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Holger Czukay’s Secret Code

September 9, 2017 · Leave a Comment

My friend Tom was years older than me, and he let me regularly visit his house to listen to records. I was a weirdo growing up isolated in Central Louisiana, and friends like Tom were invaluable. His record collection was immense and consistently opened my mind to amazing sounds. Tom introduced me to Krautrock, a music genre that was startling to a Louisiana teenager in the mid-’80s. I think Faust came first and I paid homage to the discovery many years later. But the wildest lightning strike occurred when Tom put the needle on CAN’s Monster Movie and a song called “You Doo Right”:

 

A lot is going on in that 20+ minute song, recorded the year I was born. The pounding drum line, a spiraling guitar, and Malcolm Mooney’s yowling vocal churn together like rotating machinery. The mesmerizing hook, though, is provided by Holger Czukay’s trampoline of a bass line. If repetition is a form of change then Czukay nails the concept. As Czukay once said, “The bass player’s like a king in chess. He doesn’t move much, but when he does, he changes everything.”

NPR Music:

It feels somehow inapt to simply identify Czukay as “CAN’s bassist.” Holger Czukay was the band’s co-founder, its center, its de facto leader, its producer and engineer, its tape editor, its bassist, its radio knob turner, and, effectively, its light and its shade. In its early-’70s prime, Can was dedicated to collective improvisation — as Czukay put it last year to Mojo, “We were not thinking. When you make music together, you have to reach a common accident.” At its best, the group sounded like a single organism. But one man, Czukay, collectively tuned them.

Holger Czukay was also a prolific solo artist and collaborator, working with the likes of Brian Eno, Jah Wobble, and David Sylvian. Pitchfork has published a solid sampling of Czukay’s efforts which is worth checking out.

Holger Czukay, 79, passed on this week, found dead in his home which doubled as the old Inner Space studio in Weilerswist, Germany. CAN drummer Jaki Liebezeit passed last January.

There’s little denying the influence of either, and theirs is an influence that’s obscured like a secret code. It runs covertly through so much music and so many genres. Some of us are indebted a lot, and others just a little, but we’re all indebted.

Filed Under: Musical Moments Tagged With: Holger Czukay, Krautrock, Music History

Jaki Liebezeit’s Eternal Rhythm

January 23, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Can drummer and founding member Jaki Liebezeit shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday at the age of 78. As far as drummers go, I can’t think of anyone more influential on my own music-making. I’m not alone.

The Guardian:

Along with Klaus Dinger, a founder member of Neu! and inaugurator of the “motorik” beat, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit was responsible for restructuring rock’s basic rhythm, influencing countless bands including early Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Joy Division. He devised a more continuous, open-ended alternative to the Anglo-American blues-based, verse-and-chorus model. In the late 60s and early 70s, while a new generation of heavy rock and prog instrumentalists were showing off their virtuouso prowess, Liebezeit and fellow Can members – including keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist Holger Czukay – devised a way of playing and jamming that was about creating space, rather than soloing pointlessly. Theirs was a style, developed on albums such as Tago Mago, Future Days and Ege Bamyasi, that achieved its ends through loops and repetition, creating a cumulative intensity. When they played, with Liebezeit’s percussion in full flow, circling like rotor blades, they achieved a kind of lift-off.



{In his final years} he worked in a small studio in an arts complex on the edge of Cologne, where he kept a dazzling collection of percussion instruments from around the world. By rights there ought to have been a statue of him in the market square and a day of national mourning declared for him in Germany, so colossal has been his influence, but he went about his home city entirely unrecognised.

I’ve written here about my fascination with artists who are hugely influential while the general public are, for the most part, completely unaware. I seem to gravitate towards these solitary figures for my own inspiration and, from what I know about them, they are largely content and appreciative of their status.



The Quietus:

A rare innovator that saw the unlimited possibilities that rewarded a little altered thinking, Liebezeit – who first began his musical career as a trumpeter and later as Germany’s leading jazz drummer, playing with the likes of Chet Baker – helped pioneer the style of Motorik polyrhythms that came to define the genre. Where Can’s textures and compositional freedom blended Cage’s spontaneous music and Schoenberg’s dissonant explorations, Liebezeit’s craft – which he regularly said was influenced, above else, by machines – took repetition, accuracy and unusual rhythms to fashion stark, thrashing, hypnotic grooves that simultaneously married an open-ended jazz mindset with distinctly metronomic precision.



While Can’s Holger Czukay once said Liebezeit was “more inhuman than a drum machine” the drummer himself said it best when he told an interviewer back in 2014, “I can play a little bit like a machine but the difference between a machine and me is that I can listen, I can hear and I can react to the other musicians, which a machine cannot do.” By simultaneously marrying rhythmic precision with percussive vision, his ultra-disciplined, hypnotic approach has influenced generation after generation of musicians as mottled as various techno pioneers and punk bands, as well as the likes of Sonic Youth, Stereolab, The Fall, Beak> and countless others besides.

I’m pretty sure the very first drum sample I ever looped and used in a song (around 1990, pre-Q-BAM) was from Can’s “Mushroom”. “Mushroom” contains just one of Liebezeit’s many baffling (in a good way), kosmische-ly groovy rhythms, and that’s only the first time that I lovingly borrowed from him. The ‘he lives on’ cliché is undisputedly apt here as his beat is the heartbeat of many artists and producers, now and still to come.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Krautrock, Music History

Fun Fun Fun at the Weddingbahn

January 8, 2017 · 2 Comments

Last Wednesday I was honored to attend the wedding of my longtime close friends David and Jennifer, who opted to transform their ceremony into the most delightful homage to influential electronic music heroes Kraftwerk. I’ve known David since my somewhat misanthropic college years in northern Louisiana, and I remember our shared love of Kraftwerk as present even then. Of course, David reportedly went on to fully exemplify the Kraftwerk lifestyle, and the ‘Weddingbahn’ is only the latest episode in this couple’s meisterplan.

I was thrilled to be on hand to not only DJ at Weddingbahn, but I also recorded some very special wedding music. Check out several photos (mostly taken by the intrepid Jon Wolding), read a couple online accounts from the local press, and have a listen to two tracks I specifically recorded for Weddingbahn (featuring vocoder contributions by @pimpdaddynash), all below:



→ Tampa Bay Times: German ’80s Band Inspires ‘Kraftwerk’ Wedding

→ Creative Loafing: This Tampa Couple had Full-On Kraftwerk Nuptials




Update: Jennifer just posted a wonderful ‘behind the scenes’ recap on her blog.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Esoterica, Humor, Krautrock

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about

Howdy. I'm Michael Donaldson.

I think and write about music’s place in the 21st century. And I’m fascinated by how technology affects culture, especially in the ways we make and listen to music. I’m the founder of 8DSync, 8D Industries, and 8DPromo. Sometimes I'm a Q-Burns Abstract Message. But mostly I'm just trying to keep these damn cats out of my office.

Michael Donaldson

I like to send postcards to my friends, and if you'd like I'll send one to you.

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