Many voices float through Knock Knock, like spirits. One of them is the sampled croak of what sounds like a thousand-year-old man. He talks about his kinship with music—how he sells it, listens to it, and plays it during most of his waking hours. In a metaphysical flourish, the old-timer boasts, “Look at my teeth: You see music on it.” The line is a joke, but he means it—and it’s easy to think of this mysterious guru as an avatar for DJ Koze himself. The German DJ, producer, and label owner has spent the last few decades cultivating a parallel musical universe, one based on a collector’s knowledge and a sense of play, where the histories of dance music and hip-hop and psychedelia are all pulled together by the same gravitational force. In this utopia, Knock Knock, a life’s work, plays on a continuous loop, and no one tires of it.

Koze created much of the album in a remote Spanish village, a locale that he has described as “totally different from the desperate big city, where you try to make cool music.” The isolation plays out in Knock Knock’s bespoke frequencies: Each synth wobble is crafted with a watchmaker’s care, every snare hit manicured for maximum swing. And Koze has no truck with of-the-moment trends. The record’s featured vocalists—including Swedish folkie José González, Speech from the ’90s rap group Arrested Development, and modern dancefloor diva Róisín Murphy—are surprising and varied, the product of admiration rather than any type of algorithmic cross-referencing. So we get what could be a lost Van Morrison classic alongside an impossibly soulful Old Kanye-type beat alongside techno built for flying cars, everything holding everything else up. There are no barriers between genres, eras, origins—only freedom. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: DJ Koze, “Illumination“ [ft. Róisín Murphy]