Preview: Holger Czukay, Movies (Label: SPV Revisited)

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Originally released in 1979, Holger Czukay's second album Movies was, along with Byrne and Eno's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, one of the pioneering landmarks of pre-sampler sampling aesthetics.

For these four tracks, the Can bassist montaged the various sound sources - instruments, found sounds and short-wave radio snippets - into aural "narratives" lacking only visual images.

Jaki Liebezeit's metronomic drumming helps sustain "Hollywood Symphony" and "Oh Lord, Give Us More Money" well beyond 10 minutes apiece; but the shorter pieces are more concisely and elegantly wrought.

For "Cool In The Pool", French horn dances coquettishly with organ, guitar and swoops of dervish violin, as Czukay exhorts us in his quirky mittel-European manner to "get hot on the dancing spot/then let's get cool in the pool"; while "Persian Love" negotiates an alliance between ecstatic melismatic Qawwali vocals, Balkan oud and twinkly high-register African high-life guitar that manages to be at once mind-bendingly imaginative, technically impressive and genuinely moving.

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