HOLGER CZUKAY

Rome Remains Rome is so fucking great esp the aforementioned Pope song thing and the frist tracks on both sides: Hey Baba Reebop, Hit Hit Flop Flop

I sometimes wish he was a little less enamoured with spoken vocal samples though. The rest of the second side does drag a bit.

I love the vocal samples, though they're the best on Movies.

(well czukay's oftentimes great. i have and love rome remains rome & canaxis, too:)

first post (haiku)

"ode to perfume" is
perfect for four o'clock
in the morning-time, christ

hello ilx/m

Oh man, I caught my breath there, thought he might have died!

haha sorry for that...

yeah - had the same reaction
better not revive any threads on old german rockers these days

true that. rip klaus.

Phew!

hahahah @ my last post

Let's Get Cool in the Pool!

He was in London, or maybe he isn't here yet? Anyway, Time Out described him as being 61 years old... err, try adding another on 10 years, guys.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/holger-czukay-the-roundhouse-london-1687693.html

it was a good gig apart from the posh teenagers doing coke and acting like twats.

but that's late noughties Camden for you....

<looks at camera with a shrug>

but that's late noughties Camden for you....

Can we also get hot in the dancing spot?

Donkey's mouth, full of hay...

Holger Czukay - He was there, at the first Can show in Cologne

No he wasn't, Bobby Gillespie was

boat woman song is kicking my ass today my friends

recently garnered copies of Rome Remains Rome and On the Way to the Peak of Normal, which still kick, too.

I know I've said this on noise threads before but

Canaxis / Movies / On The Way To The Peak of Normal / (most of) Der Osten Ist Rot / Rome Remains Rome = absolutely amazing and I come back to them all the time

collaborations Les Vampyrettes, Full Circle, Plight & Premonition = also too good

some good moments on Moving Pictures & Good Morning Story and I love Berlin Techno (the more anonymous the better) so I love the SF section from Clash. you'd better be a pretty big fan if you're curious about the three albums he's put out with U-She / Ursa Major. but he's in the category where his good ones are so good, I can't sell any of it back

Is Canaxis the only thing he's done that's like Canaxis?

Also is that David Sylvian thing up to much?

if you love Canaxis you will love Plight & Premonition (the first one with Sylvian). it's a little more traditionally tonal / ambient, less alien abstract, but it just sets an incredible mood. apart from Canaxis, this is the only thing that's like that record that's as good (side 2 of Good Morning Story has a 22 minute ambient shortwave piece I remember not working as well)

the second one with Sylvian is ok but it's more two seperate pieces, worked better as an LP, one drifty ethno-percussion piece & one weepy guitar-wall piece, heavier on the Sylvian polish than the Czukay strangeness. good though.

If you like Canaxis I recommend Tod Dockstader's 'Aerial 1' & you probably saw this thread

also if you're into 'Boat Woman Song' for the longform world-collage aspect -

John Oswald - WX
Carl Stone - Nyala (4th movement), Attari, 'Cooking Papa' from Kamiya Bar, Al-Noor
Jon Hassell - Vernal Equinox
Stockhausen - Hymnen / Telemusik
Richard Maxfield - Bacchanale (1963)

you really are a god among men I look forward to checking out as many of these as I can get my grubby mitts on

'Movies' is rocking my world...it's all over the place but got a lovely springtime vibe...'Hollywood Symphony' rules...

Thanks for bumping this...did any other ex-Canners have a solo career of note?

I kind of liked Karoli's album (that he did with some supermodel, I think?), but it's plastic as hell and has like, no guitar playing on it.

I have the album by Irmin Schmidt and Kumo called Masters of Confusion that was mostly Schmidt banging on the piano while drum n' bass beats played in the background...the first two tracks were really cool but it gets really boring afterwards.

Never heard anything by Jaki...are those any good??

the Can DVD came with a sort of sampler CD of solo stuff. Pretty good but I didn't really feel the need to go further.
I do like Jaki's stuff with Burnt Friedman though.

Irmin's stuff is pretty good. Not played them in a while but I've got a lot of his albums and I like at least a few things on every one of them. "Toy Planet" I like a lot. "Musk at Dusk" and "Impossible Holidays" have good things on them, very idiosyncratic stuff tho, maybe a bit smooth for some people. Tons of film music, a lot of which is like, uh, film music, but with some very Irminlike songs here and there. I've got the first of Jaki's Phantomband albums, which is dominated by Rosko Gee, which I don't mind because i like Rosko Gee's contributions to Can, not exactly startling however. Never heard the other Phantomband stuff, it's supposed to be a bit edgier.

revive!!

I was just thinking about Holger Czukay. How is he doing, I wonder? I'd like to interview him sometime soon.

Let's get hot. On the dancing...

spot

for the last two years he's been putting out very subtle remixes of track from his solo records as singles. they're all so similar to the originals they almost beg the question 'why', but anything's legal

but this sounds interesting

And the upcoming project will be "Music is a miracle", a 12" promo record from 1971 which only was made for the EMI sales people but became much more than it was initially made for...

http://www.czukay.de/news/index.htm

hi milton!

i watched the can DVD last night for the 5000th time (on a big screen at the MIT media lab...a bunch of us go there at night to play music DVDs on their giant system) and it reminded me that czukay is 73 now, and that michael karoli died almost exactly ten years ago.

Yeah, it's unbelievable really, thinking Czukay is 73 now. Everything about him and his music still gives you this idea that he's 50-something. Equally unbelievable is that Karoli's death was 10 years ago already.

Cool in the pool - one of my all time favourite songs in the universe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8RdpYMycs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D-QgbSUslo

^ this insane thing just got reissued

it's like world of echo in hell

strewth, that's wicked, not heard it before

holger + conny from 1980

not sure whose dulcet singing voice that is though

Awesome.

Danke!

Watched some of this last night. Two things:

1) I wish I spoke German or this had subtitles – Holger doing an interview while splicing tape of a Papal service would be amazing to understand!

2) Is that one of the shows they used for Radio Wave Surfer?

3) Michael Karoli. I had no idea that the wispy guitarist from Can was such a damned handsome man!

1) Ditto.

2) Looks like it.

3) But of course!

haha! Michael Karoli was definitely the prettiest Can man

3) Michael Karoli. I had no idea that the wispy guitarist from Can was such a damned handsome man!

― Naive Teen Idol

dude that's his sister on the cover of roxy music's "country life"

True. But forgive me, I said two things and that was a third.

There's quite a bit about the making of that record in Wobble's autobio IIRC.

Karoli's girlfriend was the other woman on the cover of Country Life.

It's a bit daunting, but I got one, box dented and some LP sleeves a little creased, but apart from that all sound, for £40

Tempting to splurge, but probably best to just keep to one LP a week or some such.

https://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/video/sendungen/rockpalast/video-holger-czukay---der-privatsinfoniker-100.html

Available until 2099

Wish he'd talked a little more about his time in Berlin. When he was a student, Czukay lived in Steinstücken, a tiny exclave of West Berlin that was surrounded on all sides by East Germany. He had to show his pass every day at the GDR checkpoint in order to leave Steinstücken and travel along the transit route to get to West Berlin.

"The East German policemen weren't at all like you'd expect. In Steinstücken there was an elite unit of 300 men. A hundred of them were assholes. a hundred were in-between and a hundred were really OK. They marched up and down outside my window while I practised on my bass and told me what I was doing well and not well. [...] Three of the East German soldiers, I brought them with all of their weapons to the West Berlin check-point. The police there brought out some bottles of beer and we all drank. This was during this hot time (in the Cold War). Somehow I survived."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bqtY2PtEyU

THis may have appeared before and also may have been seen from teh same link I got from David Stubbs today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klPlEJoHF1M
but pretty surreal. Surprised to see him on what appears to be a pretty mainstream show. & do wonder what response the competition question got.

I posted in some other thread, but it was a while ago now.

all the best avant-gardists did a solid stint on blankety blank or local equivalent: john cage with his mushroom lore, robert fripp and toyah, this whatever it is

"i thought i would get a kiss from you".

Didn't Frank Zappa appear on one of these? 🤔

Not with Anthea Turner though.

Thanks to this thread, I finally listened to Movie.

Oh I miss him.

Also, another good reflection from Sylvian on Holger:

🐦[Here’s the full transcript of my interview with ⁦@davidsylvian58🕸⁩ from the current issue of ⁦@uncutmagazine🕸⁩... https://t.co/M531wNQ4bU🕸
— Michael Bonner (@MichaelBonner) July 13, 2018🕸]🐦

Holger was evidently impressed with you; but what impressed you about him?
With Movies he’d created a genre defying classic album that continues to impress even when listened to today. It’s an incredibly innovative piece of work. We spent a good deal of time together in the ‘80s, prior to my moving to the States. He was an incredible raconteur with an endearing sense of humour. It’s virtually impossible to think of Holger without a smile on his face. In his earlier incarnation as a member of ‪the band Can, he tends to appear quite intense in group photographs, but he went through a radical change on leaving ‪the band. He claimed he suffered a minor nervous breakdown and the story of his recovery is a rather remarkable one in which it’s impossible to discriminate between fact and fiction, reality and altered states. When he emerged from this experience he claimed to have discovered his sense of humour, which is very much to the fore in albums such as ‘Movies’. One of the very few musicians who could incorporate humour into the fabric of an album without diminishing the powerfully groundbreaking quality of the work (Hassell claimed humour in music was comparable to the same in sex, which may possibly say more about Jon than anything else, but you can see what he was getting at). In his role as composer, producer, musician, and engineer he was a genuine innovator. To work with him, or to witness him at work, was to see an entirely different methodology utilized than the kind you’d likely find as standard in professional recording facilities of the time. Now that a good deal of recording takes place outside of such institutions it’s possible there’s more room for personal innovation than there once appeared. But judging by the limitations of the technology touted by the recording industry, harping on about authentic recreations of technology of the past, I can’t be certain. Holger’s was a uniquely inventive mindset, beyond replication.

thanks for sharing that video - both Holger and Anthea seem personable enough to make that interview fun instead of awkward like it ought to be. I never noticed how tall and imposing he was, but he seems so friendly. he reminds me of a few professors I had. Sylvian's story makes sense...Can had a sense of humor but were also serious and intense. by the time they were clearly goofing around Holger was out of the band.

Thanks for that interview excerpt!

This album is amazing, btw - gorgeous and silly and playful.

On The Way To The Peak of Normal is really slinky if you haven't heard it. Very recommended

so that led me down a rabbit hole of Holger interviews, including one where he's talking about electronic music. he says Can's music was out of fashion for a while because it wasn't "hi-fi", which to me is weird because the records sound amazing. but I suppose that's maybe not what he's talking about.

like Monster Movie *should* sound grungy but it's really crisp somehow. it was 1969 and they were broke, I dunno how they did it. Ege Bamyasi and Future Days sound like something that could have been recorded today.

I assume he means that, prior to 1975, they recorded everything on 4-track.

Having said that I don't really know what's he talking about. I don't know that the circumstances of the recording had anything to do with whether Can were "in fashion" or not - or whether they ever were particularly out of fashion. The post-74 (most hi-fi) version of Can seems like the version that was most out of fashion or favour or whatever.

does he say who they were out of fashion with?

it's at 2:00 here - I guess he says what Can was doing was "unprofessional" and "not accepted"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_s1aMhoMH0

he says they do 'lo fi' recording, but again the actual albums sound really good to me

"Some alchemists in the past have made gold/Out of STONES"

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