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 …”
