19 Thoughts on DJ Koze's "Seeing Aliens"
- One of the most common things I heard anecdotally from music writers in 2020 was that they had a hard time checking out a lot of new music—and when they did, they usually gravitated towards “softer” or “quieter” sounds. Very understandable, in that whatever anyone decides to “do” with their time these days shouldn’t really be judged unless it’s actively harmful to themselves or others.
- When the pandemic hit, I took the exact opposite route with intensity. I kept (and, mostly, still keep, but we’ll get to that in a few) running playlists of what I hadn’t heard yet, what I wanted to revisit, stuff I liked by genre, etc., for the first time in several years at least. I was thorough and obsessive in a way I hadn’t been in a while, going as far as to keep to a regimen of listening to certain things at certain points (only stuff I haven’t heard before during the day in the apartment, only stuff I liked and want to revisit while I’m walking, Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity or Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor if it’s late and I’ve had a few too many.)
- Throughout my career I’ve always kept up with new music as much as I can, but there have been years where my diligence has been less intense. My general passion dipped around 2014, when my will-remain-nameless manager at a will-remain-nameless music publication told me, after five years of literally building a career around writing about how music sounds, “I don’t care what you think about how music sounds.”
- In the few years that followed (let’s say up until around early 2018), I hopped around jobs at places and for people who, increasingly, did not care what I thought about how music sounded. At one point, I was primarily covering TV and movies, so a good deal of my listening time was spent in screening rooms, or watching screeners, or trying to convince my wife to start Billions. (We still haven’t started Billions.) When I left a job in early 2018 to freelance full-time, I figured I’d be back on the new-music beat more than ever before.
- Didn’t quite happen that way. I think that an unfortunate trend of the way digital media has progressed over the last, let’s say eight or nine years, is that there’s increasingly been less and less space to cover new music that isn’t marquee-level stuff (the Drakes, the Taylor Swifts, you get the idea). If you aren’t a full-time staff writer allowed considerable breadth to pick and choose what you are passionate about, you may as well be pissing in the wind at this point. It’s been this way for a while, it’s going to be this way for a while longer, you can read all my thoughts on this here so we’re not on this topic all day.
- Anyway, bottom line: My experience as a mostly-regular freelancer over the last four years has dictated my listening habits more than my listening habits have dictated the assignments themselves. Sure, there have been exceptions, both notable and not—but they’re exceptions for a reason. I, like many others who write about music, have often found myself listening to music purely out of financial duty instead of the other way around (does that even make sense?), and I’ve often discovered new trains of thought or music that I’ve loved through this process, but from early 2018 on the act of discovering music itself seldom guided the work I did until, idk, I started this newsletter?
- Don’t worry, I’m not about to go down a “AND THAT’S WHY IT’S SOOOOO GREAT THAT I STARTED A NEWSLETTER” path here. Even I’m not that pathologically self-obsessive. (I think.)
- But! What little get-paid-to-write-about-new-music work that existed in the pandemic dried up completely, and for a while almost all work dried up completely, so what else was I going to do except start listening obsessively to new music again? Like, to the point where I was doing so if my life depended on it? I’m being totally serious: At certain points, literally what else was there to do?
- Like the pandemic itself, I just figured the cycle of new-music-listening I was doing—constantly being tweaked little by little while remaining the same overall shape—would keep going on pretty much forever. But I hit a wall. I guess it was, like, three weeks ago? Maybe four? I started strong diving into 2021 releases even though I have playlists from 2020 (and 2019, and 2018, the latter a result of digging through past “What was released in this year” Wikis though various points in the pandemic, see, I told you this became a little obsessive occasionally) gathering digital dust. Then I just…kind of lost interest. Nothing profound took place, I just started sitting at a stop light that I’m still waiting to turn green again.
- Sometimes, finding familiar things I want to listen to when I hit walls like this feels like that Weeknd Super Bowl meme (you know the one). I hop around to stuff that’s familiar out of recent thin air, feeling unsatisfied; sometimes I just listen to one song for twenty minutes (most recently, City Girls and Doja Cat’s “Pussy Talk”) and that’s about it. Most of the time, I come back to one song that never sounds gray or faded to me, like a shirt that retains its brightest colors after a million spin cycles: DJ Koze’s “Seeing Aliens.”
- Koze is obviously a genius, and like Animal Collective before him (ah shit he’s gonna start talking about Animal Collective again), he clearly has a way with hearing and making music that’s truly peerless and inimitable in terms of uniqueness and quality, to the point where what he does feels like magic. He’s quite possibly responsible for more heart-stopping moments in music than any dance producer over the last decade except for the late, great, and painfully missed SOPHIE, both of whom are true critical crossover artists in which it’s impossible to be jaded or snooty about a sonic inch of their work.
- And there’s no moment more heart-stopping for me than 2:00-2:02 in the album version of “Seeing Aliens” (5:27-5:29 in the extended cut above) when the gentle, playful, and essentially Koze-y backbeat drops out and leaves that silvery synth figure hanging in the air, shimmering weightlessly, before kicking back in as if nothing happened. There’s something just so enormously affecting and generous about this moment—possessing confidence that the element can hang on its own and letting it radiate in your gaze like a mirage before getting back to business. He does it a few more times in the song, and it takes my breath away every time.
- It’s impossible for me not to hear “Seeing Aliens” and imagine myself in a sea of bodies, outdoors or indoors, swaying and hugging friends and soaked in some sort of emotional abandon. It’s transportive for me, and has been since I first heard it; over time, I’ve attached real memories affiliated with listening to it, like riding in the passenger seat of a rental car while on honeymoon in Greece, or getting off the subway in Hell’s Kitchen during the magic hour on a June evening and seeing the sun set across the city at just the right time.
- Back to that first image I mentioned in the previous thought: There’s an inherent wistfulness to “Seeing Aliens” that, through the ever-present lens of COVID-19, feels a little devastating. Or felt, maybe? I don’t know. At the beginning of the pandemic, I think I heard “Seeing Aliens” and thought of things that I deeply missed, and now I hear “Seeing Aliens” and think of things that—and I’m not trying to jinx anything, especially because I am rightly pessimistic about the rate at which things are going to “get better,” if they even do at all—maybe, in some perverted and it’s-gonna-take-some-getting-adjusted-to form but still in a you-can-feel-their-presence form, could return at some point in the near-ish future.
- In 2016—maybe a month before the election—I went to the Netherlands with my wife and, eventually, our friends Andy and Kelly to various cities. My wife and I started out in Amsterdam for a spell, and on the first night we did as one does when you visit Amsterdam in the middle of Amsterdam Dance Event and we went and saw some dance music. Specifically, Leon Vynehall, at some carnival-tent rave thing. Being NYC idiots, we figured the 45-minute “walk” to the venue was “walkable,” before finding ourselves on the side of a figurative highway surrounded by industrial plazas. But we got there, and it was great, and after a few hours we went back to our Airbnb and slept because we practically did all of this right after getting off the plane.
- Andy and Kelly joined us in Antwerp, and Kelly continued with us to Brussels. On our last night, my wife, Kelly, and I took a day trip to a nearby city that I cannot remember right now because I’m shit with retaining proper nouns. (If my wife was awake right now I’d ask her, and I guarantee both her and Kelly will think I’m ridiculous that I forgot the name of the city to begin with. As my mother recently and hilariously said in a family group chat, to know me is to love me.)
- Near the end of the day, we spent a fair amount of time in this city trying to find food, but a lot of stuff was closed for some reason. (We ended up going to some fine, just fine, but very far from the best meal of the trip fast-casual pan-Asian restaurant that was mostly just salt.) At one point, we got mildly lost, the way you often and (often) enjoyably do on vacation, and down a path we saw a group of people our age with a speaker setup in front of their apartment, beers in hand, blasting DJ Koze’s “XTC.” It seemed nice.
- I’ve recently replaced my new-music listening habits that stuck with me throughout the pandemic with a different organized way of listening that’s mostly just going through the last few years of BBC Essential Mixes while I’m working on non-music writing or just doing shit around the apartment. It’s been an enjoyable break—I love dance music of all stripes, maybe more than any other “genre” or “sound” when all is said and done—and at some point recently I wondered whether I miss going out to clubs and DJ sets, loitering outside the venue, tearing it up with friends, and so on.
- Having sat down to write this, though, I’ve realized that’s not the case. I mean, I miss that stuff, but I think more generally I miss the constant generation of new memories—good memories—that non-pandemic life brought to the experience of engaging with music. I miss it more than movie theaters, indoor bars, and concerts combined, and I’m hoping that hoping for that sensation to return in some regular form isn’t hoping for too much from the future we’re constantly staring down.