Label: Tone Casualties Format: CD
As they say on “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”, the Can man can! The Can man can! Uh… hold on a second, that”s candy man, isn`t it. Not Can man. Oh bugger. So what can the Can man do? Fucking tons, as it happens. But this is something of a surprise. As is the fact that, as we reach midsummer, every fucker starts releasing albums which are very lunar. Odd, that. Coil have done it, now here`s Holger Czukay with “An electronic night ceremony”.
A Throbbing Gristle-style pulse kicks it all off, and then builds gradually into a really quiet rhythm track with mad little noises coming in and out. A main part of the percussion sounds like someone playing the spoons underwater, and you end up with this kind of menacing ambient malarkey with really big stuff being moved in the background. It’s all very laid-back, but never quite comfortable – there’s something really edgy about the whole shebang, which is what prevents it from collapsing into a big pool of generic ambient slush. Think of some of Richard H. Kirk`s better stuff. It also manages to pull off the neat trick of constantly sounding like it`s getting louder, but actually staying at about the same volume.
La Luna does lock into a really kind of subtle groove eventually, but only to the extent that it provides some kind of backdrop for the mad spooky noises he keeps bunging in. And, of course, it wouldn`t be Holger Czukay without some snatches of random (or seemingly random) voices chopped up and dropped in the mix like so many mushrooms. (Now there`s an idea…) And this’ll probably piss off a lot of you avant-bleedin`-garde purists, but if you listen really carefully you can even hear tunes (remember them?) in the background at various points.
By the time U-She comes on with a kind of invocation to the moon, it all sounds rather like one of the pieces on the “Heavy Lids” part of Techno Animal‘s classic “Re-Entry“, only with a slightly more pagan vibe to it, and some sinister chanting blokes shuffling past in the background, like Queen Elizabeth doing the soundtrack to The Name Of The Rose. But with squiqqly sounds off the radio.
So, children, what have we learned today? The Can man can ‘cos he bakes it with love.
-Deuteronemu 90210, the man who put the “mental” in “experimental”-
