MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Movies by Holger Czukay - 1979

 

Holgar Czukay was a co-founding member of the much revered German avante guarde pop band Can. Movies, released in 1979, was his debut as a solo artist. This had been very much a pet project of his, spending hours and hours getting the mix of its complicated elements right. He'd become an enthusiast for the possibilities of electronic sampling, looping recorded sounds, cut and pasting found sources, dialogue from radio or TV and blending them into one cohesive musical piece. Most of this he did manually on tape, this was decades. before modern day digital recording made this sort of thing easy peasy. 

This approach to music making was totally cutting edge at the time, disparate musicians from New York hip hop artists to Cabaret Voltaire in the UK, were starting to splice found voices and cut up loops of riffs into the construction of their music. Czukay however took sampling to another compositional level, one that was intrinsic to how the music was made rather than as a unique ornamental, but essentially surface flourish. 

What strikes you with Movies from the start is how sophisticated and slick this all is sounds. Czukay was an accomplished musician, he played bass guitar in Can for ten years. Throughout Movies Czukay's immaculately light guitar playing rings through like a beautifully chiming bell. One of the general characteristics of Czukay's solo work, his ambient work aside, is the musical wit and playfulness that leaps out at you. He seems, on the surface at least, to have been unconcerned with needing to be taken seriously. This guy was having far too much fun for that. Its a trait I am particularly fond of in an artist, if they can be quite experimental, but not get too up themselves about the importance of what they are doing.

The album consists of only four tracks. Two shorter finely wrought pieces.The daft and delightful Cool In The Pool that introduces the album, and Persian Love, a sinuously cut up homage to the power of Persian singing recorded extracts from short wave radio, reconstructed and interacting with Czukay's distinctive guitar playing, its the highlight of the album. This latter track proved to be the beginning of Czukay's future engagement with 'world music' and musicians. Troublesome as some can find what they interpret as white Western cultural appropriation. Its since become a wider issue with music sampling, when is appropriation justified, and when is it plain theft? Yet after you consider all this, the album is called Movies, Czukay is primarily painting pictures, creating movies in musical form, and through your ears painting them in your minds eye. Czukay loves this music, and reveres it enough to compose something this unique from it. This is literally his love song to their love songs. 

The other two pieces are longer fifteen minute mini symphonies, one called Oh Lord Give Us More Money. The other, Hollywood Symphony is Czukay's homage to Hollywood B movies, inter-cut as it is with snippets of dialogue from them. This one piece is probably the finest example of what this technique was capable of. Like all My Most Loved Albums, Movies is an album I never tire of hearing, and however pioneering it was at the time, it does not feel remotely dated.