BLOG 16/06/2020
The Jan Diaries — Kez YM, From Japan to Berlin
Jan Kinčl and Kez YM lived one district apart in Berlin and ran into each other often enough for a friendship, which is the disclosure this review opens with before it gets to the record. The Japanese producer is, in Kinčl’s reading, a true school DJ with funk, soul, hip-hop and disco written into his DNA — calm in conversation and, as he puts it, a demon the moment he is behind a pair of turntables.
What the record does
Pipe Flow came out in April 2020 on the French label Faces Records, barely a year after the debut. That debut, Cross Section, Kinčl describes as roughly two-thirds American deep house and one-third instrumental hip-hop, and it had not left his record bag since Kez handed it to him — so a second album of equal or better quality arriving this fast came as a genuine surprise. The new one follows the same line but sounds tighter, the groove has improved and the sound collage work has picked up another dimension.
The review then walks all nine tracks. Bluff Your Way is a peak-time dancefloor killer where rhodes chords and a clarinet fight for the foreground the whole way through. Sing A Song turns on a male soul vocal sample it is hard to stay indifferent to. Harshly sits closest to the debut and shows the collage method best, layering vocals and crowd noise until the music sits in an unusually warm, human context. August Wave is slower and lighter with a discreetly broken rhythm, a mood-setter for the start of an evening; Half Lazy is peak time again; Dark Space is five in the morning, a sampled trumpet against rhodes chords. Good Man lasts one minute and forty seconds and Kinčl calls it brilliant anyway, on the strength of a magical soul sample and a serious house groove. Draft In The Bush is broken beat, and the downtempo jazz of Jam One closes the arc of a club night properly.
The part that stayed
The sharpest idea in the column has nothing to do with Kez specifically. Working inside a form as codified as deep house, Kinčl argues, the interesting movement happens at the level of content rather than form — and for all the synthesisers available, electronic producers still have not reached the futurism jazz musicians got to with instruments that are centuries old. Against that standard, the compliment he pays Harshly counts: “Jednostavno zvuči ‘inviting’, što je ključan dio osjećaja koji ljudi na plesnom podiju trebaju dobiti”. The practical advice is shorter still: if the name turns up on a flyer, do not skip it.
Read the full piece
The full review, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Kez YM - Pipe Flow, od Japana do Berlina → redbull.com