Two years after Radio Wave Surfer was released, Holger Czukay found himself in the studio again with a revolving cast taking in Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Sheldon Ancel and Jah Wobble, as well as vocal interjections from U-She and Romie Singh.
It seems fair to assume that the album was recorded not long before it was released, putting it some five or six years after Radio Wave Surfer, and these recordings find him in a very different place to his frenetically busy, fun-packed, jazz-infused music of the mid- to late eighties. The album comprises six tracks, the final track of which takes up twenty minutes. The five leading up to this are all beatless though and infused with a kind of cosmic resonance that seems to elevate them into a sphere way beyond the clutches of gravity.
Opener “Longing For Daydreams” is kind of misty and tense. There is a touch of a drone and that sort of seahorse rhythm that is like the gentle lapping of a tide, but not necessarily water. U-She’s wordless vocals have a Gregorian sentiment to them as a violin stutters in the shadows. It feels like the survivors on a forgotten battlefield orbiting some distant star, the voice stirring flags like the faintest breath of wind. This feeling of distance continues through the first twenty minutes with Ancel’s voice laid-back and remote on the Third Man-like “All Night Long” or accompanied by echoing footsteps, and more resonant and foreboding, on “Dark Moon”, the double bass here giving a more menacing sensation. U-She intoning “We are on the dark side of the moon” adds to a gathering sense of doom that “Floatspace” takes and then scatters across the unfolding universe, the sound of Rene Tinner‘s ARP synth lending it the claustrophobic sci-fi aura of 2001: A Space Odyssey. These five tracks are like a distant scattered daydream as they drift and sway into the limitless horizon, untethered and alone.The twenty minutes of “Rhythms Of A Secret Life” look inside the heads of the people observing this gradual decay. The various ingredients include Karoli’s spindly, otherworldly guitar, shining like light from distant stars, snaking through the stripped down to a point of non-existence rhythm of Liebezeit’s. The vocals of Ancel are like someone losing their mind as the transmissions come and go, repeating the same half-understood lines in a confused hush. It is a compelling piece that barely hangs together. You only notice Jaki’s cymbals if you really pay attention and the wooden, plodding guitar of Holger sits at odds with Karoli’s sky-bound slivers. It draws you in and keeps you there without really trying, and serves as a perfect companion to the preceding tracks. Again, Holger’s restless invention finds him heading into fresh sonic pastures and turning his back on what came before. Moving Pictures has a different feel, but is utterly essential.
-Mr Olivetti-
