“The music in this box set does indeed demonstrate masterful arrangements of sounds and sources, movement and melody, humour and seriousness, that can well be described as magical. It is also a set of unpredictable keys and ciphers, revealing a unique worldview where high artistic rigour meets continual openness to chance and serendipity. In this, Holger not only cut and pasted music but time, place and mindsets, when such things in popular culture were not only technically near impossible but virtually unprecedented.” – Ian Harrison (Mojo)

?This retrospective box set contains 5 CDs or 5 LPs, a lush booklet, a DVD – ‘Krieg der Töne’ (‘War Of The Sounds’), a VinylVideo 7” (LP box set only), and a digital download code (LP box set only).
?‘Krieg der Töne’ (‘War Of The Sounds’) was produced for the most experimental late night program on German public television network ARD, ‘Das kleine Fernsehspiel’ (‘The Small Teleplay’) in 1989. In the Eighties the department co-produced international independent films like Charlie Ahearn’s early hip hop film ‘Wild Style’ (1983) and Jim Jarmusch’s sophomore feature ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ (1984). Michael Meert’s ‘Krieg der Töne’ is emphatically called “a Video-Musical.” Meert was part of a movement of video activists in the early eighties, who wanted to create faster, more spontaneous pictures through video productions and hoped for a new, political and artistic public sphere of moving images through video. Holger Czukay plays a session musician, who is also named Holger Czukay but is not completely identical with the real Czukay. He is a bass player for the all-powerful music corporation Super Sound, who has to earn extra money by tuning pianos. One of his customers is an ambitious upper class mother, who desperately wants her 12 year old daughter Ino to win the Super Sound talent show. She hires Professor Czukay as a piano teacher but mainly hopes he can put a word in for her daughter at the upcoming event. Czukay is a grumpy but original teacher who opens the world of everyday sounds for Ino, smashing her mother’s precious china along the way. Ino embarks on a magical journey through Cologne, where everyday sounds transform to music on Czukay’s wonderful soundtrack. People blowing into beer bottles sound like electronically distorted trumpets, rhythms of footsteps, trains and ships form a hypnotic groove. Finally she enters the high altar of German avant-garde pop: Holger Czukay’s real life studio, with his tape machines and a short wave radio receiver at the core. ‘Krieg der Töne’ is a musical slapstick comedy and a poetic film about discovering your own ‘swing’ and the magic of sounds.

?VinylVideo recordings contain video (moving images and sound) stored in a special analogue stereophonic video signal format specifically developed for recording on vinyl records. The signal can be reproduced by connecting a special decoder unit to any ordinary HiFi turntable and standard television.