Kozee

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A trek through Kozee’s musical journey is a trek through the American electronic music scene. The Michigan-born, Cali-bred producer and DJ has had an affinity for music since the age of 7 when she crafted her first mixtape, and she’s been cruising through (and with) sound ever since. 

Spending the 1990s getting acquainted with everything from the sounds of jazz to drum & bass and hip-hop, Kozee steadily built her rep through a series of mixtapes, eventually landing a booking to open for the mighty DJ Maseo, the longstanding DJ for legendary hip-hop outfit De La Soul. It wasn’t hip-hop that brought Kozee to where she is now, though; it was the rough and rugged sounds of the UK’s grime and dubstep scenes impacting the States. An early adopter, Kozee shifted sonic priorities to these grooves, ditching her jungle dubplates for the deep and deadly sounds that started emerging around 2004. A year later, she was a force to be reckoned with in the scene here in America, be it the release of her first dubstep mix (June 2006) to touring the UK and Sweden in 2008 to the release of the seminal “Crack” (a collaboration with famed North American producer DZ) in 2009, which is also the same year she coined the term “brostep” on the every-popular dubstepforum. A forum joke that became a way of life for a certain segment of the bass-loving audience in America? Yeah, Kozee did that.

As the bass music scene has evolved, Kozee’s evolved with it. Since 2010, her forward-thinking productions have caught the eyes of like-minded imprints like Moveltraxx, Four40 Records, Sounds of Sumo, and Audio Doughnuts. Not only was she the first American female DJ to spin at Croatia’s Dimensions Festival in 2012, but she’s continued to represent her unique take one electronic music everywhere from BBC 1Xtra and Rinse FM to Radar Radio. Her original productions in the 2010s have turned heads; taking her years of record collecting and drive to push the boundaries of genre and sound have found Kozee in an intriguing spot. It’s one of those areas where you might not have a definitive name for what she’s doing yet, but who knows, maybe she will coin a term for it in the near future that will turn into an entirely new way of looking at bass music. It’s not like she hasn’t done it before.

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