Holger Czukay: How does a machine feel?

Can co-founder Holger Czukay, one of the world's most influential German pop musicians, died in September. Now an impressive compilation of his solo works appears.

Holger Czukay: How does a machine feel?
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  • Page 2 — "Plants can read My mind"
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    "We didn't want to learn, we wanted to learn," Holger Czukay later said, "We wanted to move away from tradition and away from what we had been taught. When we played, we left as many notes as possible. " In summer of 1968, almost 50 years ago, Cologne group can played its first concerts, long group improvisations, dominated by monotonous motor drums of Jaki love Time and trance-like bass play by Holger Czukay. This was a music that she had not yet given in Germany – and at same time a rock that eluded all Anglo-American models. "In end," said Czukay, "a musician has only two choices: eir to outright music story or to start from scratch. Can have opted for second variant. "

    Holger Czukay played bass, but that was not all: he fumbled around shortwave receivers during sometimes seemingly endless appearances of can, and suddenly dazzled strange chants and voices from all over world and from depths of er into improvisations Into. And for studio albums of Can he edited session and concert recordings by editing m or using filters and stereo effects to set acoustic accents, which – although sometimes barely audible – change mood and inner tension of piece fundamentally Managed.

    He started his career in new music, and in second half of Sixties he worked as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen in WDR's electronic music studio. "At interview," Czukay told me about a few years in a conversation, "I had told him: I cannot play an instrument, and I have not yet passed a test. Stockhausen said: That sounds interesting! and took me up. " In 1969, Czukays first solo work, Boat woman song: A 20-minute sound collage, which he put toger in long night shifts from tape snippets, was created in studio for electronic music. One hears a small excerpt from a medieval chorale. Over a dark-glowing Bordunton, chorale is tied to a loop of sound and tirelessly repeated until suddenly a Vietnamese folk song is used – even this a fragment, fished by Czukay with a shortwave receiver from er.

    Boat woman song has lost nothing of his strange aura even after almost 50 years. One can also consider this as first Popstück in which method of sampling became essential means of musical production. The fact that sounds from very different sources, epochs and styles are taken to material of a musical expression has been a matter of course since 1980s. Holger Czukay, however, is pioneer of this technique; What is now mounted on computer with just a few mouse clicks, he cut toger in weeks of work from tiny tape fragments.

    This article comes from six-page music special of Time No. 12/2018. Here you can read entire output.

    From 1968 to 1977 Czukay played at can. The group became most prominent representative of music that a British journalist eventually baptized "Krautrock". Can were minimalist and very repetitive: over monotonous beats of Jaki love time, Czukay on his bass often only put figures of two or three tones, while singer Damo Suzuki Voodooartige mantras murmured. But whenever music seemed to come to a halt in her endless repetitions, she brought Czukay with barely noticeable semitone changes in his game or through electro-acoustic manipulations to stutter and Schiller. Thus, can sounded like a machine, but like a machine that has already absorbed human error, deviation from precision: a machine that lives. "If you can empathize with life of a machine," said Czukay, "n you are definitely a master."

    Date Of Update: 19 March 2018, 12:03
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