‘Sometimes I feel hunted by dogs on cocaine’: the demons of DJ Koze, summer anthem genius

Was he left in a forest? Does he compose in a monastery? Is he terrified of crowds? Our writer tries to sort fact from wild fiction in conversation with the elusive German bangermeister

My video call with DJ Koze has barely begun when he comes up with a radical suggestion. He turns out to be a fascinating interviewee but has been talking about how much he dislikes promoting his own work – seldom the best start to an interview, but he really means it. He does the kinds of things that hugely revered and successful DJ/producers do, and over the past year his itinerary has taken him from Coachella to Ibiza to Australia, but you’ll search in vain for evidence on Instagram because he doesn’t do social media at all. His thoughts on that topic begin with “our brains are totally intoxicated and over-polluted”, and get progressively less positive from there. He hasn’t given an interview in five years. The scant handful around the time of his last album, 2018’s Knock Knock, have a strained quality: one was prefaced with him calling the journalist beforehand and offering to pay him if he made everything up.

“I don’t get the urge to go public or open my mouth or do a statement,” he shrugs today, calling from his home in Hamburg. “It’s a little bit, ‘Why? It’s only content.’” He just finds the whole thing stressful, he says, looking genuinely mournful. Then, unexpectedly, he chuckles. “So, I could do some ketamine maybe, to kind of …”

The strange thing is, DJ Koze, or Stefan Kozalla, certainly doesn’t need drugs to make his conversation more interesting. He began his career in the mid-90s as a member of Fischmob: their videos on YouTube revel in a strikingly odd take on hip-hop, the genre he says changed his life as a teenager in Flensburg, a town near Germany’s border with Denmark. “It was like, young, stupid dudes trying to be hard. Like, ‘People should fear us’, but we are 16-year-old boys who have to be home at 12 and are looking for male role models,” he says.

He remembers hearing Public Enemy for the first time. “The music was so otherworldly that we couldn’t understand it. It was like drinking alcohol: it tastes horrible at first but is worth doing because you’ll get to a point and be rewarded in the end. It’s the perfect music for boys between 15 and 18 to find their place in the hierarchy of society; to realise that this can also be their world, not only the world of their parents.”

Fischmob were commercially successful in Germany but Koze found their career exhausting. “The compromises are always tiring,” he says. You could perhaps tell as much from the distinctly uncompromising tone of what he did next: avant-garde electronica under the name Adolf Noise. There followed a period as a member of a major label-signed breakbeat trio, International Pony, before his career diverted again into house music: shifts that seem evidence of a restless musical brain. “The music we hear that amazes us is often the result of people doing things that make us go, ‘What is he doing?’” he explains.

His move into house music initially resulted in tracks for the lauded Cologne label Kompakt and only flourished from there. As well as touching on trip-hop and ambient and deploying soul samples with the imagination of a J Dilla or Madlib, he is venerated as a dependable provider of underground house tracks and remixes that cross boundaries, become huge summer club anthems and end up near the top of end-of-year best lists. Choice examples include his 2012 remix of British house auteur Herbert’s It’s Only, 2015’s XTC, his glorious disco take on pop artist Låpsley’s 2016 single Operator, 2018’s Pick Up, and now Wespennest, which sets singer Sophia Kennedy’s German-language vocal to synthesisers that seem to drift like mist over an immense bassline and a rhythm track thick with dubby echo.

He is the master of what you might call the subtle banger, his productions distinguished by their ability to move a crowd without recourse to the obvious. He refers to their idiosyncrasies as their “brainfuck” quality, and protests that the problem with a lot of house music is that it’s “not aiming for brainfucking you”. There’s also an ineffable underlying strain of melancholy that seems to infect everything Koze does – a result, he says, of his love of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada’s “synthesisers that are twisted and warped and a little bit off and make you feel”, and his love of the communality of the dancefloor.

“I’m always fascinated by the depths of groups standing or dancing in a club or warehouse, feeling the same without talking – spaces in society where we are actually really together. If you do the music, why shouldn’t you try to make it deeper? Because in a club, this is the most beautiful feeling – to be deep inside yourself through the music, but not alone. The first time I witnessed that dance music can be melancholic or deep, I was amazed. ‘Wow, we don’t have to be hooligans, we can be together and nearly cry and be happy that we are not alone.’”

Koze also has a reputation for a fairly flexible relationship with the truth. One of the stories he has told involves him being discovered abandoned as a child in a Marrakech forest with an Akai sampler. And when I ask about the writing of Wespennest, which I’ve been informed took place while on retreat in a Benedictine monastery in Indonesia, he smiles and tells me “the truth is overrated”.

He also has a reliably peculiar approach to the business of image. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear, he appeared on the cover of his second album, Amygdala, clad in a crash helmet, riding an elk. An image search for his name variously reveals photographs of him crouched by a cactus playing the ukulele, wearing a turban with a milk urn slung over his shoulder, and seated at a piano – a copy of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn perched on the music stand – clad in a tracksuit with a vast gold chain and even vaster gold key around his neck. Inquiries about this stuff tend to get batted away. One journalist who questioned the whole sitting-on-an-elk-in-a-crash-helmet thing was told it simply represented “a day in the life of DJ Koze”.

Despite his apparent aversion to making statements, Koze isn’t prickly or difficult company. Quite the opposite: you get the feeling he’d be rather good fun over a pint, not least because he seems possessed of a strikingly unique take on pretty much any subject you care to throw at him. He describes the art of making music as involving “a cage full of apes” in his brain: “I need to get them talking to me.”

He has a burgeoning career as a producer for other artists – he helmed the superb forthcoming album by Róisín Murphy – but says he prefers working remotely, with minimal communication, even when collaborating. “If you talk about what you want to do, only agreement can happen; it can’t be a surprise. But if I send music to another person who’s not in the room and doesn’t know what I was thinking could fit in the track, and they send me stuff in their own words, then something new can happen, because we didn’t make plans or organise our thoughts and feelings.”

His DJ sets are justly famed for his willingness to take risks, to play music the audience aren’t expecting. He avoids what he calls “music that gives you a formula, like a manual: 4, 3, 2, 1, and then the white noise, then you scream and order another bottle of champagne”. You would think this was evidence of immense self-confidence but apparently not. He makes the whole business sound like a terrible ordeal.

“I’m like a really scared person, full of anxiety. I need a drink of neat vodka before I go on stage, I need to shit, I’m in the toilet, I have shaky hands, I’m afraid of getting a heart attack or a stroke. Then I go on stage and I’m brave sometimes – but not always. I’m like an anxious, scared person, then I make these decisions. I don’t know why. Maybe because if I don’t do it, I will regret it.”

Sometimes, he says, the risk-taking doesn’t pay off. “When the crowd needs a Bruce Willis with his Die Hard weapons and I’m not that Bruce Willis, I’m a small man just coming from the toilet, it’s a nightmare,” he sighs. “The highest form of failure. Sometimes I feel hunted by a crowd of dogs on testosterone and cocaine, and I think, ‘How could I end up here? I’ve been making sweet music for 30 years, how can I be afraid of the mob?’ Then I question my whole existence and think maybe I made the wrong decisions. But when it’s good, then it’s good.”

An auteur producer who prefers not to give his collaborators direction, a DJ who’s terrified of DJing, a fascinating interviewee who prefers not to give interviews, the business with the elk and the crash helmet: it’s all very peculiar, but there’s no doubt it seems to be working exceptionally well. Wespennest is every bit as fantastic as all the other fantastic DJ Koze tracks. There’s a new album, scheduled for next year; details about its contents are hard to come by, but apparently some huge names have been subjected to the DJ Koze process of not being told what he’s thinking. And perhaps creating a state of confusion is the point. “I think I’m always searching for that which my brain can’t comprehend,” he says. Then, with a smile of relief that the interview is over, he tells me to have a good weekend and disappears back into his own idiosyncratic world.

The Wespennest EP is out now on Pampa Records