Holger Czukay

Holger Schüring (24 March 1938 – 5 September 2017), known professionally as Holger Czukay, was a German musician best known as a co-founder of the krautrock group Can.

Described as "successfully bridg[ing] the gap between pop and the avant-garde", Czukay was also notable for having created early important examples of ambient music, for having explored "world music" well before the term was coined, and for having been a pioneer of sampling.

Czukay was born on 24 March 1938 in the Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland), from which his family was expelled after World War II.

Due to the turmoil of the war, Czukay's primary education was limited.

One pivotal early experience, however, was working, when still a teenager, at a radio repair-shop, where he became fond of the aural qualities of radio broadcasts (anticipating his use of shortwave radio broadcasts as musical elements) and became familiar with the rudiments of electrical repair and engineering.

Czukay studied music under Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1963 to 1966 and then worked for a while as a music teacher.

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 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 undertook 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 the album Saw Delight, his final LP with the group before departing for a solo career.

Czukay had been sidelined due to creative disputes and his failure to progress as a bassist, admitting his shortcomings on the instrument which he had taken up "almost by default" in the early days of Can.

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 snippets from shortwave and incorporate them into his compositions.

This approach changed Czukay's plans for his back catalogue, so that the original albums Der Osten ist Rot (1984), Rome Remains Rome (1987) and Moving Pictures (1993) are no longer being reissued (in the case of Moving Pictures, because the master tapes have degraded beyond repair).

Instead, most of the tracks are being remade and newly organized as limited edition vinyl releases.

He also used shortwave as a live, interactive musical instrument (such as on 1991's Radio Wave Surfer), a method of composition he termed "radio painting".

Czukay also stated "If you want to make something new, you shouldn't think too far beyond one certain idea".

Czukay collaborated with a considerable number of musicians, notably a series of albums with Jah Wobble and David Sylvian, two younger British musicians who shared his interest in blending pop music with experimental recording and sampling techniques.

Other collaborators include U.N.K.L.E., Brian Eno, Eurythmics, and German Neue Deutsche Welle band Trio.

In 2009, after a problematic time with the record company that had been gradually re-releasing his albums on CD, Czukay began a new collaboration with the Claremont 56 record label, releasing vinyl-only remixes of tracks from earlier albums, as well as some new recordings.

Ursula Schüring (as she was called after marrying Holger Schüring under his real name) died on her 55th birthday (28 July 2017) after having been severely debilitated by illness for over a decade.

On 5 September 2017, Czukay was found dead in his apartment, converted from Can's old studio in Weilerswist, near Cologne.

The New York Times reported that he had died on the same day, but the cause of his death was the subject of a police investigation.

His death was eventually assumed to have been from natural causes.

In 2018 it was announced that Czukay's work was being released in a box set, Cinema, including his solo works, collaborations, and unreleased material.

It was released in March 2018.

Holger Czukay was married for nearly thirty years to the German painter and singer Ursula Kloss (known professionally as Ursa Major, and later, as U-She), with whom he collaborated on numerous multimedia pieces.