Koushik - Out My Window Review

Koushik's first album was a collection of EPs, and while it worked well as an introduction, it fell short as an album. Not so with the follow-up: 2008's Out My Window is an enveloping hug of blissed-out melodies, gentle beats, hushed vocals, and carefully constructed musical backdrops that casts a spell of peaceful harmony that is difficult to shake. Not that you'd want to. Koushik weaves together a wide range of influences (hip-hop, '60s psychedelia and sunshine pop, early-'70s singer/songwriters, the tripped-out jazz of the late '60s, shoegaze, and trip-hop, to name the main sources) over the course of the album, and often within individual songs, to come up with his sound. It never lapses into simple mimicry or pastiche, though; Koushik is a master at making something new out of all the parts he liberates from the past. He deftly chops, mixes, and blends great clouds of reverbed sound -- the chiming guitars, the lightly skittering drums, the warbling flutes and subtle horns -- but also doesn't forget to write songs with some hazy, lazy soul at their center. A song like "In a Green Space" is a fine achievement based on sound alone, coming off like a David Axelrod-produced session for the Millennium, but Koushik's quietly insistent vocals give it some emotional punch. There are more examples of well-crafted songs (the insanely joyful "Lying in the Sun" for one) that capture real feelings, but the most impressive aspect of Out My Window is the dreamy, sun-kissed mood the album conjures up from the first note to the final fade. Koushik has a few contemporaries doing something similar (Nobody, Four Tet, Caribou), but apart from Caribou's Andorra, none of them has come up with an album as good overall as Out My Window....full text The first time Koushik (full name: Koushik Ghosh) caught my attention was when Stones Throw – his current label – released a remix album of MF DOOM and Madlib's Madvillainy (a personal favourite of mine) bearing his name and Four Tet's. For some unfathomable reason, I decided to skip Koushik's reworks and indulge in the few Four Tet had worked his magic on instead. With Rounds on heavy rotation at the time, it seemed the logical thing to do. It turns out that praise of Koushik's half was lukewarm, but surely now everything is forgotten with the release of his first full-length, Out My Window.

His dreamy brand of psych-pop has a quality which is ultimately hard to characterise - it's superbly subtle. Ethereal is an adjective often thrown around lazily to mean anything with above-average levels of reverb or delay, but it's one which is certainly applicable to Out My Window. Production values here are key, extending far beyond the simple and token use of effects. It all seems so fastidiously planned, with not a note out of place, but it's also inherently natural. With Out My Window, the layering and balancing of Koushik's own softly-spoken, child-like melodies with a multitude of heavenly sounding instruments – flutes, harpsichords, mellotrons amongst the conventional, epitomised by the lethargic and snappy drum grooves - is an ethos and style which permeates every corner, every second of the album with a mood that is, at all times, bright and breezy....full text Koushik Ghosh describes himself as an environmental mathematician. Now if you were being presumptuous, you might think a calculated piece of music designed to save the planet wouldn't be up to much - but relax now, for this isn't Sting with an abacus.

Think DJ Shadow, throw in an intriguing mixture of musical influences of a similarly broad canvas and you get closer to the sound - but fully describing Koushik's approach proves more elusive than you might expect. What is clear is that in his time he's absorbed a whole load of music, and in that sense he brings to mind artists such as Prefuse 73. Koushik's sources, mind, tend to be more 60s-based, his beats less inclined to drop as hip hop.

The spectre of The Doors is occasionally glimpsed. Even shoegaze gets a look-in. There are bits of psychedelia round the edges; now and then the sound of distracted brass comes into view. Brief harmonica solos take the foreground before they fizzle out, while scattered drumming brings the occasional burst of energy. With every new sound and style an album you might be desperate to pigeon hole as another in a long line of horizontal chill out records turns out to have far more substance....full text