HOLGER CZUKAY CANAXIS LP CAN-STOCKHAUSEN-KRAUTROCK-NWW

	£		35
	$		46

HOLGER CZUKAY
w/ROLF DAMMERS

 Canaxis LP

Base Records / Italy

60's pioneer experimental album from founding member of CAN, Holger Czukay, making wide use of magnetic tapes and short wave radio recordings.

Some info on the release:  A founding member of the enormously influential Krautrock group Can, Holger Czukay was one of the pivotal underground figures of his era; over the course of his long, expansive career, Czukay successfully bridged the gap between pop and the avant-garde, pioneering the use of samples and exploring the significance of world music on Western culture. A few months after the foundation of Can, Holger Czukay recorded his first solo album, Canaxis, in 1969. Canaxis is an experimental foray which fuses ambient, world music and an early form of sampling, a good 10 years before anybody else in the rock music field even started to get to grips with any of those ideas. Working with producer/engineer Rolf Dammers, Canaxis was assembled from thousands of snippets recorded from short wave radio, a long standing obsession of Czukay's which he also incorporated into some of Can's later albums. The first piece, Boat-Woman-Song, opens with a flurry of tape loops which settle into an irregular but compelling rhythm. The piece unfolds gradually, with a pair of Vietnamese singers (recorded from a short wave broadcast) providing the main melodic development. One of Czukay's charcteristic minimal bass lines is added to the sound collage part way through, and gives the piece a real impetus until it fades away (along with the singers) a few minutes before the end. The piece gradually fades away, having mutated and developed in an unexpected but very subtle manner - as with a lot of the best minimal music, you're left wondering exactly how we got to 'here' from 'there'. The second piece, Canaxis, is altogether more abstract but equally fascinating. There is no focal point to grab the attention until about half way through, when what sounds like a Japanese koto plays a simple but haunting melody over the constantly evolving sound collage. The closing piece, Mellow Out, is a short composition for guitar, bass and sax which, despite being in a very different style to the rest of the album, fits the general mood nicely.   

Czukay was born in the Free City of Danzig. He studied music under Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1963 to 1966 and then worked for a while as a music teacher. Initially Czukay had little interest in rock music, but this changed when a student played him The Beatles' 1967 song "I Am the Walrus". This opened his ears to music by rock experimentalists, such as the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.

Czukay co-founded Can in 1968. He played bass guitar and performed most of the recording and engineering for the group. Rosko Gee, former bassist of the British band, Traffic joined the band in 1977, with Czukay handling only tapes and sound effects on Saw Delight, his final LP with the group before departing for a solo career. After his departure from Can, Czukay recorded several albums. One of his trademarks was the use of shortwave radio sounds and his early pioneering of sampling", in those days involving the painstaking cutting and splicing of magnetic tapes. He would tape-record various sounds and snippets from shortwave and incorporate them into his compositions. He also used shortwave as a live, interactive musical instrument (such as on 1991's Radio Wave Surfer), a method of composition he termed radio painting.

Czukay has collaborated with a considerable number of musicians, notably a series of albums with Jah Wobble and David Sylvian, two younger British musicians who shared his interest in blending pop music with experimental recording and sampling techniques. Other collaborators include U.N.K.L.E, Brian Eno, Eurythmics, and the German New Wave band, Trio. He was member of Les Vampyrettes (together with Conny Plank), Inner Space (with Irmin Schmidt & Jaki Liebzeit) and Bison.

Condition: Vinyl and cover lie in excellent- condition, cover looks great except from a minor corner bending on bottom left corner and some overall storage wear, while vinyl looks great, close to mint and plays with minor crackle.

Tracklist

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