The eccentric producer uses samples and collaborations to brilliantly exploit the spaces between deep house, trip-hop and R&B on an appealingly odd album
In January 1987, Smash Hits tried to address the unexpected rise of house music by printing the lyrics to Steve “Silk” Hurley’s chart-topping Jack Your Body. In an attempt to circumvent the fact that the lyrics to Jack Your Body consisted entirely of the words “jack your body” repeated ad infinitum, the page was padded out with parenthetical descriptions of how the record sounded: “(Rather a long bit where it goes bing bong diddle a lot, then sort of dum-de-dum).” If the 21st century equivalent of the song words in Smash Hits is the YouTube lyric video – a phenomenon kickstarted by a cheap placeholder clip for Cee Lo Green’s 2010 hit Fuck You, and now warrants its own category at the MTV video music awards – then its Jack Your Body moment may have come with the release of DJ Koze’s Pick Up, a single that preceded this fifth solo album, Knock Knock. It was promoted with a video featuring nothing more than white words on a black background, offering not just its three lines of lyrics but a wry running commentary on the track: “vocal sample … beat kicks in … disco sample loop x6 … brain realises song consists only of these few elements … deep feeling of happiness” etc.
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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