Staff Reviews

DJ Koze - Amygdala

Review by Alex Baker

Amygdala is a thoroughly immersive album, possessing so many layers that it seems to change upon each listen.»

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Against stylism, for your dose of pop: On his new album, Koze presents his concept of anti-purism more comprehensively than ever before. Amygdala is Koze's Sgt Pepper, no more aiming to take the club night full circle. It feels like a double album that urges you to turn over and change the records time and time again. Amygdala wanders through the moods, intensities and scenes. Rather than trying to figure out the whole cosmos it's really about inviting all the different soundscapes on stage, initiating a dialogue between them. It's large in its stylistic spectrum and emotional depth, but it's small in its gestures and poses. Singers from Caribou to Apparat, from Mathew Dear to Hildegard Knef appear on equal terms: Koze frees the voices from the mists of effect. Instead of using reverberation and echo, he is all concerned with the surface feel and the intimacy of the singing. And just like in earlier times with International Pony, this familiar insecurity about whether a piece is a song or a track is again only too welcome. Nobody's interested in any kind of specialist professionalism that's struggling to create the ever more perfect dub-techno tune, nor in working your way through all the great songs of pop history. The tracks on Amygdala are remixes of tracks that have never even existed.
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