GOOD MORNING STORY

Holger Czukay's solo albums have swung between more or less rock based efforts (such as Movies, or On the Way to the Peak of Normal) and more abstract electronic music (Canaxis, La Luna). Good Morning Story combines these two approaches, with the first half in the style of Movies and the second half an extended piece of ambient electronica in the style of La Luna.

The album has added significance in that it marks the first time Czukay used a sampler, as opposed to taped and found sounds. The use of a sampler also makes for a virtual Can reunion, with samples of Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli and Jaki Liebezeit forming the basis of several pieces. The first couple of tracks are songs which recall some of his 80s output like Rome Remains Rome and Radio Wave Surfer. The Invisible Man has vocals by long time Czukay collaborator Sheldon Ancel while the title track's lyrics are delivered by Czukay himself. Both are typically eccentric fare, and if you liked the 80s albums you'll love these. The next three tracks are instrumentals with samples from Cukay's beloved short wave radio (a technique he pioneered in Can on pieces like Animal Waves and whichhas informed a lot of his solo work) and sounds from all over the world are laid over a collage of samples from Can. The album closes with the 22 minute long Mirage, a sustained drone which at times recalls Canaxis but which unfolds with a logic of its own. It's highly atmospheric, but like La Luna there's a feeling that there's more atmosphere than content here.

Good Morning Story could function as a kind of one stop introduction to Holger Czukay's solo work, but as an album it feels a tad disjointed, as though the a and b sides of two different albums had been mixed up at a pressing plant back in the good old days of vinyl. It's not a bad place for newcomers to start, and established fans will definitely enjoy at least half of it, but Czukay has issued far stronger albums which focus on one side of his muse or the other, while Moving Pictures reconciles the two strands more convincingly. Good, but definitely non essential.

Holger Czukay has a number of ridiculously deep albums that by pure sound alchemy touch me in ways that other music hardly ever achieves. Good Morning Story is one of these. Its centre piece is certainly the 20 minutes of Mirage, which is a slow and somewhat minimalist sound collage based on a single drone sound, which is however breathing, moving and changing all the time, enrichened by all kinds of samples and very tastefully engineered sounds evoking all kinds of emotions from pain and fear to jumping around playfully. However, the sometimes ethnic nature of the samples and the somewhat distant sound of most of them makes this more of a globe- or even universe-spanning than a personal experience. One could see connections to Tangerine Dream's unique and legendary Zeit here, but Holger's world of sounds, well informed by the technical possibilities of the 1990s, is more human and warm, at the same time keeping the same level of experimental boldness. Newer issues of the album follow Mirage by a 10 minutes remix, which is stunning, don't miss it! The deep sound world of Mirage here is put together with wild rhythms and grooves, a very worthy re-interpretation of the epic just heard.

What was originally the first side of the album is made up by shorter songs. There's the relaxed and fun Invisible Man sung (or rather told) by Holger and Sheldon Ancel with some dreamy female voice by Holger's later wife U-She thrown in. This has a pretty unique twilight atmosphere. Then there are two tracks, Good Morning Story and Dancing in Wild Circles, that are based on sampled Can's genius rhythm from Vitamin C (Ege Bamyasi), which is one of the grooviest pieces in music history. Good Morning Story is the more relaxed piece, Dancing in Wild Circles uses some seemingly tribal rhythmic voices and is generally far more buzzing. Personally I can hear Jaki's legendary drums from Vitamin C day and night, Holger can remix and add to this as much as he wants and I will love it, although of course creativity credit here goes partly to the original. Surely both tracks here have a proper and strong life on their own. World of the Universe is a mostly instrumental piece with some spoken words by Holger that reminds me of parts of Hollywood Symphony from "Movies". This sounds rather dark and subdued and there's not that much sampling here, or only very strongly in the background. Instead we get some of Holger's original guitar playing and sound design. Very atmospheric. Atlantis is probably the weakest thing on the album. It's dominated by cheap sounding rhythm computer beats many of which seem to be randomly chosen, put together to create rather straight "ungroovy" rhythms, and then there are some more twilight atmospherical sounds. This certainly takes some getting used to, but on the positive side it's a pretty unique experiment and surely has enough complexity and unpredictability to keep the interest alive. That then is followed by Mirage, already described. I'm surprised that Good Morning Story is currently rated lower than the previous effort Moving Pictures. Moving Picture is certainly not bad, but Good Morning Story is in my view much richer and has the superior sound, it sounds absolutely amazing. After some not so strong work in the second half of the eighties and early nineties, in my view Good Morning Story is among his true genius pieces.