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Four years after his first release on Stones Throw, the Canadian-bred artist known as Koushik presents “Out My Window,” his official debut album. His backbeat is set by ’90s-era “Dusty Fingers” beats and breaks and there’s a touch of that ‘post-Dilla off-kilter drum programming’. But his music’s similarities to traditional hip hop end there. Koushik is essentially a pop music singer-songwriter – and not in the contemporary sense of the word ‘pop’. Rewind to the ’60s, when fancy production alone did not an artist make. Despite his lush, beautiful arrangements, Koushik’s melodies could be stripped down to their essence and accompanied with a single acoustic guitar. But they’re not…
That ethereal singing comes from the same guy laying down the music. It’s a swirling, reverb-drenched creation schooled by Phil Spector’s wall of sound and colored by a palette of flutes, harpsichords and mellotrons. Though Koushik’s ‘backing band’ dwells within his SP-303 sampler, ‘they’ sound like a dream team of late ’60s LA’s Wrecking Crew sessioners and that same era’s New York jazz and funk cats vamping together on some experimental shit when the engineer leaves the booth for a coffee break. To keep this dream sequence going, Koushik’s vocals would emerge non-distinctly from the air conditioning shafts, drifting up from somewhere deep in Capitol’s studios. It’s a strange sound that never made it to tape forty years ago, but Koushik has channeled it out his window and onto this album.
The timing couldn’t be better …
With all of those ‘beat diggers’ raised on Golden Age hip hop wandering into psychedelic rock and progressive folk, Koushik offers a point of departure. His unique approach stands as the reason Stones Throw added him to a roster alongside the likes of Madlib and Dilla, Gary Wilson and YNQ. Hopefully, “Out My Window” gazes into the future as well as looking nostalgically at the past – and finds a space amongst the classics that you listen to many times over, finding new things to love with each listen.
Koushik specializes in making that hazy, hip hop-based downbeat sh*t that you could easily compare to contemporaries such as Four Tet (who released Koushik’s first single on his Text label), RJD2, and DJ Shadow. What sets Koushik apart from the others is a beautiful ‘60s psych-pop element that tends to pervade throughout. It shows itself in the spacious panned strings, acoustic guitars, and harpsichords that fall in and out of each other; and the beats have a harder regimented classic true school hip hop sound, that Four Tet and Prefuse tend to stray away from. But what I truly love about this record is Koushik’s voice. His singing is soft and mixed way down in the center of the track, sounding like the voice choirs you’d hear on one of those old Percy Faith or 101 Guitars from the late-‘60s. If you’re a fan of any of the aforementioned artists, you need this record. – Other Music, NYC
“The music of Koushik will leave you genially woozy… It is a wonderful state of mind to be in.”
- Fader Magazine
“Koushik is a friend of mine and knows more about music than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s frightening.”
- Caribou aka Manitoba
(Quelle: Groove Attack, 4.7.2008)
FORMAT: CD
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