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Sofia Kourtesis knew she was in love with Berlin after running into her dentist in the darkroom at Berghain. Out clubbing the night before she was scheduled to get her wisdom tooth removed, she spotted a naked man and realized he was the same one who would be cutting into her mouth a few hours hence. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. He waved off her bewilderment: “Well, this is Berlin, darling.” The procedure the next day went fine, and she knew she was home. “This could never happen in Peru,” she said.
Berlin has been Kourtesis’ home since she moved from Lima at 17 to study film. She’s said she has a Latin heart with a German motor, evoking Germany’s world-renowned automotive industry as well as the four-on-the-floor beats of the capital’s techno scene. As she came of age musically, the tension between the two places came to define her art. She struggled with the loss of her father and her mother’s illness, pouring those emotions into records like Fresia Magdalena and Madres. She wove samples of her father’s voice into nostalgic evocations of their time together, and paid tribute to the surgeon who extended her mother’s life with a house banger named in his honor—and an invitation to go clubbing at Berghain. (“He really loved it,” she said.)
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Kourtesis applies a similarly nostalgic lens to her entry into Berlin label !K7’s DJ-Kicks series. The mix offers a road map through the sphere of influence that has shaped her perspective as a musician and DJ, gathering recent hits and new exclusives from friends and contemporaries along with four new originals. The scope reflects Berlin’s international influences, featuring artists from across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and toys with ambient IDM, Detroit techno, French touch, Afro-Peruvian rhythms, and various flavors of house music. Kourtesis considers herself a “frustrated filmmaker,” and it’s not hard to hear the soundtrack to her own biopic in her mix; the swelling crescendo that opens her new version of Jon Hopkins’ “Home Station” feels intentionally cinematic. Dawning with the optimism of a young queer girl fleeing the Catholic oppression of her hometown for the unbridled hedonism of her new one, the mix drops her newest tracks in between waves of euphoric 4/4 thumps, swirls of off-kilter syncopation, and blissed-out chords.
The tracks she’s assembled reflect her ethos of “less perfection, more corazón”: Each selection seems to highlight artists that embrace imperfections, either in rhythm, texture, or structure. Her mix of Avalon Emerson’s “One More Fluorescent Rush” into Logic1000’s “Her” plays their contrasting approaches off one another, gently blunting Emerson’s relentless, mutating synthesizer groove as it gives way to Logic1000’s Tresor-coded 8-bit synth melody. A mid-mix run from Axel Boman’s “Rock Top” to UK duo JOY (Anonymous)’ “JOY (Look Up Now)” is stitched together by her new track “Texas Changing,” a sun-drenched 4/4 thumper with a garbled vocal sample that sounds filtered through analog tape, transforming it from a merely soulful performance into something that feels more like found footage. The effect evokes her track “WinWin San,” a highlight of the 2018 compilation Studio Barnhus Volym 1 that turned heads even alongside chameleonic virtuosos like DJ Koze.
If you’re looking for the most direct distillation of Kourtesis’ sound, it might be the sequence that follows her new instrumental track “A Brief Look in Your Eyes.” The cut opens with a robotic assemblage of classic synth sounds that briefly gives way to swinging drums and a bright piano melody. The tracks that follow—Sedef Adasi’s decidedly German take on acid house (“Mermaids on Acid”) and Nick León and DJ Babatr’s choppy pan-Caribbean anthem “Xstasis”—feel like a deconstruction, an inventory of the parts (vintage electronics, an ocean breeze, strobe and fog) that make up her whole.
The concept of the DJ-Kicks series, which brings the art of club DJing into the home, is less novel than it once was, but it does offer a fun avenue for storytelling to artists that weave their narratives out of others’ music. It also offers the opportunity to highlight overlooked gems with a bit more context. Dan Snaith put his Daphni project on the map when he dropped the early single “Ye Ye” on his 2012 Boiler Room set, but Kourtesis draws on his 2011 remix of Cos-Ber-Zam’s “Ne Noya,” the enigmatic Togo group’s only known recording, an idiosyncratic funk jam that foreshadows her own explorations into rhythms of the West African diaspora.
Kourtesis’ ear for texture and immersive sensibilities are well suited to the DJ-Kicks format, which favors channeling emotion and building tension. The inevitable release comes with her final original track, “Los Poemas No Siempre Riman” (“Poems Don’t Always Rhyme”), a collaboration with the Afro-Peruvian group Novalima. For an artist that has spent much of her career braiding the affections and mortality of her loved ones with her journey as an artist, her lyrics here feel like a mantra, a reminder from the ancestors that “Al final lo que importa/Si amaste lo que viviste” (“In the end, what matters [is] if you loved what you lived”). Kourtesis’ DJ-Kicks mix feels like proof that she has: It’s a lovingly guided nostalgia trip through the vast spectrum of personalities and perspectives that lured her from Lima into the dark, damp corners in Berlin where she found the freedom she was seeking.
