, the weird self-imposed rules, the use of “found objects” in the sedimentary debris of 40 year old trash TV. Just for the sake of doing it. Sounds like…perhaps…a cult that I may also belong to?
But in this case, OPN is making simple laid back meditations. Some of them sound a little like space travel or ghostly imprints (“Submersible”) Some are almost footwork-style assaults like “Nassau,” which is based on a Butterfinger ad featuring the Simpsons! Most is not a carnival ride. It’s not pounding you with samples, it’s all smoothed out. You would never know the origins, it’s still OPN music.
He has a lot of experience and acclaim as a producer and a movie-score writer. He wrote the music for Uncut Gems recently. He has collaborated with FKA Twigs, with David Byrne on Utopia, directed The Weeknd’s band for his Super Bowl show, and contributed to Ahnoni’s album Hopelessness, which whaddya know, is the next album on this list!
Pitchfork writers:
Many of the sounds, it turned out, were sampled from TV commercials from the ’80s, but Daniel Lopatin’s curious way of chopping and looping freed them from kitschy overtones—really, from any context whatsoever. Instead, these disembodied voices and half-recognizable sounds suggested only a kind of vague, inchoate melancholy—the sadness of dead media, a gesture of mourning for a past whose outline was already fading from memory - Philip Sherburne