Holger Czukay, Rolf Dammers

"A few months after the foundation of Can, Holger Czukay recorded his first solo album ‘Canaxis’, in conjunction with producer/engineer Rolf Dammers, this album was assembled from thousands of snippets recorded from short wave radio, a long standing obsession of Czukay's which he also incorporated into some of Can's later albums.
A refugee during the Second World War, Holger Czukay famously studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early ‘60s. That direct exposure to the challenging and experimental concepts Stockhausen expounded and encouraged was a significant spark for Czukay. Pieces such as Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen were incredibly important in helping Czukay construct his own musical vocabulary, as this pre-Can masterpiece demonstrated. Splicing tapes of disparate sources together, this early example of sampling combined a descending motif from Western classical music, a field recording of a Vietnamese singer, various chants, luminous static tones and radio interference into a beguiling dronescape."