Spiritual Nature – SN-003 312.03MB FLAC
Find a Planet begins with a combination that should feel unstable: Toshinori Kondo’s electric trumpet, DJ Grazzhoppa’s turntables and programmed beats, and Dirk Wachtelaer’s acoustic drums and electronics. Instead, the album quickly establishes its own gravity. Scratches, loops, hard drum strikes, keyboard haze, and Kondo’s processed horn circle one another without settling into jazz, hip-hop, drum and bass, or electronic improvisation. The title gives the music a destination, but the record is less concerned with reaching a new world than with assembling one from incompatible materials.
The project developed in stages rather than through a single conventional session. Grazzhoppa and Wachtelaer began recording in Amsterdam in November 1999, building foundations from turntables, beats, and drums. Kondo later added electric trumpet and keyboards in Kawasaki during March 2001, then mixed the completed album. That distance is audible without making the record feel disconnected. Rhythm arrives with the physical immediacy of two musicians working together in a room, while Kondo often seems to enter from another location entirely, transmitting his trumpet into their structures like a signal received after a long journey.
Grazzhoppa’s turntables do more than decorate the beats with scratches. They give the album its sense of disturbed memory. Brief vocal pieces, instrumental traces, surface noise, and sharply cut gestures appear as information recovered from another transmission. Some fragments are recognizable for only a second before the hand redirects them. Others become rhythmic material, repeating until their original identity matters less than their placement. The turntable continually reminds the listener that recorded sound can be treated as an instrument, but also as debris: material from an earlier world pulled into a new environment.
Wachtelaer’s drumming provides the bodily center. His acoustic kit does not simply reinforce programmed rhythms. It argues with them, thickens them, and exposes their mechanical regularity. A sequenced beat can establish the grid, but the live drums add pressure, hesitation, and uneven force. Cymbals open space around the electronic low end, while snare and tom accents make the tracks feel less like finished productions than systems still being tested. The interaction is especially effective when it becomes difficult to separate Wachtelaer’s programmed beats from Grazzhoppa’s. The rhythm seems to belong to the project rather than to either musician.
Kondo moves through that machinery without surrendering the individuality of his trumpet. His electric sound is bright, smeared, and frequently altered until brass begins to resemble a human voice passing through damaged communications equipment. Notes bend at their edges, sustain beyond natural breath, or break into rough bursts that hang above the rhythm. He can play melodically, but melody is rarely allowed to become comfortable. Effects produce shadows around the horn, making one phrase appear larger than the body that created it.
The keyboards widen the record’s atmosphere. They do not dominate with elaborate harmony or obvious themes. Instead, they create suspended backgrounds against which trumpet and rhythm can change scale. A small scratch becomes more isolated when placed against a broad electronic field. A drum break becomes more physical when the surrounding keyboards recede. These adjustments allow the album to move between compact hip-hop construction and open, almost cosmic space without requiring dramatic transitions.
The planetary language running through the titles gives the sequence a loose geography. “Platform 7,” “Moon,” “Space Junk,” and “Zone Zero” suggest departure points, distant bodies, discarded machinery, and a final location emptied of familiar coordinates. The names fit the music because KGD Project treats genre as territory that can be crossed without remaining inside any one border. The album launches from recognizable beat culture, passes through electric jazz, turntablism, dub, and experimental electronics, then arrives somewhere that cannot be claimed completely by any of them.
This combination did not emerge from nowhere. Kondo had already demonstrated how naturally his processed trumpet could enter beat-based music through his collaboration with DJ Krush on Ki-Oku. That record placed melancholy trumpet lines inside spacious downtempo production, allowing jazz phrasing and hip-hop construction to meet without either becoming novelty. Find a Planet is rougher and more collectively unstable. Grazzhoppa’s cuts are more exposed, Wachtelaer’s drumming keeps disturbing the programmed surface, and Kondo’s horn is often used as electrical matter rather than as a lyrical lead voice.
Grazzhoppa also brings a battle-DJ sharpness that prevents the album’s space imagery from becoming weightless ambience. His scratches have attack. They slice across sustained trumpet and keyboards, producing friction between the continuous line of breath and the abrupt mechanics of vinyl manipulation. Kondo may stretch a note outward while Grazzhoppa divides time into short pieces beneath it. Wachtelaer stands between those approaches, capable of extending a groove through repetition or breaking it apart with physical accents.
The album’s approximately fifty-minute duration is divided into ten compact constructions rather than a few extended improvisations. That format disciplines the trio. Ideas have enough time to establish a climate, but they do not drift indefinitely. Each piece concentrates on a slightly different balance of beat, live percussion, scratching, trumpet, and keyboard atmosphere. The cumulative effect matters more than a track-by-track narrative. Find a Planet gradually teaches the listener how its world operates, then changes the proportions without rewriting the fundamental laws.
“Space Junk” could serve as a description of the trio’s entire method. The project gathers sounds that might be treated as leftover material—scratches, fragments, beat components, distorted breaths, electronic residue—and gives them orbital relationships. Nothing needs to be polished into seamless fusion. The rough joins are essential. Acoustic drums remain acoustic drums even when surrounded by programming. Turntables retain the abruptness of manipulated recordings. Kondo’s horn remains connected to lungs and metal despite the processing. The music works because the borders are audible.
The title also gains another meaning from the album’s construction across Amsterdam and Kawasaki. The musicians did not need to occupy one room at one moment for the project to develop a shared identity. Sound traveled between locations, accumulated additional parts, and was reorganized through Kondo’s final mix. Find a Planet becomes an early example of collaboration functioning through distance without losing physical character. The result never resembles files politely exchanged and layered. It feels active, contested, and alive.
KGD Project continued onstage, where the trio’s music took on a more immediate energy, but this studio album possesses its own carefully assembled personality. Its rhythms are built, struck, scratched, displaced, and rebuilt. The trumpet can become melody, warning, atmosphere, or a streak of light crossing the beat. The turntables convert musical history into movable matter. The drums ensure that the planet being constructed has weight beneath its surface.
Find a Planet ultimately succeeds because it does not announce a utopian merger of jazz and hip-hop. It offers something stranger: three musicians using different relationships to time. Grazzhoppa cuts and repeats recorded time, Wachtelaer produces time physically through impact, and Kondo stretches breath through electronics until a moment appears capable of continuing beyond the body. Their planet is made from those competing clocks. It is uneven, crowded with debris, and held together by rhythm, but it supports life.
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