The Inner Jukebox

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

When DJ T., a.k.a. Thomas Koch, releases an album, expectations tend to ride high. He is, after all, one of the co-founders and heads of Get Physical, the Berlin house-music powerhouse that's home to Booka Shade and M.A.N.D.Y., and which has long served as a standard bearer for a strain of dance music that straddles underground cred and more populist sensibilities. (He also served for many years as the publisher of Groove, one of Germany's most respected electronic-music standards, making it even likelier that his music will be parsed with an extra fine-toothed comb.)

All this might make Koch's second album, The Inner Jukebox, sound surprisingly understated, especially given the hefty funk and bulbous riffs of his debut album, 2005's Funk on You. Co-produced with Elektrochemie's Thomas Schumacher, The Inner Jukeboxlays out rounded, rollicking, deep-house grooves made with synth bleeps, hissing drum machines and restrained Latin percussion, but it shies away from the big hooks that Booka Shade specialize in. With melodies usually whittled down to the merest implication and vocals cut and compressed into single-syllable repetitions, there's something almost deliberately anonymous about the music. In many ways, like the best dance music often is, these are tracks by and for DJs, designed to slot seamlessly into an infinity of beatmatched contexts, reflecting a different perspective on the history of dance music with every new drop. But there's plenty here to capture your attention (and your imagination) away from the dance floor, from the moody funk of tracks like "Mr. Piano Hands" to the minimalist whirlwind of "Switch." Compressing all the moods of a night out (and maybe the morning after) into an easy-flowing hour, The Inner Jukebox suggests that it's OK if the tracks tend to bleed together; they're all just different sides of the same coin, made to be flipped over and over.