HOLGER CZUKAY

Just saw this in Biba Kopf's (really great) 1984 interview with Holger that's free on RBP right now:

The ancient bathchair that is a prop in 'The Photo Song' takes up a comer of Czukay's kitchen.

"I have just turned 46," volunteers Holger, while making tea. "Still too young to marry! Ha ha. When I'm 80 I will get married and this bathchair will be the present to my wife!"

https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/holger-czukay-the-lunatic-has-taken-over-the-asylum

Alas, neither he nor his wife made it to his 80th birthday. 😢

holger box due in march:

https://pitchfork.com/news/holger-czukay-retrospective-box-set-announced/

It additionally includes a “vinyl video,” which is made from a system that makes it possible to store video footage on vinyl.

ha, so the shitty videodisc technology from the 80s makes a triumphant return. Why not go all in on Zoetrope footage of "Cool In The Pool"?

There are further details and a track listing here - just two unreleased tracks by the look of it, though one of which is a collab w/ Stockhausen:

https://thevinylfactory.com/news/can-co-founder-holger-czukay-box-set/

Considering that collab is from 2008 and Stockhausen died in 2007, the result should be interesting.

He was back on his home planet of Sirius when Holger got on the blower to ask if he fancied working with him.

I've been listening to this box. The opening track on disc 1 is a nice jazz piece, the two long pieces from "Canaxis 5" are ok but don't grab me. Discs 2-4 are almost all great, highlights include "Signal" by Phew, the Les Vampyrettes tracks and disc 4's closer "Hit Hit Flop Flop" (such goofy fun!). Anything Jaki plays on is instantly recognizable and at least good.

Disc 5 later today.

And how is the rest of that Phew album?

So, what exactly is that 7" video disc then, exactly?

And how is the rest of that Phew album?

most excellent.

Sylvian on his work with Czukay

http://thequietus.com/articles/24916-david-sylvian-holger-czukay-plight-premonition

thanks... that was a great read.

Came here to post that as well. Agreed, wonderful.

After listening again to the Sylvian collabs most of this week, I’m remembering back to what got me into Can: Musician Magazine’s review of the 1990 or so Spoon reissues. The way they described the band was so exciting and exotic to me – this real blend of prog, musique concrète, Stockhausen and free improv. The first record I ended up getting by them was ... Unlimited Edition, which hadn’t been reviewed and was a massive mindfuck of, well, prog, musique concrète and free improv. I loved it immediately – Holger’s splicing of two track jams into monster pieces like “Cutaway,” and brooding synth pieces like “Ibis.”. I was actually perhaps a bit underwhelmed when I finally got a record of theirs proper, Ege Bamyasi as it felt a bit tame on first listen, but was soon to be hypnotized again by Future Days.

Of course I adored Jaki, was impressed by Irmin, tolerated Michael and wanted to cuddle Damo. But for me, there was only one hero in that band and it was Holger – the mad professor and the visionary I wanted to be. I burned thru those solo records and chased them down in every store around – I still remember when I found Full Circle at Tower in Boston, it was like manna from heaven (and lived up to the hype). His use of the dictaphone seemed both unprecedented in popular music and wonderfully mad. And as Sylvian notes in this Quietus piece, he had a really odd, somewhat off-putting buffoon-ish side. But really his whole conception of music was just ... different.

I realize that this is really just a poorly phrased stream of consciousness rant that doesn’t actually say much, but he’s one of the few guys whose whole existence makes me feel this way.

God I miss the man.

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

I love all of them but I've always always thought Holger + Jaki were the geniuses of the band.

i am getting myself a copy of the CINEMA box set for my birthday
what should i expect? the personnel looks good and i love pretty much any soundtrack music.

What is it?

https://www.groenland.com/en/product/holger-czukay-cinema/

i am getting it used from my friend who owns a record store. discount!!

... oh it's some of his solo albums, it's not soundtrack music!

not sure if I'm misunderstanding these posts, but Cinema is not a collection of soundtrack work, it's a retrospective of Czukay's non-CAN career. So if you've got any of his solo albums, there will be redundancies. That said, it's a great set! Surprised myself by responding most warmly to the late 80s stuff

It's everything he released from 1969 to, errrr, 1991?

oh well i don't have any of them
are they good? i hope?

sorry i was mistaken

They are!

i figured with czukay and liebezeit involved the worst thing it would be is boring and i like them being boring more than i like most things
regardless, i am looking forward to receiving it as a gift from myself.

no need to apologize--I'm not sure why it's even called "Cinema"...
I feel confident in guaranteeing that you will love it. quite a bit of it sounds CAN-like, but it goes in some unexpected directions (sorry to be vague; there's a lot of music on it) and his impish spirit is all over it

i can't wait!!

love his impish spirit <3

also I have the CD version and even that's quite lovely, I imagine the vinyl box will be a very nice object to have!

There's certainly a lot of impishness - arguably too much at times.

well "Hit Hit Flop Flop" is my current favorite, so I think maybe we have different imp tolerance levels?

I was thinking more "The Photo Song" tbh.

aw I kind of dig the young marble giants host a children's show vibe of that one, though the whistling is maybe a step too far I'll grant you

As I think I've mentioned on ILM before I curse my brother for pointing out, on hearing "Cool in the Pool", that his singing voice sounded like *Kenny Everett with a German accent, I've never been able to get that out of my head since.

(*non-UK ILXors might have to resort to wiki here)

the only solo work of his that i know is "cool in the pool" and i'm not entirely sure why i ever had that on my hard drive. probably a blog around the same time i got super into CAN -- like 2004-5? IDK

i had a nightmare about "cool in the pool" once

When you get it let us know what the video vinyl item is. For the life of my I cannot find out from the internet what that is.

haha! my friend joked about that too, he said he hopes i have a vinyl video player
lol

Happily that bit of UK culture wasn't passed on to me, though now that I've imagined Czukay hosting a children's show my mental image of his face is blending with Captain Kangaroo's

"cool in the pool" is pretty representative of a chunk of the set, so hopefully that nightmare was more weird than horrified

I'm tempted to pick this up, I sampled it on Spotify and found much to love (but not all of it, his tastes and creative spirit was incredibly broad).

I don't think it's *everything* he did in his solo career, it's a large anthology.

No, it stops with "Radio Wave Surfer" - which I think was his last album for Virgin?

also I think it only samples most of the albums (all of Movies is on there though)

there's a lot of amazing music on that box. for me also wildly frustrating. it's the first 7 albums, each nearly complete, minus one or two tracks. czukay released remixed versions of the albums over the last ten years which are profoundly different (sometimes interesting but never improvements - a lot of the tight splices and edits are now gone, and there's more reverb); none of the people who reviewed this box knew the material well enough to mention which versions were included here and the website doesn't mention, but I'm guessing it's the later versions.

the groenland reissues of 'peak of normal' and 'osten ist rot / rome' also left off a bunch of the best tracks, and some of them, but not all of them, are back on this box, and are now the only places you can get them. it is sloppy.

that being said - I love all this music so much, I would still consider buying this if I found a (very) cheap copy so I could pick the box up and hug it while listening to the original versions

The only one I really couldn’t cope with back in the day was radio wave surfer. I wonder how I’d react to it now.

When you get it let us know what the video vinyl item is. For the life of my I cannot find out from the internet what that is.

It's one of these I think. It's a record with black and white video encoded in audio. It's been around since 1999 and there were initially 21 releases in the format before it was 'revived' recently. It uses a special decoder thing.

http://www.vinylvideo.com/
http://vinylvideo.supersense.com/

Movies is a really strange record. The two short pieces go down easy – witty, melodic, brilliantly edited, it’s hard not to flash a smile at these. But holy shit, the two long pieces are bizarre as shit.

“Oh Lord Give Us More Money” is an epic remix of “Hunters and Collectors” from 1975’s Landed (a fact pointed out to me by Milton on some old Krautrock thread), with wandery varispeed guitar noodlings competing for space against Solina string synth noodlings. His almost amelodic vocal entrance on this (“Some arguments in the past have made gold/Out of STONES!!!”) is equally odd – later in the song Czukay even repeats the line and follows it by asking, “What the devil does that mean?” It’s even weirder when you realize how utterly different it is than Karoli’s singsongy lead on the original track. The editing is almost every four bars – building, slowing, and building again with periodic jump cuts to heroic resolutions or nothing other than Liebezeit’s hihat pedal. And then it ends almost arbitrarily after thirteen-and-a-half minutes The effect overall is as disorienting—and often as frustrating—as anything Teo Macero did with Miles in the 70s.

“Hollywood Symphony” starts off like it’s going to be an entry into the “Ethnological Forgery Series” before Czukay himself swoops in to croon about “endless nightmares” – again with no sense of actual melody or contour. Here again the guitar dukes it out with the string synth for long stretches at a time. But where at least “Oh Lord Give Us More Money” had its descending piano chords to pin it down, “Hollywood Symphony” has even fewer guardrails – supposedly edited for over two years, the piece feels through-composed, at one point transitioning from a bass rumble figure reminiscent of the introduction to “You’re So Vain” to a sublimely hyperactive synth, guitar and short wave radio jam before returning to the demi-melody (albeit vocaless) with which the piece began. What is Czukay trying to accomplish with this piece? I honestly have no idea.

the single edit of "halleluwah" is a good one. anybody heard the 2 minute single edit of "oh lord give us more money"?

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

great post btw

(xp) Was about to say...

I love how "Oh Lord" fades out fades in again... about four times. I always feel like the two long tracks were partly about Czukay showing the rest of Can just how complex and musical he could get without them.

Alchemists? Ok my bad.

Barring maybe Cannaxis, Full Circle is probably my favorite non-Can Czukay release when all is said and done. The trio has incredible synergy and equal billing with Liebezeit keeps Wobble and Czukay’s most indulgent qualities in check.

On the full release (this was initially an EP), “How Much Are They?” is probably the closest thing the trio got to doing something club ready. The dubbed out piano parts are delightful. I do wonder what Jaki does on this however, given prominence of the drum box.

“Where’s the Money?” has a rhythm that could’ve been pulled directly off Metal Box, with Wobble holding down a great 4/4 riff but with some overdubbed echoey African percussion from Liebezeit. Czukay here spends most of his time adding dub accents on rhythm guitar and modulating the dynamics of things with timely edits and atmospheric short wave. But here he lets Wobble’s vocal and bass set the pace to great effect.

Then comes the title track and “Mystery” (neither of which were on the original EP), which were part of the “Radio Picture Series.” The latter features creeping footsteps and a drone and an insistent dub bass.

The title track is a brilliant high life/dub/radiophonic amalgam. Once upon a time I didn’t particularly rate this but as time passes, it feels increasingly like the strongest track here – with some of Czukay’s lithest guitar work, short wave/dictaphone punctuations and French horn blasts. The Jaki/Wobble groove rivals any Can track for its sheer relentlessness but showcases a level of interplay between Liebezeit and Czukay’s interjections that didn’t exist in that band. Credit here probably goes to Wobble who allows them that freedom by locking things down so completely. Even tho it goes on for 13 minutes and doesn’t really build to anything approaching a traditional crescendo, the track somehow never outstays its welcome.

Really, every track is great but “Trench Warfare” is probably the most unhinged piece here and the climax of the full release. Over a deceptively complex Liebezeit rhythm of rimshots, finger cymbals and various cowbells, Czukay again tears into his French horn, but instead of West African guitar wails like Pete Cosey thru a harmonizer during a traffic jam. The garish stereo separations worthy of There’s a Riot Goin’ On and jump cut splices of Jimmy Smith organ and dictaphone, combined with Wobble singing thru a harmonizer as well (it’s possibly feeding the whole mix), give things a particularly psychedelic touch.

“Twilight World” rounds things out with a spacey swinging groove, Wobble croon and chicken scratch organ. It’s probably the most conventional thing here and there’s very little editing from Czukay but it’s a perfect comedown from the insanity that just preceded it.

I love this record unconditionally.