2023 repress

Tracklist
A. Pick Up (12" Extended Disco Version)
B. The Love Truck

DJ Koze might be one of the world's best producers, but above all he's a DJ, and it's his DJ ear that governs. Just as in a great set, so with his releases: "Seeing Aliens" came out of nowhere, a big buzzing beast of a track, to announce that Koze was back on the scene and prime everyone for the coming album, knock knock. But now that Koze has your attention, it's time to remind everyone what's most important about club music, pull things back, take a turn to the left, and get deep into the groove.

Thus "Pick Up": the second single from knock knock is 100% pure groove, doubly so in the extended 12" version. In a sense it's incredibly familiar - it is essentially a filter disco record, very close to something you could imagine coming out of Paris around the turn of the millennium. But of course, this is Koze. Nothing is normal or familiar in his world, and he's taken this most foundational of clubland staples into new territory. Flipping samples of Gladys Knight & the Pips "Neither One Of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)" and Melba Moore's "Pick Me Up, I'll Dance", it creates something completely airborne, shot through with emotions such as gods must feel: not quite explicable to the human mind but strong enough to knock you off your feet. In its way it's absolutely as powerful as "Seeing Aliens", but it comes in like the proverbial iron fist in a glove of velvet.

The flip, a ten-minute new track, "The Love Truck" is a big contrast again. If "Pick Up" is giddy flight, "The Love Truck" is woozy floating. Its sharp, clicking percussion recalls 2000s minimal techno, but this time absolutely nothing is generic. The long, intense, on-and-off bass tones, the flickers of birdsong, the pure voices slipping in backwards as if from the future... it's all like the most blissful dream, and culminates in a coda so subtle yet so beautiful it's like ever time you've ever seen the sun rise and thought "I never want this to end", all the while understanding deep down that the fleeting nature of the pleasure is also what give it its power. But of course, being created with that consummate DJ's ear, it's also full of the thrill of wondering what Koze has in store next.

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Format: 12” vinyl, printed labels, printed inner sleeve, dl code

Tracklist:
01 / A Parallel Shift 04:39
02 / B Earth 05:39
03 / DX Earth - Edit (Digital Bonus) 05:08

Astral travel with Cybotron into the meta-narrative of the Parallel Shift, a new sonic fiction that raises many questions about military science of the near-future and the possibility of other worlds.
Descending backward through the rhythms of time, the Skynet module retracts from the hyper-structural society of 2100, edging toward the mid-century modern age teetering on the brink of what was then the frontier of “the future”. The system boots the Infiniti process, morphing into a cosmotechnic vessel coursing the superhighway of burgeoning general intelligence, seeking data from just before “the overshoot and collapse.”
R&D methods, rhythmanalytically applied, dissect the aftermath of an industrial society that burst through the ecological capacity of Spaceship Earth. Fractal visions of war and innovation spike and recede from and into the surfaces of reality being bent and guiding the eyes, ears, touch towards a laboratory in the year 1961. A nuclear expert, Don Lewis, receives orders to decrypt the mysterious black dodecagonal disc known as Fortec and the extraterrestrial biology unearthed in Roswell. He joins a team disassembling Fortec and studying the recurrent dodecahedral patterns linked to the human nervous system.
Through dismantling and probing, the team cycles through a saecular search devoid of finite conclusions, limited by Earth’s intellectual and technological prowess. One 1960s night, Lewis, while meddling with Fortec’s cyborganic innards, accidentally electrifies himself. His cyclotron and missile experience guides him to circuit-bend Fortec, stirring the entity from a mechanical slumber. Lewis and Fortec communicate in resonances, until it drifts back into a tranquil stasis.
The US Defense and contractors, unbeknownst to them, observe this breakthrough. They later permit Lewis to exit military service as the Air Force forms the Foreign Technology Division. Concurrently, MJ12 evolves into CY12, delving into second-order cybernetics. Lewis clandestinely keeps working on Fortec fragments, transitioning from military engineer to musician, pioneering the LEO module, a fusion of Fortec’s essence and audio engineering.
He shares his insights with Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, aiding the creation of the iconic TR-808. Meanwhile, Fortec branches out, coining “Cyberspace” – a collective illusion of liberty unshackled by physical, political, or spiritual bounds, anchored in the equitable distribution of The Golden Ratio across realities. Yet “Cyberspace” morphs into a chaotic truth reservoir, spilling over into deception.
The Parallel Shift manifests in the perpetual “Now,” a collapsed event horizon where past and future are ensnared in a relentless present, unfurling along a dissolving timeline, overseen by a monolithic simulation under ceaseless watch…
— The Rhythmanalyst aka DeForrest Brown, Jr. More