Dinner with DJ Koze is delightful. He shows me to a Thai restaurant in central Hamburg, down some steps and into a curtained room bubbling with atmosphere and charm. He studies the menu as though searching for secret meanings, then orders the pho, which is what he always gets. Then he laughs at my face as two beers arrive.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he says. I’m sure it’s not true, as he’s been amusing company all afternoon. A short while later, he’s finished his beer and seems unable to concentrate on our conversation until he gets another one. After many efforts to get the attention of the staff, a young waitress appears and Koze spends five minutes talking to her in German, making her laugh shyly. As she politely switches to English to see if I too am still thirsty, I ask if she knows who she’s just been talking to. She says no. Now Koze smiles. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him smile today, but it’s the most infectious smile I’ve seen in months.
For 30 years Koze has made music that captures the feeling of finding happiness in spite of it all, of smiling through a face full of tears, laughing between sobs, and realising that even now, with all that’s happening in the world, there is beauty out there. His trademark house, techno, and genre-agnostic psychedelia is wonderfully, impossibly bittersweet, and his story so far is equally contradictory. He would be easy to classify as another enigma of electronic music, resistant to interviews and elusive in his public appearances. But over the years he’s talked to many a journalist, almost every one of whom has remarked that although he’s a reluctant interviewee, he’s fun to talk to and generous with his time.
During the six hours I spend with him, I find this to be true. He’s promoting his sixth solo album, Music Can Hear Us, but he states early on that the interviews he finds least interesting are those that obsess over “the product.” He talks zealously about the album artwork, painted by his girlfriend of many years, Gepa Hinrichsen, but won’t tell me where he made the music or how long it took him. “Write 10 years,” he says. “And write in Florida, Japan, Australia. You can make up stuff. The truth behind the musical process is often boring.”
The music he makes is subtle, intangible, but never boring. It has impressed many people, earning him official remix rights to songs by Jamie Foxx, Peggy Gou, Caribou, and Gorillaz, plus the production of an entire album by Irish singer Roísín Murphy. Swedish star Robyn credited Koze’s 2014 track “XTC” as the inspiration behind her last album. The Koze effect is epitomized by the lead single from his 2018 album, Knock Knock, a two-chord masterpiece called “Pick Up,” possibly the finest work of house music of the past 25 years. “Pick Up” is so good, instances of DJs playing it at various events have become semi-famous. Take Laurent Garnier, who played the song to a gleeful Barcelona crowd shortly after its release, sending them and more than 70,000 viewers into bedlam. Or Ricardo Villalobos, who closed his sunrise set at the Houghton Festival in 2019 by playing two copies of the “Pick Up” vinyl at the same time.
Best of all is the clip of Koze himself playing the song at the Sydney Opera House, with Murphy on vocals. One chord appears to speak to the other, sounding almost impudent in their simplicity, equal parts ecstatic and heartbreakingly melancholic. “I guess neither one of us wants to be the first to say goodbye,” Murphy sings, in time with a 50-year-old Gladys Knight sample. Then the beat drops and the room erupts, dancers throwing their hands in the air with abandon. If you watch at home, you’ll face an internal struggle between cheering and bursting into tears.
KOZE WAS BORN Stefan Kozalla, a hip-hop kid who grew up in Flensburg, in northern West Germany, in the 1970s and 1980s. His dad was an attorney, and Koze says his first memory of music is hearing his mom singing — “mother radio” — although he stops short of revealing any more. (“You have to make a story out of it.”) He once told a journalist he was found as a child clutching an Akai sampler in a forest in Marrakech.
In the Nineties, he produced music for the Hamburg hip-hop four-piece Fischmob, whose 1998 album, Power, offers a glimpse into a parallel world where the Pharcyde rapped in German. While in Fischmob, he started calling himself DJ Koze, which most English-speaking listeners pronounce “Cozy.” Koze himself used to say “Coat-zuh,” like the German word kotze, meaning vomit, but he has long since ceased to care how it’s pronounced.
Now in his fifties, Koze is approaching an age when people might rightly describe him as avuncular. Earlier in our encounter, we met at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg’s preeminent modern-art gallery, for a retrospective featuring the work of Swiss painter Franz Gertsch. Koze greeted me not with words, but with sweets, offering me a handful of hard-boiled zuckerfrei (sugarfree) candies in colorful wrappers. I accepted and began to unwrap one, but he stopped me.
“No, no,” he said, “that one is really hardcore. Start with this one.” I took his advice and had the one wrapped in pink (sage), but couldn’t resist the temptation for long, and soon plunged for the green (eucalyptus). My mouth briefly ignited and he laughed at my reaction, before explaining that he uses the sweets to satisfy his natural urge for a vice. “It’s really intense. It stops me craving something to eat or drink.” As we browsed the exhibition, Koze marveled at Gertsch’s canvases, most of them depicting mundane situations in glistening detail. “I love how he is not painting anything big or iconic, but finding beauty by focusing on small things.”
After Fischmob, Koze started International Pony, an electro-pop trio with a few minor hits to their name, before launching his solo career with a string of albums stretching over more than 20 years. In 2005, he released two solo LPs, one under his regular stage name and another, more experimental record under the alias Adolf Noise. At the risk of invoking an old trope of Anglo-Germanic repartee, I ask him if the name was a Nazi joke (our respective nations fought a couple of fairly serious wars a while ago). “It is less a Nazi joke,” he says, “more a word joke, just a wordplay.”
Koze once described Hamburg as “so small and boring and far away,” but the city was once known as a debaucherous hub of creativity. Not far from here, in 1960, the Beatles played at various nightclubs in Hamburg’s red-light district, having left Liverpool on the advice of their manager. Onstage, John Lennon was known to tease his German audience by holding a comb over his upper lip, lifting his arm in a Nazi salute, and shouting “Heil Hitler!” Apparently some people found it quite amusing, but those who didn’t would sometimes rush the stage, prompting club bouncer Horst Fascher to step in and protect the band.
Years later, around 1990, Fascher’s son, David Fascher, sat on a judging panel as a young DJ Koze competed in the DMC DJ’ing championships. Koze says he invented a trick where he would place one spinning turntable on top of another, balanced on four shot glasses. The following year Fascher competed at the DMC final at Wembley Arena in London and did the same trick. “This was my idea,” says Koze. “He stole it. And he won.”
Back to Hitler. “Twenty-five years ago, we could make fun of it, because it was so far away,” says Koze. “Now it’s newly relevant. And it’s not funny now.” We’re talking not long after a day of interviews with the German press, many of whom asked him what Adolf Noise would say to Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s resurgent far-right party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland).
Four days after our conversation, Germans go to the polls. The AfD make unprecedented gains, becoming the second-biggest party in the country. The results prompt Elon Musk, who appeared to give a Nazi salute at a rally a month earlier, to congratulate Weidel for her party’s performance.
“In the moment, there’s not one telephone call I have with friends which is not, in the end, political,” Koze says. “We used to talk shit and talk about music, but now it’s always, Did you see yesterday? Normally we could fade out or avoid talk about that ’cause it’s a bit boring, but it’s fucking not boring anymore. It’s, like, alarming.”
Nonetheless, he only sees benefit in trying to remain positive, because doom-mongering “doesn’t make the world a better place. I think you don’t say you lose until you lose. You fight. It’s the same in BJJ. You don’t tap until you’re forced to.”
This is one of many references Koze has made to Brazilian jujitsu, his most treasured pastime. He’s now a black belt in the martial art, and says he could speak for 10 hours about its benefits. “I have more friends in the BJJ scene, where people even now don’t know what I’m doing, more or less — Oh, yeah, you make music? — than in the music scene.”
Friends or not, Koze has worked with some big names, including Damon Albarn, on Music Can Hear Us’ lead single, “Pure Love.” In 2015, Koze said, “I’m not gay at all, but a little bit I could imagine with Damon Albarn.”
“Did I really say that?” Koze says, snickering. “I don’t really know him, but as an artistic figure he is like a role model for me, how you can get old with dignity, be so open-minded, how you spend every day of your life making music, and of course, the musical genius, his expression, how he sings. For me he has a magic voice. It just hits me.”
He met Albarn at Coachella in 2022. They were in adjacent trailers, and, with Koze having remixed a Gorillaz track in 2019, Albarn introduced himself. They drank champagne and spoke about the writings of Hermann Hesse, and Albarn showed Koze that he speaks a little German. Albarn may well have aged with dignity as Koze says, but shortly afterward, Billie Eilish brought the Gorillaz frontman onstage during her headlining set and some of her fans mistook him for her dad.
After dinner, I pause the recording and we head out in search of more liquor. Koze ducks into a newly opened Asian food store, and his eyes light up as he browses the snacks. He buys us a coconut each, and, off–the-record, tells me some stories about the recording process behind Music Can Hear Us. I’ve forgotten the details, but I remember it was wild — something about waking from a dream to discover 15-minute songs staring back at him from his laptop, composed and recorded with his faculties asunder.
As we settle in a plush hotel bar, he spends several minutes studying the slope of the floor, firing up a conversation with the German concierge to confirm there is in fact a slight descent to the terrain, before reporting the discovery to me as though it changes everything. Two gin and tonics arrive, and I recite the lyrics from “Pure Love,” sung by Albarn: “I told you I was OK … but that was not true.” I ask DJ Koze: Is he OK?
“Ambitious,” he says, eyes twinkling. “Um, no. I’m not OK. I’m trying to look at this mess and sort it out, finally.” Is it his job to sort out this mess? “To sort out my mess? Yeah, that’s my job, to become a human being which is in peace, somehow, with everything.” So he doesn’t feel at peace with himself? “I think not. To the outside I pretend to, but I think it’s difficult times for me.”
The roots of his mental unrest remain abstract, but perhaps he is simply another creature suffering the symptoms of a fractured world. Our interview is challenging, the truth seeming to flit around us like some un-Shazamable song, but most enjoyable. Conversation drifts from politics to music to sport to comedy. He likes the new single by Jorja Smith and AJ Tracey; “em2500 M253X” by Aphex Twin; “Sexy Sadie” by the Beatles; amapiano (electronic music’s last great “earthquake”); and Burna Boy. He still harbors ambitions of producing music for pop stars, but quickly rows back the idea in a moment of typical self-contradiction, because “there must be a bigger idea than a white boy trying to make Afrobeats for Burna Boy.”
He enjoys Hannah Gadsby, old Louis CK. He also likes Ricky Gervais’ Extras, and we debate the series’ greatest moment before agreeing upon Robert De Niro’s guest appearance, in which Stephen Merchant asks the actor if he’s ever driven a taxi for real before gifting him a pen with a woman on it, whose clothes fall off when you turn it upside down.
After more drinks, we walk the streets. By coincidence it turns out my night’s accommodation is on the same street as Koze’s home, a flat he’s occupied for more than two decades. It also happens to be Hamburg’s roughest neighborhood. Koze points out a restaurant where, he says, a teenager recently shot someone, a doner kebab shop that was recently raided because its owners were selling heroin, and at the entrance to his building, a seedy fart leaving with an apparent sex worker. The scene recalls nothing so much as De Niro’s sultry narration in Taxi Driver.
Koze says he feels safe in Hamburg, and by contrast calls Berlin, the German capital, “a shithole.” He pauses outside his building, as if to consider inviting me in. He decides against it — I suspect — to keep some of his remaining enigma intact, to avoid revealing how the bratwurst is made, or maybe just to sleep off the booze. He texts me later, suggesting ways for me to spend the next morning, chiefly, a visit to Reeperbahn, the street on which John, Paul, George, and Ringo played together for the first time. In the February sun I creep around the place like a kid in a zuckerfrei sweet shop.
I forgo the Fab Four in the earphones, however, opting instead for Music Can Hear Us. It’s a magnificent album, one that requires many listens before it will reveal its beautiful secrets to you. Koze named it after a belief that music can offer us precisely what we need in this trying time: “It can feel our pain, our destiny, our euphoria, our wishes, our demands. It’s somehow political also.” Do it, reader. Listen five, 10, 100 times. Listen as Koze speaks to you in the universal, unknowable language of chords and keys and rhythm. Listen closely enough, and you might just hear it listening back.
