PLIGHT & PREMONITION FLUX & MUTABILITY

Plight & Premonition, Flux & Mutability, both titles are predicated on instability.
Meanings are equally mutable, perhaps the beginning of a spiritual journey, a climate of
uncertainty, the experience of improvisation, a door opening (that may quickly close
again). That first nocturnal session in the Can studio began unconsciously, or at least
without initial awareness that music was being made, Sylvian enjoying the opportunity to
play a pump organ, then growing aware of a slippage in the room as Czukay played
orchestral samples through the fold back system: "I fell into a trance." Ethereal sounds
looped through the space. He moved to the piano, searching for something concrete.
After ten or fifteen minutes he found it, only to hear Czukay tell him to move on: "He'd
only wanted the process, the uncertainty, the ambiguity of the searching out of ideas."
The night wore on; as soon as fixity or some compositional motif crept in, so the
machines would be taken out of record, as if establishing an equilibrium between the
transience of making and the indelibility of recording.