Forty-five years ago, a truly singular album first saw the light of day. Like a kind of musical vanishing point, Canaxis 5, as it was called, as if named after the far off satellite of some distant star, landed in West Germany at the confluence of two hitherto parallel but quite distinct streams which up to that point had regarded each other either with suspicion or a kind of mystified fascination.

Two years earlier, The Beatles had put Karlheinz Stockhausen on the front cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, nestled not entirely comfortably between Lenny Bruce and W. C. Fields, as if warning their fans not to take the German composer too seriously. At that point at least, the Fab Four’s experiments with tape and electronic sound were always strictly subordinated to pop song structures, periodic rhythms, and diatonic harmony (all of which were anathema to Stockhausen himself).

But in 1968, one of Stockhausen’s former pupils, a thirty year old shortwave radio enthusiast named Holger Czukay, crept into the the electronic music studios which Stockhausen managed at the West Deutscher Rundfunk and made one of the strangest albums to be released in what was already one of music’s strangest periods. Earlier in the year, amidst student protests mounting in intensity, along with one of his guitar pupils and a classmate from the Musikschule composition class, Czukay had formed what would one day be recognised as amongst the most influential bands in rock history: Can.

Read the rest of my piece about Canaxis 5 over at The Quietus

03/19/14 at 10:03am
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