|
Hiss 'n'
Listen
Holger Czukay and the rhythms of a secret life
"I love to work on a piece for
one year. For five minutes of music, one year's work. If one year is not
enough, I put on another year. And if this is not enough, a third year. And
I don't ask why, I don't ask for efficiency, I don't ask if this has to be
finished now because time is over. When I think it needs a fourth year, I
take a fourth year. And that only stops when I get killed or when I'm
dying. Sometimes I'm even sleeping a piece. 'Oh,' the people say, 'that's
wonderful, I fell immediately into a dream and then right into a sleep.' I
say, 'Hey, is it true? Can you tell me the end of it? Because when I was
recording, I fell asleep, too!'"
On a rainy day in Cologne, I'm having tea and
cake with Holger Czukay, and he's providing the entertainment as well. The
occasion is the U.S. release of his CD Moving Pictures on Cleopatra Records, and
his upcoming first-ever U.S. appearances, in which he'll be accompanied by
Dr. Walker of Air Liquide and by his wife, artist/musician U-She.
Holger Czukay you may or may not have heard of,
so let's call him the grandfather of modern German music, and the wielder
of enormous influence through his work with his former band Can and a
series of pivotal solo recordings, especially the classic Movies
of 1979. The list of
devotees is impressive:
Brian Eno, David Byrne, Bill Laswell, Public
Image Ltd., The Fall, Loop, Moonshake, Stereolab, etc., all owe a
gigantic debt to the innovations of Czukay.
What innovations might those be? Well, he if
anyone invented sampling, for one thing, and he's been incorporating it
into his music since the '60s. A solo work, Canaxis 5, from 1969, features
snippets of Vietnamese music interlaced with electronics, bass and other
tape collages. Can sampled itself in the studio, which is among the ways it
derived its unusual sound; the band would play spontaneously, and
everything was recorded, with Holger, acting as both bassist and engineer,
later editing it all down and shaping it into finished pieces. This
collective composition ÐÐ the band differentiated it from improvisation in
the jazz sense ÐÐ spawned a number of viscerally avant-garde albums,
notably Monster Movie, with the American singer Malcolm Mooney, and Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, with the Japanese
"stone age" vocalist Damo Suzuki.
Can was ahead of its time in a number of ways.
Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had studied with Stockhausen, and
Schmidt had also performed and conducted works by Cage, Feldman and
Gorecki. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit had a free-jazz background and had played with
Chet Baker and Manfred Schoof, and guitarist Michael Karoli had studied
Gypsy music and served time in dance bands. Their varied backgrounds, their
dedication to experimentation and their mutual ignorance about rock music
allowed them to develop a beautifully unclichŽd sound, one that treated
drums and bass with inordinate respect.
Claims about the patterns of musical influence
are dodgy and pretty damn boring, usually ignoring Zeitgeist and creative
confluence, but it's no big stretch to say that without Can ÐÐ and
especially without Czukay as the band's chief architect ÐÐ jungle, trance,
ambient, trip-hop and mother hip-hop itself would not exist as we know
them. And the band's recurring "Ethnological Forgery Series"
presaged the world-music craze now run rampant, rendering pieces so
obviously fake that they birthed new genres, thus cleverly addressing and
diffusing the specious issue of musical tourism. When Can fired Czukay in
1977 (his bandmates wanted a "better" bass player; he wanted to multimedia-ize
the band by incorporating short-wave radio, tapes and his own handmade
analog sampler constructed from a modified Dictaphone), he made his move
into the world of "acoustical landscape painting."
On Movies, Czukay developed the process of painting with
sound through editing, producing music with a highly visual quality. With
the aid of Liebezeit's concise, tight drums, often subtly incorporating
North African or Middle Eastern polyrhythms, he built pieces that included
just about everything: sports announcers, mariachi horns, Korean
orchestras, warbling sopranos and Hollywood leading men, plus his own
relaxed but clipped bass and whispery, characterful voice, and a
crystalline guitar sound obtained by recording at half-speed. Every phrase
of the music was pieced together from numerous edits; the album itself is
the product of several thousand edits. The results could be a funny, funky
riot of international pop and "serious music" sources ("Cool
in the Pool"), or a hauntingly pretty interval derived from an Iranian
shortwave radio broadcast ("Persian Love"). "Hollywood
Symphony" is a mysteriously epic piece that suggests an aural account
of a non-existing film. Its episodes are ambiguous ÐÐ snatches of movie
dialogue, shortwave noise, stately string synth, plaintive but peculiar
guitar, and hundreds of indiscernible sources braid into and grow out of
each other, over a fuzzy-blanket bass line and Liebezeit's variations on a
loping polyrhythm that propels yet can be heard in many ways. The piece's
complexities are stitched together so deftly that it establishes its own
kind of sense ÐÐ rather like the logic of a dream. Eno and Byrne's My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts, itself a hugely influential album, was heavily
"inspired" by Movies, a fact the pair acknowledged a few years after its
release. Czukay continued to develop his idiosyncratic aesthetics on
several other solo albums, usually with Liebezeit and sometimes with the
assistance of bassist Jah Wobble.
But let's cut to the present. Holger Czukay has
never stopped making music. Each night he enters his home studio and works
till dawn in partnership with his machines; usually, the ideas come with
ease. He has a lot of music in the can, including a set of radically
reharmonized cover versions done with U-She, a slamming live set with Dr.
Walker and a 47-minute electronic tour de force called "La Luna"
that ranks as his finest hour. "I am always looking for the
development forward," he says. "I don't want to continue playing
bass or guitar, as I have done that in the '60s. I really want to see where
the music is going. The adventure is for me the most important thing."We are talking about a psychological effect of
his sound; I say that, when listening to it, it's often hard to tell if
you're hearing something or imagining it. "This is something you can
learn from the scores of
Claude Debussy," he says. "Instruments
are sometimes just good for a shadow. This is how to orchestrate, how you
are painting with an orchestra, and not presenting solo instruments or
something like that. Everything is a part of the whole thing, with light
and shadow." Musicians should inhabit their own time and place, he
declares. And that means not living in fear of machines. "We are able
to perform these days like a painter has a brush, and he's able to perform
the whole picture alone if he wants to do that. And the electronic
development makes that possible, to become a classical composer in terms of
Beethoven and Debussy, these days. I understand myself being a composer in
this sort of sense, but you have to find the language and the pronunciation
of the time you are living in. The language of the '90s is for me not the
language of a just ordinary rock & roll band, not at all. This is the
language of electronic music, of music which is so reduced somehow -- you
don't paint a full picture, you just paint only some lines, and the rest is
actually the people who listen to that, they make the rest of it.""Who is putting pineapple juice
in my pineapple juice?!" Czukay enacts from the life of one of his
heroes, W.C. Fields. We list our favorite films: I like David
Copperfield,
he likes Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. "He could be sometimes
so speedy and so incredibly out of tune, it was fantastic. Such a nonsense
you can only dream of." Czukay likes nonsense; it represents a kind of
freedom, and that's a reflection of his personality, which is friendly and
expansive. We're talking about his musical process, how he gets a sound
both warm and unsettling, as in "Rhythms of a Secret Life" on Moving
Pictures.
Comprising around 70 tracks, it took four years to complete, and it begins
with the sound of whales. "They are members of the orchestra," he
says. "This is sort of a virtual-orchestra piece. I like these
imaginary worlds when you listen to something and you are immediately
getting out from daily life into a dream. And this music makes you dream
very easily."
Czukay's music comes about in various ways, but
his most important tool is time. "I have nothing organized, I'm as
empty as possible. I get the vision by playingÉIt is wonderful to make
music in the darkness, and suddenly you see a light, and then you go
towards that light, the end of the tunnel, in the process. It's wonderful
to start in the darkness, because otherwise you are connected to songs which
are under the pressure to be successful. Most of the time it is playing
something without ambition."
While his pieces frequently contain vast
quantities of sonic information, Czukay doesn't multitrack in the
conventional sense, and he believes that good editing tools are more
important than all MIDI, synths and other modern studio apparatus put
together. Anyway, he was forced to adapt to the digital realm, because he
edits so much that no magnetic tape could withstand such manipulation
without a buildup of hiss and degradation. In the '60s, he says, "the
engineers had to be able to make the final decisions right during the
recording, and this is something which I like. With this recorder here,
this Akai digital recorder, he's only performing four tracks ÐÐ two stereo
tracks, two events at the same time, nothing more. That means you have to
mix it from the very beginning, and that means you have to leap back into
the '60s somehow. With a modern technique you get back 30 years into the
past."
Czukay builds his pieces like a puzzle.
"Everything is divided into sort of molecules," and the mixes are
often done fast and rough. He mixes each composition as many as 20 ways,
then samples phrases from each mix and edits them back together. "This
is the way of an artificially put-together piece," he says.
"Artificially in the sense of better than the original, or different
and possibly better than the original."
Czukay has successfully applied this
backward-thinking to his own handmade music videos, too (Ennio Morricone is
a fan, though he initially thought Czukay was out of his mind), and he's
been approached by big-studio types to score their movies. However,
"to make film music is absolutely uninteresting," he says.
"The ordinary way of making film music is the interpretation of
pictures, and this is always weak. You must create a world which is somehow
different from the world of the pictureÉthis is the reason why you should
not read the script. This was the way how Can was making film music [it
scored Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities and Jerzy Skolimovsky's Deep
End, among
others]. Irmin was the only person who was talking to the director, and he
came into the studio and talked to us about the story. And we created an
all-musical world, and the director took the material and fit it in at the
end. Therefore the music was strong. Basically you can say the music should
be first, before the pictures."
This approach paid off when Czukay taped a video
at a fashion show in Cologne, with all the catwalk action choreographed to
the music; he acted in it as well. "Yeah, I became a top model, you
can sayÉ'All Night Long' [from Moving Pictures] was specially presented in
fashion shows, and all the models said that this was the most efficient
music they had, that they could move perfectly. The idea was that the
models were completely nuts, freaked out somehow, catching for flies,
shaking their hands and something like this, and it was excellent,
actually. Someone at the end gets murdered. It was wonderful."
We're listening to some of
Czukay's latest works; he has seemingly plunged even further down inside
the tones ÐÐ we're soaking in a bath of warm frequencies, getting a massage
with one of those rubber-tipped thingies. I wonder aloud how he could
possibly calculate these effects. "I was never good at school with
mathematics," he says. "No, this is only a question of taste.
When it comes to the comparison between vinyl and CD quality, usually the
freaks or the DJs go for vinyl. But when you work for a CD, you have
precisely to work for this medium. And that means to optimize everything
for the digital world, so that on the CD it sounds as it would never sound
anywhere else as good. You feel it immediately from the sound what sort of
frequencies you try to avoidÉ
"All the analog purists, they argue with
the fact that the overtones frequency range is far beyond 30 and 40 khz,
and you are getting affected by that. And the body feels it, this sort of
richness and warmness. The digitalization somehow misses, cannot reproduce
these frequencies, of course. But these purists forget one thing: when you
work for the digital media, you have to work with instruments which fit
perfectly into that. For example, if you work with a synthesizer or with
artificial instruments, they are reduced in their spectrum very much, and
fit perfectly into the digital world. And that is the point: you don't need
always to have the full range of the frequency spectrum. Why? Leave out
most, and it's becoming more interesting."
Other secrets of Holger's sound shall remain
secrets, but he will say that for certain effects he works with the oldest
techniques possible, with microphones from the '50s, and tube amplifiers.
At this stage it is an analog world, yet it cedes to the digital. "For
example, I have a great, huge gong, and such a rich sound which comes from
that huge gong. Usually you tape with very expensive microphones, but I
instead tape Jaki with a $10 cassette recorder and a microphone for $1.95.
I take that into my digital device and it's better than all the rest. That
means, the poorer the sound, the better the quality."
And why is that? I wonder.
"Yeah,"
he laughs. "That is, Why? Ask God." 
|
|
