FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
IN THIS PHOTO: Can (from left: Jaki Liebezeit, Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli)/PHOTO CREDIT: Faber & Faber
Part Twenty-Eight: Can
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I am heading in a slightly different…
musical direction for this week’s A Buyer’s Guide. I am featuring Can. They were a German Experimental Rock band formed in Cologne in 1968 by the core quartet of Holger Czukay (bass, tape editing), Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Michael Karoli (guitar), and Jaki Liebezeit (drums). The group cycled through several vocalists, most prominently featuring the American-born Malcolm Mooney (1968–1970) and the Japanese-born Damo Suzuki (1970–1973), as well as various temporary members. Can are renowned for their experimentation and innovation, and artists like Brian Eno, and the Happy Mondays cite them as influences. To honour the pioneering group, I recommend their four essential albums; an underrated record that is worth another look; their final studio album and, finally, a Can-related book that you should explore. Immerse yourself in a group who, to me, are almost peerless in terms of their…
PHOTO CREDIT: Press Ltd./Alamy
EXPERIMENTATION and importance.
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The Four Essential Albums
Monster Movie
Release Date: August 1969
Labels: Music Factory/Liberty
Producer: Can
Standout Tracks: Father Cannot Yell/Mary, Mary So Contrary/Outside My Door
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/The-Can-Monster-Movie/master/7774
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2GXaLHeT6znG6x0U4y1U8h
Review:
“Riding a particularly Velvet Underground vibe, "Father Cannot Yell" sounds like post-punk before punk even existed. Irmin Schmidt's brittle keyboard squalls and dissonant rhythms and Mooney's buried recitations predated the Fall, Swell Maps, the noise scene, and generations of difficult sound by years and in some cases decades. Holger Czukay's pensive basslines are also an already distinctive calling card of the band on this debut, providing a steadfast glue for the barrages of noisy tones, edits, and pulses the record offers from all angles. The 20-minute album closer "Yoo Doo Right" is an enormous highlight, cementing the locked-in hypnotic exploration Can would extrapolate on for the rest of their time and come to be known for. Mooney's raspy vocals range from whispery incantations to throaty rock & roll shouts, building with the band into an almost mantra-level meditation as the song repeats its patterns and multi-layered grooves into what feels like infinity. Legend has it that the final side-long version of the song was edited down from a six-hour recording session focusing on that tune alone. Given the level of commitment to experimentation Can would go on to show, it's not hard to believe they'd play one song for six hours to find its core, nor is it unfathomable that Monster Movie was the more accessible album they recorded after their first attempts were deemed too out there to be commercially released. Even in their earliest phases, Can were making their name by blowing away all expectations and notions that rock & roll had limits of any kind”- AllMusic
Choice Cut: You Doo Right
Tago Mago
Release Date: February 1971
Label: United Artists
Producer: Can
Standout Tracks: Paperhouse/Halleluhwah/Aumgn
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Can-Tago-Mago/master/11512
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/058qBjhg9yzbRGZCqOBX42
Review:
“Tago Mago is seven songs in 73 minutes; the first half is big-beat floor-fillers, the second half yanks the floor away. For those first four songs, drummer Jaki Liebezeit is the star of the band, setting up rhythmic patterns of his own devising (isolate his part of almost any Can song, and you'd immediately know what you were listening to) and repeating them like mantras. His drumming is actually the lead instrument on "Mushroom", which could very easily pass for a post-punk classic from 10 years later; everything else just adds a little tone color. (The song might be about a psychedelic mushroom, or a mushroom cloud, or maybe just the kind that comes in a can.) And his deliberate, crisply articulated marching-band-of-the-unconscious beat is the spine of the overwhelming "Halleluwah", possibly the only 18-minute song that would be too short at twice its length” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Mushroom
Ege Bamyası
Release Date: November 1972
Label: United Artists
Producer: Can
Standout Tracks: Pinch/Soup/Spoon
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Can-Ege-Bamyasi/master/11693
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5HpEJLvy9LxTVUbINGTLRM
Review:
“The follow-up to Tago Mago is only lesser in terms of being shorter; otherwise the Can collective delivers its expected musical recombination act with the usual power and ability. Liebezeit, at once minimalist and utterly funky, provides another base of key beat action for everyone to go off on -- from the buried, lengthy solos by Karoli on "Pinch" to the rhythm box/keyboard action on "Spoon." The latter song, which closes the album, is particularly fine, its sound hinting at an influence on everything from early Ultravox songs like "Hiroshima Mon Amour" to the hollower rhythms on many of Gary Numan's first efforts. Liebezeit and Czukay's groove on "One More Night," calling to mind a particularly cool nightclub at the end of the evening, shows that Stereolab didn't just take the brain-melting crunch side of Can as inspiration. The longest track, "Soup," lets the band take off on another one of its trademark lengthy rhythm explorations, though not without some tweaks to the expected sound. About four minutes in, nearly everything drops away, with Schmidt and Liebezeit doing the most prominent work; after that, it shifts into some wonderfully grating and crumbling keyboards combined with Suzuki's strange pronouncements, before ending with a series of random interjections from all the members. Playfulness abounds as much as skill: Slide whistles trade off with Suzuki on "Pinch"; squiggly keyboards end "Vitamin C"; and rollicking guitar highlights "I'm So Green." The underrated and equally intriguing sense of drift that the band brings to its recordings continues as always. "Sing Swan Song" is particularly fine, a gentle float with Schmidt's keyboards and Czukay's bass taking the fore to support Suzuki's sing-song vocal” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Vitamin C
Future Days
Release Date: August 1973
Label: United Artists
Producer: Can
Standout Tracks: Future Days/Spray/Bel Air
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Can-Future-Days/master/11765
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6FjeEDB8LT95KDxUVgU6OS
Review:
“It was certainly an end of Damo Suzuki’s spell with the band and it could have been of that rocking freakout Cope is so fond of (who isn’t?). Unfortunately, it also spelt the end of Can’s most productive streak, as all their albums proper that followed were actually hit and miss affairs. Fortunately, on the other hand, it brought along with it a musical inspiration for everything that came from then on, from ambient, motorik, various new wave experimentations to post-rock on the level that was Velvet Underground’s Velvet Underground & Nico.
So where could the problem lie? With the 'Future Days’ itself. The opening title track, that is. It is most probably the best musical piece that came out of Krautrock and one of the best in modern music! The combination of Czukay’s and Leibzeit’s intricate and undefinable rhythms, Karoli’s scratchy, on the edge of funky guitar scratches, Schmidt’s absolutely inventive use of synthesisers (almost unknown at the time) brought an almost mystic musical experience with such a number of musical strands that in themselves created an infinite number of possible musical paths.
Then there were Suzuki’s vocals, a story of its own. Damo Suzuki to this day remains one of the most inventive vocalists around. During his stint with Can, he was singing in something that certainly resembled the regular English language, with Suzuki interpreting his vision of what it should sound like, sometimes using ‘regular’ English words, sometimes, twisting them, sometimes inventing new ones. You can call it ‘Damoinglish’. “Future Days” itself was the pinnacle of Suzuki’s invention - he was whispering words that could have come from the language that is yet to be, with just the main phrase being clear and understandable to everybody. Future days, indeed.
Everything that comes afterwards probably would pale in anybody’s ears, no matter how good it was. And the rest of the album almost reaches that absolute brilliance only once, with the ever-shifting, almost 20 minutes long closer “Bel-Air”, which some of the current best post-rock/ambient bands wouldn’t be able to come up with.
Still, both “Spray”, and “Moonshake” rank among the best music Can have come up with, on any of their albums, but suffer the fate of being sandwiched between the grandeur of the two incredible ‘bookends’. That is particularly the case with “Spray” with its incredible rhythmic shakes, while “Moonshake”, the briefest track on the album, indicated the more ‘pop’-oriented direction Can would go on to after Damo Suzuki left” – Soundblab
Choice Cut: Moonshake
The Underrated Gem
Landed
Release Date: September 1975
Labels: Hörzu (Germany)/Virgin
Producer: Can
Standout Tracks: Full Moon on the Highway/Hunters and Collectors/Unfinished
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Can-Landed/master/11429
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6KPX8qdYQzYTeBZWNYBJJ0
Review:
““Vernal Equinox” is the undisputed highlight of the album. It's a massive, nine-minute jam-fest filled to the brim with energetic guitar, keyboard and drum solos... It's completely nuts, and the only place on this album where I get the feeling that they were actually trying to experiment intensely with the textures. There are no melody nor lyrics ... it's just a bunch of crazy instrumental solos that are coming in and out like waves. Ya gotta hear it! They follow that up with the relatively uneventful “Red Hot Indians,” but that's still a fairly fun song in its own right. Some light bongo drums patter around whilst a somewhat detached rhythm guitar comes in and plays a groove. I'm a particular fan of that alien saxophone that comes in like some manic depressive doo-wop player who forgot to take his medicine. (They introduce a guitar riff in the middle of the song that bears an uncanny resemblance to PiL's “Disappointed.” I won't complain too much since the PiL song is vastly superior to this.)
And the album closes with a 13-minute monstrosity called “Unfinished.” Some listeners have found it tedious, but I sort of think it's cool. It's just a lot of creepy, ambient waves of sounds... It's the spitting image of atmospheric video game music for Myst-like adventure games, and at least it's really interesting that Can was able to predict such music. Just for the slightly psychotic atmosphere, I'm willing to give it my thumbs up, but they really should have worked a little harder on it... It had a lot of potential, but they just didn't have enough momentum going to keep it sustained that long. The first minute of it is pretty great, but for most of the rest of it starts to grow tedious. Some musical sections seem to drag on too long and they're sometimes even predictable. It still would have worked as video game music since it is indeed atmospheric and is pretty successful at creating a mood... and you never listen directly to that stuff anyway.
I can't imagine why people who like Can would want to completely snub this record. As I said earlier, it's nowhere near as challenging or entertaining as their classic albums, but this has enough merits on its own to be worth a listen once a year or so” – Don Ignacio
Choice Cut: Vernal Equinox
The Final Album
Rite Time
Release Date: October 1989
Label: Mute
Producers: Michael Karoli/Holger Czukay
Standout Tracks: The Withoutlaw Man/Like a New Child/In the Distance Lies the Future
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Can-Rite-Time/master/16239
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5d6Qzg2oooAK5a3YC64W6g
Review:
“An unexpected reunion from Can (made even more unexpected by the presence of original singer Malcolm Mooney, who left the band in 1969), 1989's Rite Time is in large part a return to form for the group, especially when one considers how weak Can's last few '70s albums were. Wisely, the quintet doesn't try to replicate the sound they created over two decades before on albums like Monster Movie. Instead, Mooney and company make Rite Time a document of where they're at musically at the time. In short, it's funkier ("Give the Drummer Some"), funnier ("Hoolah Hoolah," which takes that old schoolyard rhyme about how they don't wear pants on the other side of France as the jumping-off point for its melody and lyrics), and more abstractly ambient (the elliptical closer "In the Distance Lies the Future") than before. Rite Time doesn't have the rubbery, polyrhythmic intensity of classic Can albums like Ege Bamyasi or Future Days, but it's a solidly listenable album that, unlike the majority of reunion albums, doesn't soil the memory of the band” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: On the Beautiful Side of a Romance
The Can Book
All Gates Open: The Story of Can
Authors: Rob Young/Irmin Schmidt
Publication Date: 3rd May, 2018
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Synopsis:
“All Gates Open presents the definitive story of arguably the most influential and revered avant-garde band of the late twentieth century: CAN. It consists of two books. In Book One, Rob Young gives us the full biography of a band that emerged at the vanguard of what would come to be called the Krautrock scene in late sixties Cologne. With Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay - two classically trained students of Stockhausen - at the heart of the band, CAN's studio and live performances burned an incendiary trail through the decade that followed: and left a legacy that is still reverberating today in hip hop, post rock, ambient, and countless other genres. Rob Young's account draws on unique interviews with all founding members of CAN, as well as their vocalists, friends and music industry associates. And he revisits the music, which is still deliriously innovative and unclassifiable more than four decades on. All Gates Open is a portrait of a group who worked with visionary intensity and belief, outside the system and inside their own inner space. Book Two, Can Kiosk, has been assembled by Irmin Schmidt, founding member and guiding spirit of the band, as a 'collage - a technique long associated with CAN's approach to recording. There is an oral history of the band drawing on interviews that Irmin made with musicians who see CAN as an influence - such as Bobby Gillespie, Geoff Barrow, Daniel Miller, and many others. There are also interviews with artists and filmmakers like Wim Wenders and John Malkovitch, where Schmidt reflects on more personal matters and his work with film. Extracts of Schmidt's notebook and diaries from 2013-14 are also reproduced as a reflection on the creative process, and the memories, dreams, and epiphanies it entails. Can Kiosk offers further perspectives on a band that have inspired several generations of musicians and filmmakers in the voices of the artists themselves. CAN were unique, and their legacy is articulated in two books in this volume with the depth, rigour, originality, and intensity associated with the band itself. It is illustrated throughout with previously unseen art, photographs, and ephemera from the band's archive” – Waterstones
Order: https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Gates-Open-Story-Can/dp/0571311490