The Artist: Holger Czukay
Holger Czukay wasn’t just a member of Can. He was the ghost in their machine. A classically trained student of Stockhausen turned krautrock saboteur. Obsessed with tape splicing, shortwave radio and sonic disruption, he didn’t play the bass so much as let it wander off and report back.
By the late ’70s, while his old bandmates splintered into side projects, Holger vanished into a studio in Cologne with a razor blade, a reel-to-reel and a wild idea: what if a record could behave like cinema?
The result was Movies. An album that doesn’t just play - it edits, cuts, jumps, pans, zooms.
Found sounds. Loops. Funk. Psychedelia.
A global frequency scan disguised as a four-track record.
The Record: Movies (1979)
The first thing you hear is a burst of warped funk. Synthetic horns, squelchy synths, then a bass line so lazy it’s almost sideways.
That’s Cool in the Pool - the most conventional track here. Playful, strange and undeniably catchy.
Oh Lord, Give Us More Money is a collage of mock TV dialogue, sprawling instrumental grooves and snatches of soundtrack. It runs over 13 minutes and feels like flipping channels in a fever dream.
Then comes Persian Love, built around a shortwave recording of an Iranian singer, looped and filtered through haze. It’s haunting, beautiful and impossibly ahead of its time. You can hear this track echo in Moby, DJ Shadow and Burial, decades later.
Finally, Hollywood Symphony closes the record. Strings rise and fall, static crackles, something swells then dissolves. Fragments of disconnected dialogue only make the experience more psychedelic. More intriguing.
The whole thing feels like a dream sequence in some surreal movie.
Play Now:
🔊 Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube
Start With:
- Cool in the Pool - Cartoon funk
- Persian Love - Heartbreak via shortwave
- Hollywood Symphony - The end credits