HOLGER CZUKAY & ROLF DAMMERS: CANAXIS 5

Holger Czukay's first LP outside the CAN stable was a groundbreaking effort, years ahead of its time in how it juxtaposed pre-existing music from widely different cultures. But that doesn't necessarily make it a classic, and today the album should be approached as a primitive experiment with far-reaching implications.

Sampling wasn't anything new in 1969, but Czukay was fusing a lot more than just music here. It's all about the unexpected context, hearing contrasting sounds in unlikely settings: in this case field-recordings from the Cham people of southern Vietnam and Cambodia, lifted off a 1965 Folkways Label record and combined with a heavily-treated loop of a melodic phrase from a lament by 13th century troubadour Adam de la Halle...or is it a 16th century requiem by Pierre de la Rue?

Both have been cited as possible sources, but either way it was an act of political daring in 1969 to pair Vietnamese folk music with what sounds like a liturgical funeral hymn, just as the Indochinese war was nearing its zenith. The album's title track, in its original form called "Shook Eyes Ammunition" (Shook-Eye pronounced Czukay), was an even more provocative side-long vinyl essay, again with Southeast Asian music cues but this time blended with edgier, ambient Krautrock drones and electronics.

Czukay of course had long been fascinated with exotic radio waves, and his apprenticeship under Karlheinz Stockhausen weighed heavily on the Canaxis sessions. Co-producer Rolf Dammers, also a student of Stockhausen, was given a share of authorship despite being credited only with "general support". But despite later speculation (in "The Can Book", by Pascal Bussy) that Czukay was the neophyte and Dammers the more experienced master, in retrospect the album was Czukay's baby, and like any new parent his doting attention was tireless: he even snuck into the Stockhausen studio after hours to perform a final mix.

In any test-run of a new recording technique the bugs have to be considered a part of the creative process, and listeners today need to allow for some age-related wrinkles. The flower from this seed would take a full decade to bloom, on albums like "On the Way to the Peak of Normal" and "Movies". But don't compare those later, playful efforts to this more embryonic artifact. He may have been a novice, but in 1969 Can's resident mad scientist had already learned how to approach sound editing and assembly as performance.

Consumer Alert! The CD bonus track "Mellow Out" (not available on every re-issue) doesn't fit with the album's avant-garde spirit, but for CAN archeologists it's a real discovery: Holger Czukay's first live performance, from a 1960 radio broadcast. It's little more than negligible filler, very much in the light jazz vernacular of its day. But the tune is a useful datum point from which to measure Czukay's musical evolution in the years ahead.