D>Elektro 1.2 - |> expanded concept <|
|1.2.2| Sounds + Elements
|> Experiments | Sounds + Concepts |
| Machine | Play | Samples |
| "I regard it as an insult to be labeled a musician. I see myself as a composer - a kind of archictect of cut-up's and collage's." |
And those experimental travellers brought ever more new, unheard-of Sound-discoveries with them from their electronic expeditiions.
Now it was about time to develop intelligent and creative travel-routes and to combine / connect the sound-treasures that had been found along the way.
| "Faust
were deconstructing the nuts, bolts and griders of rock music through
relentlessly
monotonous pieces and laying the groundwork for today's sampler-collagists
through their intricate tape cut-ups and splices."
Andy Gill - MOJO magazine, April '97
|
CAN, as a group with a breathtaking proliferation of styles and approaches, that developed it's material out of experimentation, improvisations / 'spontaneous compositions', were absolutely depending on the re-structuring of the loads of ideas and material that they had recorded.
The material had to be condensed, edited, mixed and layered to fit it onto the given album-format - without losing it's power and particular open CAN-character.
Czukay, by developing
his very own cutting- and mixing-techniques, was pushing these procedures
towards perfection. He
let those spontaneously composed elements talk to each other anew through
his way of editing and mixing them together.
The original recording-tapes were cut up in many pieces, layered, manipulated and collaged.
Eventually, this work itself, through it's radical re-structuring of the raw-material, became a
true part of the process of compostion.
| "I
was composing with the same technique, which a cutter applies when
editing films. The mixed down music was cut in 'bits' and put together
again, as a computer does. The result is something, that simply didn't
exist before. It's calculated ['computed'] or, better said: assembled,
'composed' music. Those separated molecules are assembled again artificially. Artificial in the sense of: possibly, hopefully better than the original."
Holger Czukay
|
In the course of his work, Czukay almost "by the way" pre-invented in mechanical / analogue form the today omnipresent sampling. That digital soundtool, without which contemporary electronic would be unthinkable.
| "For
every sound-engineer my recording-methods for 'Movies' and my other
solo-albums would have been something very unusual. In the beginning I had worked on the recordings on my tape-recorder at home. Then I was using a reel-to-reel, then 3 reel-to-reels. When I was preparing the final tapes I transferred them to a 16-track machine and from this onto the computer-mixing-board. For 'Persian Love' I had - with the help of a short-wave receiver - stolen the voice of a persian poet. In 'Hollywood Symphony' I winked a few times towards Diana Ross. All in all I have processed many thousand hours of music for that record. Sometimes I had recorded a couple of hours and kept only a few seconds of them - for instance from a Korean orchestra."
Holger Czukay
|
Especially through the usage of found sounds- and music-material in combination with his own editing- and mixing-techniques, it was never a problem for Czukay to play 'solo' - because the machines were his assistants, his musical 'play-mates'.
|
"Musician's only have two hands. Tape-machines supply me with more than two hands.
I believe, if I would ask the recording-machine to bring me a cup of coffee, than it would do that."
Holger Czukay
|
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