Can - The Days of the Future

Can were born in 1965 from the meeting between Holger Czukay, a German-Pole from Danzig, and future keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, both students of Stockhausen. On the initiative of the latter and of David Johnson (future flautist), Czukay was called in '68 to bring to life the experimental project later christened "Can". They were joined by drummer Jaki Liebezeit, a fan of concréte musique with a past in free-jazz, and young self-taught guitarist Michael Karoli (curiously, Liebezeit and Karoli are, respectively, the brother and husband of the two girls pictured on the cover of Roxy Music's "Country Life"). African-American singer Malcolm Mooney was recruited as vocalist.

Having set up a studio in a castle near Cologne on Czukay's initiative, the "Inner Space", the band, equipped with a two-track recorder, began rehearsing. Far removed from a Canterbury-style avant-garde, Can proved rather open to American psychedelia and to the cosmic-Faustian German vein, which would find its counterpart right at the turn of the decade in Amon Duul, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust and so on.

What remains of this period runs in two directions. On one hand a compressed yet unbridled hard-rock, explicitly Hendrix-like, embellished by Mooney's moodiness, consistently found on Delay 1968 (released in '81); on the other hand, broken up by fragments, bare rhythms, pale semi-acoustic dreaminess on Unlimited Edition (1973 and 1976), which features, among other things, the free-form conception of "Cutaway", the phantasmagoria of the instrumental "Gomorrha", and the peculiar "ethnological inventions", still sketches of surreal exoticism.

The debut that emerged from this ferment is an astonishing "answer" to the Velvet Underground: Monster Movie (1969), recorded live in Norway, opens with the feverish dystonic dance of "Fathers Cannot Yell" and closes with the hallucinatory march of "Yoo Doo Right", a sort of halfway point between a "Sister Ray" and an "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", a progressive and regressive assemblage of lyrical shades between a riff and a theme of miraculous simplicity. But the album will also be remembered for the long, tormented melodic phrases of "Mary, Mary, So Contrary", where the guitar can - to an unwary ear - be mistaken for a violin.

In Can's music, everything must be, by definition, random, and tied to the drunkenness of the passionate sonic moment. As Czukay states, "this music has neither beginning nor end, it's the continuous outpouring of a point toward infinity, and an infinite distortion of the theme in a space of a thousand dimensions, where further inventions and further layers of reverb are born", so that Can's sound seems to transcend the barriers of time, and the drums don't keep time, but determine space. The era of Malcolm Mooney's broken voice, who would later be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, has its testament in Soundtracks (1970), an album that archives their career as film-score musicians with a series of generous, languid pieces (but there's also the abyssal "Mother Sky", bearing witness to their schizoid streak).

In place of Mooney's death rattle, along comes the vaguely androgynous timbre of non-singer, Japanese "Damo" Suzuki, found on the streets of Cologne, who would also end up badly, in a mystical crisis among the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Everyone was leaving while Damo prowled the stage like a samurai," recalls Czukay, who with Suzuki and the others would put together the double album Tago Mago (1971). Can decide to abandon the chaotic psychedelia that had characterized their early work in order to fulfil their dream of avant-garde music, bolstered by free-jazz-style improvisation. The English will call it "kraut-rock", lumping in other illustrious names of that era, such as Faust, Amon Duul, Neu!, Popul Vuh and many others.

It opens with "Paperhouse", post-industrial folk played on clean guitar, with a mournful rhythm and the eccentric vocals of Damo Suzuki, who treads a seditious musical line, introducing a gallop that will clear instrumental hurdles worthy of the finest noise-rock before coming to a halt, enveloped in the minimalist jams of Liebezeit and Czukay. Things continue with the noxious, disturbed tones of "Mushroom", featuring an alienated, psychopathic lyric in typical Can style; the cerebral rhythm and Damo Suzuki's feigned desperation put on quite a show over music that is rationally inconceivable, the madness of five acid-fried freaks hurling themselves against an impenetrable wall of sound. Musically, the main protagonists here are Schmidt, a hugely underrated keyboardist at the time, ready to conjure up twisted sounds, and Jaki Liebezeit, whose impeccable touch is almost indistinguishable from a drum machine. Thunderclaps precede the driving rhythm of "Oh Yeah": a twisted track woven from Karoli's bewitching combinations and Suzuki's vocals, which lose all control, spitting out words found in no dictionary. The rhythm recalls certain Velvet Underground-style boogies.

"Halleluwah" is the album's masterpiece: starting out from funk-rock, it journeys in search of unexplored sonic territories, intersecting the tribal sounds unleashed by Schmidt, Karoli's dazzling technique, Czukay's lopsided bass and the virtuosic drumming of Jaki Liebezeit, who with this performance confirms himself as one of the greatest drummers of all time. Also extraordinary are Karoli's Cale-style dissonances on violin, an instrument he'll set aside mere seconds later to pick up the guitar again. The track's infernal artistic inventions, carried by an irresistible rhythm, also pass through an apocalyptic climb toward a musical nirvana that the musicians handle with total clarity, gradually carrying the listener toward the composition's fade-out ending.

Next comes "Augmn", a hypnotic journey into the human mind, built on increasingly daring, hypnotic sounds and epileptic noise, closing with a dazed, highly technical solo from Liebezeit, framed by the screeching hiss of the keyboards. After a series of strange sounds, we're greeted by a jarring atmosphere dominated by stringed instruments, which is then neutralized by the geometric dissonances born of Karoli's magical violin and the frantic, chilling solutions of Can, which carry us inside a cave where despair and pain, fear and resignation, lie in wait.

"Peking O" is another small musical extravagance, considered by the Residents and Negativland to be the best song of all time — not surprisingly, it would have a strong influence on both. Liebezeit's programmed drum machine, the musical collages, the absurd noise inserts, the inexplicable instrumental polyphonies mirror the band's imbalance in the face of a sick society they can't bring themselves to accept; indeed, thanks to the power of their peculiar, "absolute" music, Can enter another society altogether, one of anarchy, lust, freedom, boldness, chaos, ecstasy, friendship, hallucination. In a word: purity.

A grand finale comes with the bizarre "Bring Me Coffee Or Tea", accompanied by Jaki Liebezeit's free-jazz drumming and the Eastern-tinged tones of Karoli's guitars, which would resurface a few months later in the band's only commercial hit: the track "Spoon". Reaching as high as No. 1 in Germany and adopted as the theme tune for a German TV series, "Spoon" would be released in 1972 on Ege Bamyasi. Tago Mago, on the other hand, never sold much, but it would leave an indelible mark on bands such as Sonic Youth, Fall, Pop Group, Television, Wire, Cabaret Voltaire, Fushitsusha, Muffins and many others. On vinyl it came out as an unusually long double album; for its fortieth anniversary (2011), the record was reissued in another "double" edition, with a bonus live mini-CD.

Next came the album Future Days (1973), unfolding through the swelling and coiling of breezes and shifting climatic vertigo, and through the intersection of the most incestuous disharmonies. It stands, ultimately, as a paradoxical and unrepeatable consecration of cosmic rock, directed by a criminally gifted Liebezeit, drummer of the improbable. No one would ever again recreate cosmic music with such ancestral refinement throughout the Seventies.

Ege Bamyasi (1972) is the hoarser, more linear proof found sitting between those two chasms. It's an album steered by a now fully evolved minimalism: a new sonic orgy in "Soup", but also, and above all, more classic song forms, hit singles such as "Spoon" (number one in Germany), though it's the subtle, breathless collapse of the pulsating "One More Night" that reveals the band's most arduous clarity, rigorously handing the percussive baton over to "Waiting For The Man". Singles, b-sides, projects and experiments from this voracious period are gathered in Radio Waves ('94-'97), but can also be found on Peel Sessions ('95) — two essential releases for grasping Can's thinking, both during their golden era and beyond. In both, worth noting are the never-ending versions of "Up to Barkeloo…", a pockmarked scream and a colossal peak for Suzuki. He would never be replaced; Karoli and the entire rhythm section would take over vocal duties, and others would be added along the way, including the dreadful "rasta" Rosko Gee, who at the end of '76 (in the midst of the band's decline) replaced Czukay on bass, co-steering the turn toward a drawing-room exoticist psychedelia.

Soon Over Babaluma (1974) also leans toward the minimal, but in a more spacious, contradictory way: in the moaning tango of "Come Sta La Luna", as in the rarefied brilliance of "Chain Reaction/Quantum Phisic" and in the "perfect-in-itself" rhythmic-melodic quality of "Dizzy Dizzy" — the two vintage gems. A decent anthological overview, albeit with tracks necessarily trimmed down, is offered up to this point by the double album Cannibalism (No. 1). It's Landed (1975), however, that closes out the German band's golden era. Contracts in hand (EMI and Virgin), Can manage, with an intensely inspired Karoli, to draw progressive lifeblood out of paroxysmally archaic mud, as the English school inspires. The songs are a frenzy of flickers that come into focus against one another. And closing out Landed is the stunning mysticism of "Unfinished" (their finest instrumental piece), which brings Can's golden era to a close.

From their later period — the misfortune of their reggae drift — only scattered flowers remain, like the dense collage of Animal Wave, though these would be mostly instrumental. Can, or Inner Space (1979), aided by an already estranged Czukay, nonetheless manages to bring the adventure to a worthy close. It's a highly electronic, rhythmic work, vaguely reminiscent of Landed, with the tightrope-walking peak of the cinematic "Safe" bidding farewell to what was by then a withered "cosmic kraut".

The solo careers, while worthwhile, would never again give full body to such genius, though Holger Czukay's Movies (1979) remains remarkable, echoing, a decade on, the admirable madness of Canaxis 5. The sporadic 1989 reunion would prove superfluous, but "Last Night Sleep", handed over at the dawn of the new decade to Wim Wenders for "Until The End Of The World", confirmed that, kept in check by a grain of dust, Can know how to avoid the sloppy experimentalism of an a-synthetic prog, the kind that has unfortunately come back into fashion today. In 2001, Can's story was marked by loss: the passing of guitarist, violinist and singer Michael Karoli. Meanwhile, their musical legacy has been taken up by a multitude of artists, including Brian Eno, Tortoise, Stereolab, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth.

In 2012, Mute Records released the triple box set The Lost Tapes, containing unreleased recordings, live performances, improvisation fragments, abandoned compositions, and more.

In 2021, Irmin Schmidt launched a restoration and reissue project devoted to a series of the band's live shows from their golden years, the first of which is Live In Stuttgart 1975, a sweeping document that sums up what rock had been up to 1975, with an enviable capacity for improvisation and for building colossal monster tracks (ranging from ten to thirty-five minutes). Five long improvised pieces totalling ninety minutes, in which the official discography all but dissolves entirely in the search for the perfect groove, found and then immediately deconstructed, only to begin the search anew. Recorded on Halloween night in 1975, the record is a small-yet-great masterpiece for the nostalgically inclined, with the 35 minutes of the third track standing out above all — a colossal improvisation that captures far more than the career of a single band, perhaps even the very essence of what American and European rock had imagined over the preceding decade.

It's clear that the CD loses something when listened to outside of the live experience, tending to repeat itself on several occasions, though without excessively diluting that sense of a major event that must have accompanied the lucky attendees.

Contributions by Massimiliano Raffa ("Tago Mago"), Francesco Nunziata ("The Lost Tapes"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Live In Stuttgart, 1975")

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