A little more than an hour of sound material from Holger Czukay’s archive can be found on “Gvoon – Brennung 1”, which will be released on March 28th via Greenland.
The CAN co-founder’s tracks were recorded in the 1990s when he worked in Cologne with younger techno producers who taught him new music technologies. However, some of the pieces only came to light 20 years later, when the artist Arthur Schmidt (known as Gvoon) used them as the soundtrack for an interrogation room-style art installation.
Schmidt’s stories about his time in East German prisons were what inspired Czukay to record the tracks in the first place. The music has now been mastered by Dirk Dresselhaus in honor of the late Czukay, who would have turned 87 next March.
As a co-founder of CAN, Holger Czukay (1938–2017) is a pioneer of experimental music. As a bassist and sound tinkerer, he shaped the music of the 1970s with his innovative use of tape collages and sampling techniques. After CAN, he set new standards in avant-garde music with solo works such as “Movies” and “On the Way to the Peak of Normal”.
In his final years, Czukay lived in seclusion in the former CAN studio in Cologne-Weilerswist, where he died under tragic circumstances in 2017.