I recall the hours I spent in the Eighties listening to the weird and delightful sounds of Can, a visionary band from the late Sixties and early Seventies. Alas, their albums went the way of all vinyl, and I am pleased to see that Can’s brilliant music has recently been made available on iTunes. I immediately picked up my three favorite albums, Monster Movie, Tago Mago, and Future Days. (Ege Bamyasi, from the same period as Tago Mago, is also highly recommended, and the band’s most accessible album.)
Here are a few thoughts about Can and what their music has meant. The band was remarkable is several respects. While they started out as a psychodelic product of the late Sixties with strong echos of the Velvet Underground, they quickly broke new ground. Two of their four core members had studied with Stockhausen and Ligeti, and were “serious” modern classical musicians and composers (Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt). After a trip to NYC, they decided that rock music provided the more interesting field for artistic expression, and they formed Can (originally known as “The Can”). This doesn’t mean that you will hear twelve-tone counterpoints, but there are certainly passages that defy conventional tonality and that are experimental. Another remarkable aspect of their music is that it is largely improvisational, an influence of the modern “new” jazz their drummer Jaki Liebezeit had played. Yet the music is disciplined and minimalist. This improvisational quality is particularly apparent in Can’s two vocalists, Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki (the NYC band Mooney Suzuki is named in tribute to them). And that brings up the next remarkable thing about Can: The extraordinary influence they have exerted on progressive, avant-garde, experimental, and ambient music (Wikipedia lists some of the many acts who have cited Can as their influence). Two more remarkable things about Can: Their music changed from album to album. By the time of Future Days, they were exploring electronic and ambient soundscapes that would not become part of the mainstream until twenty years later. And Can’s musicianship was just astonishing. Their drummer, Jaki Liebezeit must be one of the all time great drummers and if you are into that sort of thing, you will get endless pleasure from hearing him lay down steady and irresistible grooves, along with Czukay, the bassist. The other band members, including guitarist Michael Karoli (who was Czukay’s guitar student before he was invited to joint the band), are equally amazing, and while the music is often weird and far-out it is deeply satisfying and beautiful (after you develop a taste for it). Until the mid-seventies, Can recorded all their music on a two-track tape recorder in a room the walls of which were hung with dozens of old mattresses. No multitracking.
There is also the most delightful folklore surrounding Can, most of it probably apocryphal. Like the story that when the band recorded their mind-blowing classic Yoo Doo Right (you can hear a ten-minute excerpt on youtube), the clock in the studio would stop whenever Karoli stopped playing and would start again as he started. The track represents another of Can’s innovation: it’s probably the first track edited down from a longer improvisational session. 10 hours of a mad groove compressed into 19 minutes, the length of one side of vinyl. (Yoo Doo Right is on Monster Movie, and has been covered several times, if you’ll believe it.) The original singer, Malcom Mooney, a sculptor from New York, left the band in 1970 on the advice of his doctors, who feared an impairment of his mental health if he continued to play with Can.
Anyway, here is to the grandfathers of prog, ambient, trance/house, and several other genres. If you’ll give Can a listen, you won’t believe how cutting-edge the music still sounds, after nearly forty years.
Some youtube can weirdness:
Mother Sky
Spoon (their one mildly successful, almost commercial track)
Moonshake (almost a pop song; from Future Days)
Short version of Halleluhwah (from Tago Mago - it’s over 18 minutes on the album)
Give a shout if you are a Can fan, too. 
