It's a fascinating journey, this Drift.
Over the holiday period I put together the annual 15 album mp3 collection (only three copies this year) which for 2006 I have called Driftin' , this being a play on John's lyric for 'Metal Beat', a reference to the album of the year by Scott Walker and a description of the way the current takes me along the same stream but into different pools of discovery.
Lead me to wondering quite what I would be listening to this year, and purchasing Mojo has given me a couple of ideas. There are some fascinating new ambient/experimental electronic albums out there, but it was the review of Movies that made me play this again and started me really thinking. Czukay describes how he used recordings of voices from distant, unknown radio stations instead of a singer, and how he picked up a bass guitar and start playing along to dialogue.
Fascinating stuff, which was brought more sharply into focus today when I got around to listening to Radio 2's Berlin - Soundz Decadent programme this morning. Interviews and anecdotes from John foxx interesting of course, but even more so was the input from Blixa Bargeld, Klaus Dinger of Neu! and the very wonderful Ute Lemper.
I am absolutely intrigued by the whole Krautrock phenomena and love the way it all weaves together to form a beautiful picture of intelligent music in a ten year period that seems to have influenced so many artists during the last twenty odd years. First stop then will be Low and Heroes of course, and who knows where we'll end up from there.
Even more interesting was the way this programme analysed why Berlin was so influential in the 1970s, referring back to the emergence of cabaret in the 1920s. This is another genre that I enjoy, but it's so far been hard to reconcile with the other material. And here was the link. The link is the social.economic and cultural development and decline of decadent Berlin. Berlin. Lou reed, I believe.
Something else to check out.
Seems to make perfect sense now that also over Christmas I played my one and own Kurt Weill compilation. His work with Brecht is worth looking into as well...

"Seems like I forgot to steer…"