by Adam Hildebrand
When we talked with Josh Kouzomis it was one of those too-bright days in the Valley, the kind where sunglasses don’t help. The sun blasts off every surface in white-hot dry cakes of light. You feel as though the light were pressing your back, and you feel the dust between your teeth, and can’t wait to get indoors. We met at his home/studio in L.A.: an unassuming Southern California stuccoed place, with rugged irregular wood paneling at the front, painted a deep grey green. A beautifully restored black sedan sat in the driveway—a friend’s car, Josh explained later. As you approach the cement steps leading to his front door, you realize what a puzzle Josh Kouzomis really is. It’s difficult to anticipate spending a little one-on-one time with a guy like Josh Kouzomis. Aliases abound in the hip-hop world, and Josh’s alias, Troublemaker, is enough to give a man pause. He earned the name in a sort of infamous way that makes you glad you weren’t present for the inauguration.
Raymond Roker of Urb Magazine gave Josh the name a few years back at Miami’s Winter Music Conference. Raymond, Josh and a few others huddled behind the stage relaxing. The sweet and sour rot smell of marijuana wafted from backstage and into the nostrils of a bouncer—the wrong bouncer. He marched to the back and accosted the group. “I want everyone out of here who’s smoking marijuana!” he said. Josh replied, “Hey man, we’re all artists here—we’re all backstage, see.” The veins in the bouncer’s neck bulged with irritation, and he said, “I’ll take you around back and beat the hell outta you. Now get out!” Josh leapt onto the bouncer in a flash and throttled him by the neck. A mob of six or so bouncers crashed onto the scene and attempted to subdue the young Kouzomis. “He’s high on something, gents!” “I think it’s a controlled substance of some kind! It might be PCP! Watch out!” Things eventually settled down, and Roker, cool the entire time and watching, said, “You’re such a troublemaker, man.” Troublemaker… DJ Troublemaker. It sounded good, it fit, and it stuck. Although he had been around for a while and had become a recognizable DJ, that moment was when the Troublemaker persona officially took root. “That,” said Josh, “was the defining moment.”
“I was really young at the time,” he said, explaining why he leapt onto the bouncer’s throat. The day we talked with him, we found an older, perhaps wiser Troublemaker. And he made for good conversation, too.
Josh has amassed an extensive body of work. He has had ample opportunity to make a few enemies along the way with his work. Creating remixes of other’s music is precarious work. “I try to be very respectful of what they’ve done,” he said. “I know, as someone who makes music, that when you give your music over to somebody, you don’t know what is going to happen.” Josh’s remixes are definitely uniquely his. “But,” he said, “I try to respect what the artist did, and then come at it from my own angle.”
The work of a DJ is half homage, half creation, tweaking and rearranging and adding to what exists. But you don’t choose a particular track to remix if you didn’t already respect it to some degree. “Sometimes it’s part of the vocal hook,” he said. “Or even something they sing in their verse, and that triggers an idea. Or it’s the melody of the track, and I know I can build around that. But most of the time it involves me stripping a lot away and finding the couple of good things that really interest me. More than likely it’s one of the sounds that make the melody—like a guitar riff, or some synth line, or a nice little vocal piece that I can make into a hook.”
After he’s got his hook, he applies the Troublemaker motif. “I’ve gotten to a place where I definitely feel like I have a sound,” he said. “But I’m sill diverse, and can do a lot of different types of music. And in all those types of music there are always a couple common threads.” A common thread, he said, “has to do with the drum programming choice: what type of drums to use and their programming, as well as the bass.” The bass, he said, was something he especially loves to figure out. “I like bass. I started out as a hip-hop kid in drum and bass music.” As he’s progressed and changed, the styles that have attracted him have found their way into his work. “I like punk rock music, and it’s all agro and harder driving. And even now that I’m into more pop stuff, I like to add those elements into it, too.”
Over the years, Josh’s work has varied both in style and nerve. Josh has taken on many artists, some probably less known, but others who would be considered untouchable: Johnny Cash to name one. “Sometimes when the true core fans of a band hear your remix, they hate you,” Josh said. “I went off the deep end with the Johnny Cash remix, so it sounds way wacko. But people really liked it. So you never know.” As a remix artist, Josh is sort of an invader in occupied territory. He takes what he likes (and presumably what other people like), he tweaks it, and he makes it his own.
“I know that my stuff will probably be more driving and beat oriented,” he said. “That’s why I try to take something from the artist’s melody, or vocal, or something that they will warm up to and that’s what also warms me up as well.” At the end of each project his next harrowing task is presenting his work to the original authors: Here’s your work, rearranged and different. Whadya think? “You know you’ve nailed it when the artists agree with you: there aren’t any comments. When people tell you that they actually like the remix better, that’s very humbling.”
But not all his feedback is exactly glorious. “I did a Mastadon remix, and nettle rock people don’t understand electronic music, and they hate me. At the same time,” he continued, “Allison Stewart—a journalist who used to be at MTV—she reviewed that remix in the Washington Post. So obviously some people get it and like it, and some people don’t—and that’s cool too.”
Positive feedback or not, when it really comes down to it, Josh Kouzomis is an artist who loves to work with fellow artists. One of the biggest personal moments of his career was sharing a project with De La Soul. “I did a remix last year for the song ‘Daylight.’ And De La Soul rapped on it. And that was a huge moment in my life. Having grown up as a hip-hop kid and being a fan of De La Soul, to be able to say that you did something with De La Soul is a pretty big deal.”
Perhaps face-to-face, Josh has mellowed out over the years—no longer strangling bouncers. But still, ego is inherent in his line of work. You have to be confident enough in your abilities to make a living taking original existing tracks and pulling off something marvelous and different, that the original artist couldn’t have imagined. Despite Josh’s obvious respect for the artists with whom he chooses to collaborate, the spark of the Troublemaker is always with him. And it really manifests itself where it always has, in his work, at the turntables, or in the studio, where his talent is unleashed. And in the moments of creativity, that spark bursts into a rowdy blaze.
How do you earn the alias “Troublemaker”? What kind of shenanigans does it take? Panel joined Josh Kouzomis, a.k.a. DJ Troublemaker, to find the answer, and to discuss the precarious life of a DJ who is a master of the remix.
