Holger Czukay

The fact that the well-known musician Holger Czukay, co-founder of the band Can, was also active as a video artist is revealed by his estate of 600 video tapes, which has been processed in the ZKM archive since 2019.

Holger Czukay was born in Danzig on 24 March 1938 and grew up in Duisburg after the Second World War. As a teenager, he worked in a small radio workshop, repaired radio and television sets and taught himself to play the guitar.

“This fiddling around, that's just because you naturally want to do everything yourself as much as possible. So I'm actually curious, like an animal can be curious, and I just try to get at it. So even as a little child right after the war, I already had two Volksempfänger and two German Kleinempfänger and with a red rear light... Somehow I had always had this vision from the beginning of a studio that I would one day have in my home. That's how it came about."

From 1963 he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in his composition class for new music at the Cologne Musikhochschule. The band Can, which he founded in the spring of 1968 together with fellow student Irmin Schmidt, saw itself first and foremost as a group that wanted to experiment and do many things differently.

“I started with Can as someone who actually wanted to unlearn everything he had learned, and with that I couldn't do anything either, with that I was a universal dilettante."

The band members came from a wide variety of musical backgrounds. So they not only mixed the genres of rock, jazz, new music and electronic music, but also expanded and changed the recording and production methods that had been common until then. Repetitive sound structures and extended improvisational sections characterised the group's musical idiosyncrasy, with Czukay playing a special role as he not only played the electric bass but also operated all the recorders, samplers and editing equipment and acted as sound engineer. The band gained fame in 1970 with several film scores, including for »Das Millionenspiel« by Tom Toelles and »Deadlock« by Roland Klick. Eight years followed with a total of 12 studio and four live albums and performances all over the world.

Shortly before the break-up, Czukay left the band in 1977 to make music in the following years as assistant to producer Conny Plank with numerous internationally known musicians such as the Eurythmics, David Sylvian or Brian Eno. Czukay now played not only bass, but also guitar, piano, drums, but also French horn and many other instruments. Solo albums followed with songs like »Cool in the Pool« (1979), collaborations with Jah Wobble (»Full Circle«, 1982) and Air Liquide (»Clash«, 1997).

Czukay's work with video also began in the period following his involvement with Can. As in music, he created music videos (for »Cool in the Pool«, 1978), animated films (»Hoolah Hoolah«, 1990) and so-called »video speeches« in an experimental, minimalist and humorous way. An example of this is the video »Jahresrückblick 1982« (1982): In his recording studio, among all kinds of equipment and synthesizers, Czukay addresses the audience directly and ponders the 20th century in an ironic way. The video appeared in 1983 in the second issue of the video magazine »Infermental«, which is part of the ZKM's video collection.

“I think that the video is something like a two-component glue between image and sound. First of all, the images have a rhythmic flow and they also convey a certain mood. It's not so important to me that they tell big stories. With video, logic is not as important as, for example, colour and rhythm.”

Czukay in turn reflected his role as a universal dilettante in Michael Meert's 1987 feature film War of the Tones, in which he plays himself as an unsuccessful musician who brings a naughty child to music. The camera originals of the feature film are also in Czukay's estate at the ZKM. 

“I see myself as a doctor, namely Doctor Frankenstein of the digital age. And that is: everything I actually do is done according to the method of a victorious conqueror, just like the Romans did. First they conquered a country and then they said: divide and rule. That is actually my technique. I go and cut everything apart and practically divide things and give them a beginning and an end. And with these divided things I rule, musically as well as in the image. And from that I actually build things together.”

After Czukay's death on 5 September 2017, the entire video estate was handed over to the ZKM to be restored and digitised in the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems.

Text: Christian Haardt