Can

There are plenty of landmark debuts that come to mind, the kind that changed the course of music and of the artists themselves: "Velvet Underground & Nico", "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" by Pink Floyd, "Marquee Moon" by Television, "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division, "Psychocandy" by Jesus And Mary Chain. But if we wanted, we could add one more to the list: "Tago Mago" by Can. Why? Because if "Monster Movie" features Malcolm Mooney on vocals, and "Soundtrack" is regarded for what it actually is, namely a collection of songs written for film (the band themselves have always counted it as their second record but not as album number two), then Can in their classic lineup — Damo Suzuki on vocals, Irmin Schmidt on keyboards, Holger Czukay on bass, Jaki Liebezeit on drums, Michael Karoli on guitar — actually make their debut right here.

After barely a year of activity, and with one album under their belt, Can run into their first crisis: following his psychoanalyst's advice, Malcolm Mooney leaves the band and heads back to his native United States. For the four musicians from Cologne it's a real blow, because although unstable (his nervous breakdown, followed by a collapse, during their second live show is the stuff of legend) and prone to skipping out, it was Mooney himself who had pushed the group to embrace funk as well, not to mention his singular vocal style.

A nasty blow. But while Brian Eno theorized ambient music while immobilized in a hospital bed, Can found their new singer over a cup of coffee.

It's fate playing its hand, one afternoon in 1969. Chatting at a café table, Liebezeit and Czukay notice a busker with Asian features chanting strange incantations skyward. A few hours later Can will play the first of four dates at Munich's Blow Up club, and Czukay decides there's nothing better to do than walk up to this strange character and offer him the job of singer. The strange character accepts; and once on stage, amid spastic movements and Bedouin screams, whipping up the crowd, he leaves behind a live performance still remembered today. Rarely has such a figure been seen on a stage, sinister and innocent at once, visceral and instinctive like a Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee docet) playing at being Jim Morrison. He's also the right man to bring into the studio.

On the aforementioned "Soundtrack" — five tracks for him and two for the departing Mooney — he makes his studio debut, with a "Mother Sky" that alone would be enough to canonize him, but the best is yet to come.

As 1970 draws to a close, in Cologne, holed up in a wing of Schloss Nörvenich — henceforth known as Inner Space Studios — Can plan their personal masterpiece. Over three months of recording, with Holger Czukay editing and manipulating the tapes, the band channels avant-garde and psychedelic impulses according to the — veiled — mandate of avoiding any Anglo-American template. And if "Monster Movie" was the wayward offspring of Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, "Tago Mago" was a state of grace and miraculous alchemy. A double album that could have been a single, were it not for a figure we'll get to shortly.

It opens with "Paperhouse". Liebezeit seems to look around, sly, moving in a manner that's restrained if not exactly subdued, much like Suzuki. Czukay sticks to the essentials and Schmidt is barely noticeable, while Karoli — the only one with a genuinely rock background, and it shows — phrases like Sam Andrew of Janis Joplin fame. And even when the mood shifts, moving frantically into hard-bluesy territory, it sounds like a more possessed Kozmic Blues Band. But the ground is being laid. As "Paperhouse" closes, "Mushroom" settles in, like a single organism. A peculiar funk-but-also-dub snapshot takes shape, and the vision starts to stretch further ahead (here are the first seeds of a certain daring wave sound to come), with Suzuki in a trance and the others acting as a perfect rhythm machine. "Oh Yeah" opens with a thunderclap (or an exploding bomb) and the stakes rise further, with Schmidt's synth backing up a Liebezeit who, ahead of Klaus Dinger (the first Neu! album would come out in 1972), retreading "Mother Sky" ground, unveils the motorik gospel. The tape-treated vocal carries a sinister quid, and the tellurian bass, propped up by a still-bluesy guitar, makes "Oh Yeah" and its rhythmic ups and downs an essential treatise on (modern, as ever) history for anyone.

From here on, having been creative and daring, the band also becomes frightening. And monumental, as in "Halleluwah". Take early Funkadelic and imagine them even further out than usual, to the point of repeating the same groove for eighteen minutes. It's trance-funk on codeine, sensual in its vocals and relentless in its churn. Monotony elevated to an art form.

Four tracks that alone would already make a masterpiece. But as Czukay once said, those sessions "represented the attempt to reach a mysterious musical world, from light to darkness and back again". They couldn't end there. And it was thanks to the tenacity of Irmin Schmidt's wife, also the band's manager, Hildegard Reittenberg, that "Tago Mago" went from single to double album, including material that Can themselves — and the label too — would have preferred to hold back for a future "Unlimited Edition".

And so from light, we move to darkness. "Aumgn" is a percussive bacchanal, a mantra, musique concrète or esoteric music. This time the voice is Schmidt's, but more than singing it's a lament, and in the background the string of clangs, violins and keyboards lends the whole thing a spectral quality. In attitude it could be likened to Faust's "Tapes", or to Kluster, or even to Italy's own Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza or Area's "Event 76". But here it goes even further, and only they know where. "Peking O" feels like a bluff. Song form is completely dismantled, if it's even a song at all. Suzuki's voice rambles with no sense whatsoever, while the electronic drums, now bossa nova, now spasmodically sped up, weave disorienting rhythms. And amid a spastic jazz piano and Venusian percussion, the only certainty (?) is that to understand the Residents (?) this might be the place to start.

And from darkness, the return. "Bring Me Coffee Or Tea" is carried by Czukay's hypnotic bass and Liebezeit's drums, here at humanoid levels. It's a solemn groove, neither funk nor rock. It's a sound as close to world music as it is to some unknown ritual. Total music for some, chamber music (a very spacious one) for others. Unquestionably, ahead of its time.

"Tago Mago" is this and more. An obvious platitude, but a necessary one.

Just as it's necessary to revisit it forty years after its release. Because, indeed, forty years matter, and few records can bear that weight. It deserves celebrating. And Mute takes care of that, issuing a new edition of "Tago Mago" for the anniversary, this time double (whereas digitally it had always been single), bundled with a live CD and reusing the artwork from the old UK edition of the album, which — unlike the German one with its atomic mushroom cloud — simply showed a photo of the band on stage, from behind. On the live disc, it's striking to hear "Halleluwah" (which by its very structure could go on for days...) trimmed down to "just" ten minutes, "Mushroom" stretched out to twice its length (becoming far more measured and menacing), and "Spoon" — from 1972's "Ege Bamyasi", the year of these particular recordings — turned into a dizzying half-hour monster.

But the freshness of this album comes as no surprise: unlike so many classics (from Led Zeppelin to Velvet Underground), it still sounds like it was released tomorrow.

In short, (i) Can.

Ah, we almost forgot: to the English, it's kraut-rock.

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19/01/2012