CLASH (WITH DR. WALKER)

This is an absolutely unique monster of an album and whoever is up for something truly innovative and progressive should at least give it a listen. Trouble is, it has some heavy techno influences which probably aren't particularly popular in these quarters.

Clash is recorded live but contains only new and fresh material. Holger Czukay once said about it that the live collaboration with Dr. Walker brought him back some of the original excitement and spontaneity of playing with Can. Much of the album appears to be improvised or developed spontaneously. It is a double CD giving us about 140 minutes of music in nine tracks. The main principle of the music is the combination of Dr. Walker's techno rhythms with Holger mixing in a rich variety of sampled sounds with the addition of some electronic sounds produced on the spot. This seems simple and straight enough but actually the devil comes out of the detail; Holger unleashes layer upon layer of nervous, meditative, groovy, fast, slow, human, artificial, sophisticated, trivial, spacey, earthly, western, eastern, northern and southern attacks on the listener's ears from his sound archives put together over many decades from radio stations and other sources from all over the world. Now this seems no longer that simple and straight, but the reader may expect it to be somewhat random and disconnected. Let me assure you, it is not. What you get here is a viable and complete new world pieced together of parts of the old one making for a surprisingly consistent experience produced by the two musicians' talent to combine the samples and the rhythms in a very organic manner, always providing a leading thread (sometimes it's the rhythm, sometimes one of the more expansive sampled and remixed soundscapes). Particularly, the teamwork between the two is amazing with Holger all the time adding depth to the rhythms and taking it on and Dr. Walker showing a good sense for the dynamics and mutations required by Holger's constructions.

The samples and the way Holger is manipulating and combining them produce a unique experience with many nuances to discover at any moment. It is as if secret layers of the human existence shine through what is perceived on the surface, similar to the multilayered technique that some modern painters use, combining selected manifestations of life with their own comments.

The rhythm stops and changes its character at times, at other times it has a rather subtle appearance and seems almost deconstructed, but often it flows very confidently but thanks to the omnipresent sound metamorphoses never too monotonously; and occasionally it becomes a mighty stream that tears everything with it.

This is probably not for everyone, but I rate it as an an outright spectacular experience.