DJ Koze is going to be late. He’s supposed to be taking the stage at Austria’s Elevate Festival in an hour, but he’s not here. In fact, he’s a country away, stuck in a German airport lounge, waiting for a connecting flight. He doesn’t sound worried, though. “I’m in a quiet room, under a blanket—three hours of peace,” he tells me over the phone, his voice low and measured. “This is the happiest I have felt all month.” He clicks off; the phone goes boop boop. This is my introduction to the zen mindstate of one of electronic music’s wiliest figures.

Here at the festival, the vibe feels a million miles away from Koze’s tranquil repose, as booming techno and electro fill the room. An oversized Jesus statue looms behind the DJ booth, an illuminated Red Bull logo hanging over its head. Gitz, Koze’s tour manager, grimaces. “I’ll need to get that covered up,” he says. “If I sent Koze a picture of that right now, he wouldn’t even get on the plane.”

Koze’s real name is Stefan Kozalla. The 45-year-old Hamburg denizen has used the alias for 20 years now, ever since his days as a hip-hop DJ, but most people just call him “Kosi,” which sounds like “cozy” (more or less how his alias is pronounced). He first made a name for himself in the early 2000s with strange, splotchy techno, but over the years, his music has gotten both mellower and more unpredictable, drawing audiences that wouldn’t know the inside of a dance club from a medieval dungeon. He’s a sensitive trickster, a misty-eyed madcap—every time you think you’ve got him figured out, he turns out to be something else.

When Koze finally shows up for his set in Austria, which has been delayed three hours, he’s wearing a half-harried, half-quizzical expression. If you saw him anywhere but here, you would not mistake him for a reasonably famous DJ—a staple in big European clubs whose most popular tracks number in the millions of plays on Spotify. As opposed to the minimalist, all-black outfits popular on the techno circuit, Koze’s getup looks like he stumbled off the trail on the way to an alpine refuge: brown polar-fleece jacket, thermal hoodie, collarless shirt, baggy pants gathered at the ankles.

The venue is now packed, and, thanks to Gitz’s handiwork, the spotlights on Jesus are killed. Koze strides across the stage, a bottle of champagne in his hand, and crouches behind the DJ booth, munching on an apple. (Koze is a born snacker, rarely without a piece of fruit or a bag of trail mix within easy reach.)

Despite his race to reach Austria, once he’s behind the decks, he’s in no hurry to get anywhere fast. He spends the first few minutes gradually teasing in the bass, as though wading into progressively deeper waters. He leavens forceful, percussive tracks with carefully placed vocals and counters four-to-the-floor rhythms by tightening drum loops until they make a dentist-drill buzz. Both on stage and on record, Koze’s specialty is the fusion of squirrely and sentimental, of mischief and melancholy. It’s a subtle sound, spongy, full of riddles.

In the booth, when he really gets into it, he holds his hands up alongside one ear and claps in short rhythmic bursts, like a flamenco dancer; in another signature move, he turns his back to the decks, walks as far as his coiled headphone cord will allow, and air-drums in place. But he’s not a performative DJ, despite his tendency to ham it up when he gets the chance—like the surrealistic promo video for his acclaimed DJ-Kicks mix from 2015, or the cover of his 2013 album Amygdala, where he sits astride a reindeer against a fuschia field, clad in a brocade robe and a motorcycle helmet. When, not three songs into his set, he lights a stick of incense and jams it into a crack in the DJ table, it feels like a private ritual rather than something done for show.

The set climaxes with one of Koze’s own songs: “Pick Up,” a Gladys Knight-sampling cut from his new album, Knock Knock. It’s the only actual dancefloor track on a record full of muted hip-hop beats and swirling textures. Over a Daft Punk-like disco loop, Knight sings, “It’s sad to think/I guess neither one of us/Wants to be the first to say goodbye.” At once melancholy and euphoric, it makes for an exhilarating collision of emotions, and out in the crowd, the vibe is beatific. Koze closes by gradually cutting the treble until the music is just a dull rumble. A smile, a wave to the crowd, and he darts off stage.

An hour later, a small entourage is packed into an Audi barreling toward Vienna at 90 miles per hour, passing around a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Koze, riding shotgun, has the aux cord, and the volume is frightfully loud; I feel like I am cocooned inside one of his mixes. He plays songs by the Staples Singers, Damon Albarn, De La Soul, Madlib—anything but dance music. None of these tracks would have sounded out of place on Koze’s DJ-Kicks mix, but at the current volume and velocity, they’d work just as well for The Fast and the Furious franchise.

The distorted sound of the car stereo goes to the heart of Koze’s aesthetic: throbbing bass, berry-rich tones, and empty space, all wrapped around a beat as porous as a termite mound. Nearing the city limits, the champagne long gone, Koze shouts over the music as we whizz past a string of slow-moving windmills, marveling about an obscure Todd Rundgren sample in a Japanese rap track.

A manic glint in his eye, Koze is hatching plans. He wants to stay out drinking in Vienna, which sounds like a terrible idea—it’s already 2 a.m. and we have a flight to catch in the morning. But his enthusiasm is persuasive. The Austrian capital, brutally cold, is a blur: The streetlights glancing off the façades of the city’s wall-to-wall luxury boutiques; the food truck on a central square, where we grip beer bottles with frozen fingers and wolf down käsekrainer—cheese sausages served with grated horseradish so hot that it brings tears to your eyes; the tiny Art Deco bar where we drink Negronis until last call.

Koze can be both electrifying and inscrutable. Axel Boman, a Swedish producer who has recorded for Koze’s own Pampa label, calls him one of the warmest people he knows. In my hotel room, thinking back over the long day, I’m reminded of something else Boman had told me: “Koze showers you with attention and then he’ll disappear, leaving you both inspired and empty, wondering what happened.”