Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Bass Bits #5 - Krautrock




Named after my mum. Love the reverbed shimmer-bass on this Faust beauty from the under-rated IV. Jean-Hervé Péron take a bow.




More delay-bass. Was it Han-Joachim Roedelius, or Dieter Moebius? Or even Michael Rother, who co-produced Zuckerzeit? Remarkable group, Cluster.



On most Can songs Holger Czukay is doing something special. But nowhere more so than on "Quantum Physics" - that high-toned insectile chitter. Cosmic Morse Code.

Here's what I wrote about the song in another place and time:

"An extraordinary piece of music that feels like a glimpse into a realm of infinitely vast or infinitesimally intimate processes.  Can's playing on 'Quantum Physics' is beyond, beneath, between categories like rock, jazz, funk.  Czukay's bass and Liebezeit's drums don't interlock as
a steady, sustaining pulse, but stitch a percussive/melodic thread; Schmidt's lambent synths wax and wane.... The instruments seem to follow irregular but mysteriously related orbits around an absent or invisible star. Then there's a moment of harmonic convergence, as they chime together in a glowing chord, which in turn unfurls a plane of marbled light, like sunrays streaking around the moon's circumference in the final minutes of an eclipse."

Mostly though Czukay is simply doing something right - something perfect - but not drawing attention to himself.