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Artist
Holger Czukay
12+ albums
krautrockexperimentalAvant-Gardeambientelectronic
about
Holger Czukay (Holger Schüring, 24 March 1938 – 5 September 2017) was a German musician. He co-founded the influential rock group Can in 1968. He was a singer and played bass guitar, guitar, keyboards, percussion, drums, and French horn. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk). Czukay studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1963 to 1966. Czukay recorded some notable early ambient albums, and is important for his utilization of shortwave radio sounds and sampling, and has collaborated with a considerable number of musicians. Initially Czukay had little interest in rock music, but this changed, when a student played him the Beatles' 1967 song "I Am the Walrus", a 1967 psychedelic rock single with an unusual musical structure and blasts of AM radio noise. This opened his ears to music by rock experimentalists such as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. Czukay co-founded Can in 1968. He played bass guitar and performed most of the recording and engineering for the group. Rosko Gee, former bassist of the British band Traffic, joined the band in 1977, with Czukay handling only tapes and sound effects on album Saw Delight, his final LP with the group before departing for a solo career. After his departure from Can, Czukay recorded several albums. One of his trademarks was the use of shortwave radio sounds and his early pioneering of sampling, in those days involving the painstaking cutting and splicing of magnetic tapes. He would tape-record various sounds and
