Phantom menace
Berlin's DJ Kaos
and partner CE:EL tap into the ghost in the machines.
By Vivian Host
INVENT MODEST FIRES – the first album from
Ghost Cauldron, the duo of Berlin-based DJ Kaos and his old skateboarding
friend CE:EL on K7! Records – is many things. It's brooding,
instrumental hip-hop and it's wistful, acoustic guitar-driven shoegaze,
and every once in a while it finds itself in a sleazy Brooklyn bar,
slinking self-consciously around the room to garage rock-derived
dance punk and the shiny pulse of electro.
In a way, the album is not unlike DJ Kaos himself. It rambles,
rights itself, and shows bursts of hyperactivity while journeying
through all of the musical influences someone who grew up in the
'80s and '90s might conceivably have. In person, Kaos (alias Dennis
Kaun) is more of a talkative man-about-town than the melancholy
studio type you might expect, but his moods are mercurial, and talking
on the phone from his room at Manhattan's swank Tribeca Grand Hotel,
he moves from one topic to the next at a rapid, heavily accented
clip, pausing only to emphasize his favorite adjectives, "great,"
"awesome," and "totally retarded." Stuff that
is great: East Berlin, the TV series Twin Peaks, Fleetwood
Mac, Japanese-made clothes, and New York City. Stuff that is retarded:
West Berlin, people who do nothing, and hip-hop purists.
Out of the underground
Kaos is very much a product of growing up in Berlin: he's both
upmarket and underground; open-minded, but with an eye on tradition;
a party fiend with an underlying serious side. He started his ascent
to cool early, with parents who listened to '70s rock and Kraftwerk
and took him to the record store at the age of 14 to buy hip-hop
imports. Hip-hop led him to a short but productive stint doing graffiti
in the mid '80s. (Bill Clinton supposedly owns a piece of the Berlin
wall that Kaos sprayed on, a gift from the German government.)
From graffiti, Kaos moved on to become a semipro skateboarder and
then a DJ, fully cementing his reputation within a worldwide group
of street-culture tastemakers that includes hip-hop space cadet
Rammellzee, Mo' Wax label head James Lavelle, and photographer Juergen
Teller – all sometime Kaos collaborators.
Kaos talks about his rather superstar-studded career the way some
people talk about what they had for breakfast – nonchalantly.
Since he's gotten into music, he says, "somehow I've always
gotten hooked up with the right people. I always seem to have gone
in the right direction. Like in 1995 I started doing a club night
at E-Werk in Berlin. There were a lot of clubs at this time, but
we were the first DJ crew playing eclectic music – hip-hop,
rock, techno. People gave us attention."
Kaos and his DJ partners got into studio production and formed
Turntable Terranova. A year later in 1996 they had an offer from
K7! Records to contribute to their DJ Kicks series. "It was
crazy," he says.
Darker times
Although Kaos continues to serve up eclectic DJ sets that travel
from butt-rock to avant-disco to electro to hip-hop, he bailed from
the group (who continue on as Edition Terranova) two years ago to
start the considerably darker-sounding Ghost Cauldron. "There
were too many rules in Terranova, to be honest," Kaos says.
"I still love Terranova; maybe we'll do another record next
year sometime. But I wanted to do something that is a mixture of
a little bit of indie rock, electronic, and hip-hop shit. At first,
we just wanted to do a live record. But then I thought that maybe
it's a little boring to just have a guy singing on all of the tracks.
I think it's difficult to make an album that's all instrumental.
I just thought to mix it up a bit, and I also wanted to keep that
DJ aspect in the record."
Invent Modest Fires has a few danceable singles, but its
pastiche plays less like a DJ set and more like a radio DJ's set,
or like a compilation tape, the kind that would be put together
after hours by some eclectic vinyl junkie in a fuzzy brown
cardigan. The connection between the angsty post-folk of "See
What I've Become" (featuring Nick Taylor's fuzzy vocals) and
the ominous, strung-out hip-hop of "Fear" isn't a genre
but a dark mood that ranges from rather cuddly despondence to downright
menace.
Kaos says it felt natural for him and CE:EL to tap into their shady
sides. "It's so difficult for us to make music that sounds
positive," he says. "We're good with a darker, more melancholy,
shadowy sort of vibe. But we're not like, 'Let's smoke some weed
and let's do a very dark, deep tune.' This is the way we are. All
the music that's on the album is really honest music."
Spirited samples
To get deeper into the spirit of things, Ghost Cauldron stirred
up a thick brew of influences. "We wanted to do something that
is a little horror-inspired," Kaos explains. "Like Murnau's
Nosferatu. A lot of the music that is sampled on this record
is out of movies. We sampled lots of '60s and '70s rock records,
Italian goblin horror movies, and also some stuff, which is more
popular, like Metallica. But there's a lot of shit going on. There's
also a lot of Donovan in there, Simon and Garfunkel, Krautrock,
Tangerine Dream, Apocalypse Now. On some of the tracks we
played piano and guitars.
"It's just a shitload of samples," he says with a sigh,
and I can almost hear him shaking his shaggy coif on the other end
of the line. "I don't even want to talk about it! I've been
listening to the music over and over again. It's good to hear from
people what they think about the music, because I really can't tell
anymore."
I suggest to Kaos that the cinematic feel and shadowy undertones
of Invent Modest Fires owe something to DJ Shadow's instrumental
hip-hop opus Endtroducing, particularly Fires' tracks
"Fire Walk with Me" and "Look Back See Forward,"
whose narrative samples and horror-derived keys remind me of Shadow
numbers like "Organ Donor" and "Midnight in a Perfect
World." Kaos is thrilled at the comparison. "Shadow is
fuckin' the shit; he inspired us," he enthuses. "He is
one of the most innovative producers I have ever listened to. I
got a little bored of sampling the same breaks that everyone is
using so I go a little into rock; Shadow is doing the same thing."
Open minds
Though DJ Shadow gains respect within the hip-hop scene and outside
of it, Ghost Cauldron probably won't hit the ears of crate-digging
beat purists. The record's indie rock and electro elements and its
overall aesthetic stray far from hip-hop conventions. That's fine
with genre-busting Kaos. Although he once lived and breathed hip-hop,
he says he could care less now about gaining credibility within
that scene.
"Even when I used to be listening to lots of hip-hop, I got
dissed for listening to Echo and the Bunnymen and Tears for Fears
and shit like that," he says in an exasperated tone. "And
I still listen to it, and of course, it reflects in the music. Since
I'm into music and painting graffiti and DJing, I'm really open-minded
and so are the people I hang out with. In March, I played a party
at [the Winter Music Conference in Miami] with all these hip-hop
guys, and you could just feel the weird vibes form the other DJs
who only play hip-hop. I really can't hang out with those guys.
It doesn't go anywhere. When I hang out with MCs like Beans or Priest
[both formerly of Anti-Pop Consortium], they listen to rock, electronic
shit, pop. It should be like this. That's why we work together.
That's why we don't have to talk about what we want to do. We just
do it. And it's right. It's 2003, please open your mind."
DJ Kaos plays at Fake, June 13, 10 p.m., Cat Club, 1190
Folsom, S.F. Call for price. (415) 703-8964.
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