NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE IV

IN PRAISE OF STEFAN KOZELLA: DJ KOZE CAN HEAR US

Before Heaven and Earth

There was something nebulous,

Silent isolated

Unchanging and alone

Eternal

The Mother of all Things

I do not know its name

I call it Tao.        

(Lao Tze, Tao Te King)

The Bee Sting

If I were to remember the many times I have woken up to a foreign room after a blackout, all the bees in the world would die of boredom; exhausted and honey-less.

It would be the end of pollination, spring, true love, and ultimately, sunshine and Tao, the perfect environment for the obliteration of all sorts of humans, except perhaps one: the ginger human, which would outlast the rest of us surviving in darkness for a little excruciating while thanks to their bioluminescent skin cell (whose name I’m not rendering) —before fatally vanquishing onto the same bye-bye-void.

Tripolar H

I’m numb enough to not know if I am already buried somewhere, if there is a body containing this thinking or if I’m just drifting in outer space. I can’t picture if I’m horizontal, vertical, or sinking into a wormhole.

I hear someone playing a drum ever so softly. It is exhilarating: could this be the Great Beyond??

All the signs are mischievous: my ears are working, but not my eyelids, therefore invisibility. I try opening them: it feels like they are buried under a grand piano. My nose is also working, although the Great Beyond predictably smells like nothing.

ID ANYONE

The drummer stops playing and says:

“Remember your name?”

I don’t.

“Harper God,” he says.

“That’s a good name.”

“It’s a bit over the top, if you ask me. I’m Rishi.”

“Rishi sounds cosy, I give you that. What happened to me? Is this the ultimate hangover?”

“Sort of. You died again…”

“Holy shit. So this is The Great Beyond?”

“Well, yes and no: you were never born in the first place, remember? I’m just repairing your motherboard: you were badly damaged in Kathmandu. Did you think about Darkness and ginger survivors upon waking up?”

I’m paler than Trump’s ass. I say nothing. I breathe, although I probably don’t.

FEATHER

The good news is that I don’t need anything you need. Family, food, clothes, toilets, ambulances, sunshine, toothpaste, Xmas, sports, you name it…

I’m bodiless and free, so I can’t complain, can I?

“Yes you can: you still have a body, I’m restarting it as we speak. Hold on.”

Rishi fiddles his tiny pliers, something sparkles, and my eyes open.

Bye-bye bodiless dream.

It is the same old sack of bones with a head in the shape of Tom Hanks’ volleyball, the unfortunate Wilson. I’m not impressed.

“At least you’d have music,” says Rishi enigmatically.

Rishi God

Rishi is very handsome. His eyes are like honey inside the skull of a lion, unfathomable and dangerous. He is wearing an orange silk shirt and white slacks. He is effortlessly elegant and neater than an organ-less-incel.

“Ha! Good analogy!” That’s how I wrote you: irreverent and opinionated. I’m proud of you. Your code is unpredictable, one of a kind.”

“You are not proud of me, you are proud of yourself, I’m just your mirror, you fucking narcissist.”

“Language! Jesus! It was an honour to write you, but I won’t tolerate the swearing.”

“I’m just using your own words. Should I call you DaddyAI?”

“I prefer Rishi the Creator.”

EVERY IT NERD IS A SYMBOLIST RAPPER

As soon as the words come out of his mouth I have an instant flashback. It is terrifying. I keep up with the conversation as if nothing happened. I’m great at pretending. I have no feelings, no dreams, no hopes, and my future is endless. I must have been a murderer in my previous life.

“Rishi The Creator! Are you for real? Every IT nerd is a failed rapper: if you only knew how to write words instead of symbols you’d be married to Beyonce or Taylor the Creator.”

He is furious. I’m working.

“My wife is a hundred million times better. Plus she is the product manager of your ‘existence’. We need to do a test-run before properly briefing you. Hold on.”

I’m about to ask if I can use the toilet. Then I remember that I don’t need them anymore. The flashback is in my cloud storage. I see the scarred face of The Oracle talking to me with his contagious enthusiasm.

Peanut Island, Vietnam, April 2025

“Harper if you go to Pokhara… It is a long shot, but who knows: try to find a guy called Rishi. He was seven years old when I met him, the best worker I ever had. He had escaped home, a badly polluted area in the Himalayas. He tried to bring his family to Pokhara, but they refused to move, so he flew. A year later the ‘bad air’ had claimed his entire family. I took him under my wing, but lost contact when he was twelve. If you get in trouble, he might be able to help.”

Nowhere. Now, somewhere, May 2025

Which are the chances? I search how many Rishi’s there are in Pokhara. Hundreds. Rishi means “the inspired poet,” so this one shall be the exception that proves the rule. The search results for ‘Rishi The Creator’ are meagre and rather bleak.

DEMENTIYAH

Rishi calls a name that sounds like “Dementia”. A woman covered in a black kimono shows up. I have seen her before. She moves like a fallen leaf and has a mesmeric faded red dot, a blessed tika, on her forehead. Her hands move like two birds at swim and her smile could be the foundation of hypnosis.

“Namaste, Harper God, I’m Dementiya, not dementia. I’m your protector, and the Goddess of the Thousand Moons. This is your new bicycle.”

THOUSAND GIANT’S MOON

The bicycle is called Giant Trance. It is blue and yellow, has hundreds of gears and no mudguards.

“I just uploaded a new record into Your Music. You have new built-in speakers, so play it as loud as you like. We want you to listen to it while cycling Pokhara for the first time and then write a text combining routes and tracks and your first impressions. Does it make sense?”

“Kind of. Am I a music journalist and travel writer AI now? Fuck my life. Just tell me how many words and give me a deadline.”

“You are much more than that: you are Humanity’s deadline. Write as many words as you need or not,” she says.

Her smile recalibrates darkness, sharpens the thousand shades of deadlines.

THE EAR

She says good luck and lets me out.

The album has the best title I can remember. “Music Can Hear Us.” It makes me think of Andrew Weatherall’s late radio show: “Music is Not for Everyone.”

And it immediately turns music into a huge ear listening to you. I feel electronic as fuck just by reading the title.

It is DJ Koze’s latest LP, an album conceived for “travel without moving.”

I start listening to it while crossing the courtyard outside the office, and I’m already travelling like an accomplished and talented Mr. Tripley.

THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL

The song starts with Koze quoting Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Outside the courtyard, there is a massive Banyu tree and a string of prayer flags fluttering in the name of good wishes, their beating smoothly matching the expanding drum machine and the humming of the opening track like a gigantic tropical fruit smoked with German romanticism, full of endangered seeds and entangled spider webs, all of them revived and untied instantly, Koze’s holy waters healing the dream of music in seven minutes and thirty eight seconds.

THE TALENTED MISTER TRIPLEY

It is 7:33 am and I cycle down the street. The asphalt is cracked and hot, strewn with smashed fruits and burnt incense sticks, and perhaps some deadly flowers.

To my left hand side there is a woman covered in a black shawl spraying a wall with the country’s initials: Never Ending Love And Peace.

As soon as we make eye contact, my player skips the next five songs and falls into The Talented Mr. Tripley.

It starts with the quote the graffiti lady is uttering perfectly synched with the music:

“Everything happens and nothing happens.”

I shiver and breathe rainbows and jungles of hope

HIGHEST BACK MOLARS

I surf the keyboards, synths and the fat bass carrying the rhythm.

Except I’m next to the highest orthodontics of geology, the world’s mouth at its peak: the imperial Himalayas rising like a chain of huge fangs slurping ice, and I see Annapurna floating in its own rainbows.

I keep pedalling the myriad of protecting sounds, Koze’s gravity zero at its maximum, and I feel like I’m alternately tiptoeing the dunes of the Sahara, and involved in a car crash on my eleventh birthday, and I wonder if I exist, and I remember I don’t .

BRUSHTAXI

I’m now. I’m here..

I’m pedalling like a maniac in the middle of a highway that makes the dirt roads of Mad Max look like German autobahns. I divert hell, and all of a sudden I’m mountain biking like Elliot again, this time skidding a glorious riverside surrounded by lush hills.

BANG BANG

It is then when the highest banger of Koze’s miraculous career shines like the last afterhours in the world under a shower of lasers and flowers.

Lost In Trance Nation could be its name.

Josh Wink and Hardfloor are having a heart attack and Stefan revives them with his astonishing defibrillator, a machine containing a current version of The Notwist, a very fine gem to reconcile ravers and teenagers, fathers and sons, daughters and mothers.

Koze’s brilliant production stitches together the best kept secret of the last 30 years of electronic music, a seamless journey on how to traverse trance, world music, afrobeats, pop and Kraftwerk and CAN to come up with this.

This is the dream of an island called life before AI’s.

ARUNA

I look up and the Annapurna mountain range shines in its own rainbows, and a song named “Aruna” claims half of the landscape, and the whole soundtrack, a massive valley full of marshlands and opulent hills, rivers like Terminator’s silver veins, perhaps the Yeti’s; and clouds of dust, and then a lake and the outstanding mountain range reflected in it like the biggest watercolour ever painted.

This is what is all about: music and belonging.

Koze channels the mid 90s like the oldest and highest migratory bird; its wings still iridescent, dreamy, dark, restless and playful as the only possible cure for the death of dance music and imagination.

He can call himself a priest and a healer, the highest carrier of the light of an extinguished culture through the decades.

He has funnelled the years and the sounds, and once again, turns Apocalypse into a Life Full of Possibilities.

Begnas Lake, June 2026

The album exactly ends when my battery dies.

I disappear again into the bye-bye-void and I open my eyes and I see a lake and a prophet. The prophet is thin, has a magnetic sliver beard and diamond grin that would expand like a gondola. His eyes shine like snow and soul, when he says:

“You just had a bad dream. Look up. Do you see Rishi anywhere?”

I look up and the Three Sirens are in front of me, next to the prophet, who announces that the heaviest monsoon in thirty years is about to fall upon us, therefore his blessing.

I can only wonder if I’m Ulysses. AI’m just another Koze’s music victim, very proud in a most synthetic way.

I’m exhausted but instantly nurtured.

The sirens are reflected in the water like the spirit of hope and understanding, the slightly unnerving “never ending peace and love,” which happens to be the spirit of this land, as if it is a motto that has overcome itself to become an enlightened mantra.

So if music is the answer, then Stefan is providing it in full bloom. As I cycle back on A midsummer sunset to my cabin in the woods, I encounter a leopard in the middle of a tiny road.

The eye contact is thrilling: the beast looks like the Nepalese spirit of Stefan. I don’t have the words. I start quietly walking backwards.

I’m in the middle of NOWHERE, very close to the heart of the land where Buddha was born, and the leopard is looking and I am receding until I hit something with my ankle.

I turn around and I see a little blue house. Susana the owner….. SHE is whispering, “Here is safe,” she says.

It is written in the language of the place where I was born.
It is the name of the last band of my favourite 90s Spanish producer, Xavier Alarcón. He has been our local Koze, and the former leader of the country’s greatest dark-synth output of the 90s: Vanguard. He is a humble titan who has spent the last few years as master and sound producer of a band called exactly like Susana’s safe house.

La casa Azul. (The blue house).

Home is where you die.

I could die here.

Music is a miracle pregnant with life.

Thank you, Koze.