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█ █ P U B L I C . S O U N D
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█ █ presenting our latest release
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r e l e a s e . i n f o
Artist.....: Can
Title......: The Lost Tapes
Rip Date...: Sep-2012 Cat.No.....: CDSPOON55
Style......: Psychedelic Rock Label......: Spoon
Quality....: VBRkbps Type.......: Album
Size.......: 339,6 MB Source.....: CDDA
r e l e a s e . n o t e s
Summer is over, and it's time to buy some nice records again. You
could do far worse than this epic collection of previously
unavailable Can goodness.
Fifteen, twenty years ago, it would have been natural to respond
to The Lost Tapes not just with astounded applause but with a
rather lofty prescription: any group could learn a lot from close,
repeated listening. It's still true, of course, but in 2012 it
seems a bit out of touch. In many ways Can - whose name so clearly
dates them to a time before the internet search - were not like
us, sat here with conflicting histories of everything, isolated by
choice and by the new demands of our miserable lives. Living and
working together was the point; the strengths of five individuals
merged to create something greater, something uncontainable.
It's maybe a bit na∩ve to think that this ideal - the band as a
cell, decrypting codes and forcing doors, not so much jamming as
un-jamming - could be recaptured, here and now. These days, with
the creation and, to a great extent, the consumption of music
reflecting the conditions of late capitalism - atomisation, anomie
- Can's collective action feels like a nagging dream, something
drifting in from another time, from the long-forgotten fringes of
the libertarian Left. The communal, the collective, the sense of
musicians as cogs in a machine... it's barely a factor in rock
music now, let alone the avant-garde. Everyone's too busy, or else
intent on expressing their own worldview, their own confusion,
their own longing for something beyond their own problems, their
own self.
It used to be different, like a lot of other things. From 1968 to
1975, the period covered by The Lost Tapes, synergy between
musicians was revered as popular music's basic source of power.
This encouraged a certain snobbishness, of course, prioritising
technique over content and giving a free pass to a great deal of
rot - the loosening of entry requirements for pop, when it
happened, was long overdue and quickly rewarded. But this is
irrelevant to Can, who were always beyond the showy stuff, working
as they were towards a somewhat higher goal. There was rarely room
in their music for anything so crass as an extended solo; the
explorations here were conducted as a team, each member dependent
on the others. The subtlety and grace with which they avoided (or
inverted) boredom on all those long trips out there and back is
still unrivalled, the fluency and invention of their ensemble
playing often uncanny. This much, lots of us know already - The
Lost Tapes confirms it, over and over.
Can's spontaneous, co-operative creativity hasn't been weakened by
time or by anything else; the music here sounds somehow even more
potent, having outlasted all the cultural currents which carried
it in. It sounds almost revolutionary again. Something unburdened
by the self, or by self-consciousness; free of the past and the
present.
Holger Czukay, somewhat professorial at the age of 30, joined
Inner Space (the original name of the group formed by keyboard
player Irmin Schmidt) on the understanding it would be a kind of
art collective, a rather academic fusion of rock with the
teachings of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he and Schmidt's old teacher
and mentor. In fact, from the sound of 'Millionenspiel', the
opening track on this collection, Inner Space progressed very
quickly to what would become the early Can sound ('Millionenspiel'
is a psychedelicised Chantays on a surfin' safari through medieval
Europe and Jamaica in the 50s, far beyond the fumblings of the
Prehistoric Future tape). Still, it was only when grainy-voiced
Malcolm Mooney joined on vocals that Czukay grasped what could
really be achieved. As he describes it in the sleeve notes to The
Lost Tapes, "Stockhausen with a hell of a drive!"
That drive was Can's trademark, powered not just by Mooney's
aggression but by Michael Karoli's tattoo-needle guitar style and
(especially) the drumming of Jaki Liebezeit, in which the delicacy
and invention of jazz was applied to a series of rigidly
mechanised beats, a kind of percussive hypnosis driving the others
forward without fear. In time, as Mooney was replaced by the
ethereal Damo Suzuki, the drive became more of a glide, the sound
spun out until it was almost translucent, but the band retained
its eerie power: heavy when featherlight, direct when delirious.
In the glow of Schloss Norvenich, their hidey-hole near Cologne
(then later at Inner Space Studios, a refurbished cinema in nearby
Weilerswist), Can spent hours and days and nights and sunrises and
sunsets playing. Everything was recorded, although not everything
survived, because of the cost of tape, and - according to Schmidt
in the sleeve notes - because of Liebezeit's insistence on
constant forward movement: "Erase!" These three discs have been
assembled from a pile of rediscovered masters, pulled from a
cupboard after nearly forty years, and if they'd been recorded
this morning they'd sound like they came from the future.
Occasionally, the centre fails to hold and Can are pitched off in
different directions: such is the price of freedom. Still, on
those rare occasions where the music is slightly ragged, it
remains relentlessly inventive. The single most jaw-dropping thing
about Can was this unstoppable originality - what stands out most
clearly here is that even at the point of exhaustion, where anyone
else would fall back on shopworn blues riffs and keyboard-demo
drum fills, Can were utterly incapable of clichΘ. And when all
five members coalesce - which they do more often than not, more
often than pretty much any other group who ever relied on
improvisation and daring - the results are incomparable, sometimes
indescribable.
The Lost Tapes wouldn't be a good place to start, being
essentially a sequence of snapshots; in that sense at least it's
clearly inferior to the self-contained worlds of Tago Mago, Ege
Bamyasi and Future Days, the early-70s trilogy on which Can's
reputation rests. But these are not just offcuts and outtakes -
despite the inevitable incoherence which comes with any
compilation, this is plainly superior to a fair few of Can's
original albums, and here and there comes close to touching the
tail of their very finest work. Almost nothing here is worthless,
much of it is so good you could laugh out loud at the thought of
sounding like this and then forgetting all about it for the best
part of four decades. But Can were busy, doing something different
in a different time; in many ways, they were not like us.
In November 1968, a woman called Beate Klarsfeld climbed onto the
podium at the conference of the Christian Democratic Union, West
Germany's ruling party, and slapped the Chancellor, Kurt Georg
Kiesinger, screaming "Kiesinger - Nazi! Stand down!" (It later
transpired that she was in the pay of the East Germans, but it's
doubtful this fact would have put off many young firebrands at the
time.) The swell of radical thought in the West that year took a
slightly different shape in different countries, and in West
German cities the mood was especially fractious and politicised.
Kiesinger, formerly a NSDAP propagandist, was only the most
visible link between the country's new establishment and the
horrors of the recent past.
The de-Nazification of West Germany after World War Two was an
almost impossible task handled badly. Plenty from the German
professional classes had something in their history which didn't
look good; some (most famously Wernher Von Braun, developer of the
V-2 rocket turned architect of the US space program) were poached
by the Allies for their expertise. Others - pen-pushers,
bureaucrats, torturers - remained in the system providing
continuity for the Bundesrepublik. For several decades ex-Nazis
held positions of power at every level of German society: federal
and local government, the police, the judiciary, the intelligence
service, the civil service, the media, the church. The foreign
ministry provided protection for former party officials, advising
on and assisting with travel and any associated legal issues. At
one point two thirds of the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police
Office, were ex-members of the SS Totenkopf. The BND -
Bundesnachrichtendienst, the West German secret service - was also
riddled with SS veterans, and for years seemed disproportionately
concerned with the surveillance and occasional harassment of
German leftists and "pacifists". Generally, there was quiet
acceptance that not much more could be done, and besides, a few
old fascists could be useful weapons in a Cold War against
Communism. A younger generation of Germans - Can's generation,
born just before, just after or during the Second World War - were
inclined to disagree. In 1967, a student protest against a state
visit by the Shah of Iran was put down with such enthusiasm, a
young man was shot through the head at point-blank range by the
police, and instantly the battle was on.
It's hardly surprising that the radicalism of West German youth in
the 60s and 70s went beyond the waving of placards and sit-ins in
the college canteen. Its seriousness, in fact, could reach
ludicrous extremes: a poll revealed that a quarter of Germans
sympathised with the murderous inanity of Andreas Baader's Red
Army Faction. Crossover between this idealistic unrest and the
extreme German music of the time was sometimes pretty direct -
Baader-Meinhof fugitives hiding out at Amon Dⁿⁿl's place (much to
the band's dismay, in fairness) - and sometimes a little more
subtle. The music of Can was never explicitly political, but it
was always radical. A synthesis of Stockhausen, Sly & The Family
Stone, 'Sister Ray' and Ornette Coleman would be musically
incendiary at any time, but in these times it was more than that.
Can's aesthetic choices may have been instinctive, but they
weren't coincidental: they were drawn to African rhythms, to the
music of Eastern European gypsies, to non-hierarchical systems,
personally and musically (crucial to their sound was the abuse of
those strict tonal relationships enforced by the Third Reich's
cultural guardians). They were, in Nazi parlance, Entartete Musik
- degenerate music - taken almost to its limit. This was not
necessarily a deliberate choice on their part. But with that
mindset, in that country, at that point in history, there was no
choice.
Progressive rock in Britain reflected a kind of aspirational
complacency: trying to escape a three-chord trap, these generally
well-brought-up musicians reached for the classical forms in which
so many of them had been schooled. Fundamentally snobbish and
bourgeois, this approach was poison to the new German bands, the
kind of thinking from which they felt compelled to take rapid,
immediate flight. The so-called Krautrock groups, even as they
pushed at the limits of what rock could do (or what it could be),
were drawn to precisely the elements of this music the Brit-
proggers sought to purge: the inarticulacy, the mantric
repetition, the grunginess, the extraneous noise. In Can's case,
this sat well with an avant-garde aesthetic which couldn't have
been more clearly opposed to the fetishisation of formal
"perfection". What's more, they understood the potential
significance of sound, its psychological sway, its strange
capacity for subversion.
"Television is immensely interested in the political opinions of
beat musicians, because they can't talk," a smirking Irmin Schmidt
informed a German TV crew in 1971. "TV is not at all interested in
the political opinions of people who also want socialism and a
more human society, [and] can spell it out. I am insecure, I know
much too little... so television, being gloriously critical of
society, can take me as an example. So that it can preach: 'look,
they do not know what they want!' [A little] bit of the revolution
we want is included in the music, but you can destroy this when
you manipulate the musicians in such a way that they are forced to
interpret their music with words..."
Jaki Liebezeit was playful when he suggested that Can could be an
acronym for communism, anarchism, nihilism, but it wasn't supposed
to be a joke. This is a side to Can which is often forgotten, but
they were as much oppositional as anything else, an extreme
reaction to their own past and present. There's no other way to
make sense of them; the unity, the exquisite restlessness, the way
they work so very hard to transcend time and place. Can's
relationship to the mood of post-war Germany is more than a
footnote. It doesn't define them, but does provide a context
within which they're easier to understand, and harder to reduce.
This was "alternative" music, not (just) in the sense of consumer
choice; a demonstration of a different way of living, an
impression of freedom. Way out, as a way out.
The Lost Tapes is incredible, of course, but inevitably it's not
all great. A few of these tracks, like the live (and very long)
'Abra Cada Braxas', feature a lot of the shrieking and rumbling
into which Can would sometimes descend when things weren't really
working out; despite its marvellous title, 'Networks Of Foam' is
an uncharacteristically lazy lollop into the middle of nowhere,
Irmin Schmidt's homage to Chick Corea let down by a meandering
Karoli (finally, Schmidt gives in and just starts slamming his
elbows down on the keys). It's not the musical form that's the
problem - another live piece where they let it all hang out,
'Godzilla Fragment', sounds authentically crazed - it's the form
of the musicians. It would have been slightly creepy if Can had
not had the occasional off-day, but be prepared: a couple are
recorded for posterity here.
While this is indeed three-and-a-quarter hours of unheard Can, in
a way it kind of isn't, as many of these tracks are warm-ups or
dry runs for some of the group's best-known recordings. 'A Swan Is
Born' is the pencil sketch for Ege Bamyasi's 'Sing Swan Song';
'Desert' is an early try-out of 'Soul Desert' from Soundtracks;
'On The Way To Mother Sky' is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bash at
the instrumental sections of 'Mother Sky' (though there was still
some way to go).
The lengthy 'Dead Pigeon Suite' - assembled from the soundtrack to
a TV movie called Tote Taube In Der Beethovenstrasse; Dead Pigeon
In Beethoven Street - is clearly the best of these works-in-
progress. Groping towards 'Vitamin C' (arguably the most compact
and clinical Can tune, the track on which their experimentation is
at its most economical), 'Dead Pigeon Suite' is sprawling and
open-plan, a sequence of variations spliced together and offered
up like a sketchbook. It's almost a shame to be shown the workings
- deep down, I think, we'd all like to believe that Can just
played for nine hours one day, and somewhere in there was 'Vitamin
C' - and yet as Damo Suzuki finds his bearings ("Hey!" he yells at
7:09; "you're losing!" at 7:18; "hey you!" at 8:17, and so on)
it's impossible not to be drawn in. The band are still searching
for the groove, as Liebezeit drums his limbs off and the others
approach the track from every conceivable angle, and others
besides. The keyboard break appears first as a spooky introduction
on Damo's penny whistle, then again towards the end as an even
spookier organ piece, Smile set in Mitteleuropa. But while 'Dead
Pigeon Suite' is fascinating and at times almost painfully
brilliant, it's still a (slightly) inferior version of something
we already knew - too much of this and The Lost Tapes would have
gone down the same road as The Beatles' Anthology, a curio, to be
played increasingly rarely as the novelty wore off.
Most of this stuff, though, is brand new even to Can collectors
and sounds implausibly, miraculously fresh. The tracks with
Malcolm Mooney date from both before and after Monster Movie (the
one LP on which he appears) and provide a broader view of what Can
were up to at the very beginning. 'Waiting For The Streetcar', the
best example here of that early, explicitly garagey Can, is a
definite progression from the first album, fantastically delicate,
fluid and brutal. A couple of these early shots are no more than
"interesting" (barely that, in the case of the painfully stoned
'True Story' and the literally piss-taking 'The Agreement', a
field recording from a lavatory) but there's plenty of Mooney
material here which dwarfs Delay 1968, the earlier trawl through
Can's 60s archive. 'When Darkness Comes', one of their last
recordings together, sounds like Tim Buckley's 'Starsailor' with
the smack drained from its veins, and offers a clue to how Can
might have sounded in the 70s with their original line-up (the
answer is "not quite as good", which makes it easier to enjoy).
The best bit is right at the end: Mooney's head begins to clear
and he launches into some basic R&B chanting, Schmidt underlines
it with a mangled chord, and the whole thing stops abruptly at the
very moment it's fallen together.
The Can sound expanded slowly, from the infinite density of
Monster Movie to the wide open spaces of Future Days and the
underrated Soon Over Babaluma, finally reaching heat death at an
unspecified point in the late 1970s, by which time The Lost Tapes
is over (there's one track from 1975, but nothing at all from
later than that). Inevitably, most of the action came in that
early-mid period, during which Can were possibly the most exciting
group on Earth. On the fabulous seventeen-minute 'Graublau', short
wave radio samples weave through a roughly-edited jam which has
Can at their most obviously "Krautrocky" - it sounds like it dates
from some time in 1970, between Soundtracks and Tago Mago - and
their most effortlessly inspired. 'Messrs Scissors, Fork And
Light' cuts together contributions to the soundtrack of Das
Messer, another Can-scored polizei drama, and shivers exquisitely
(with bits of 'Spoon' stirred in) while Liebezeit tries to channel
the percussive power of a West African village. A live version of
'Spoon' does away with the record's twilit larking, setting the
controls to "up" and then accelerating for seventeen minutes.
Equally bold is another live recording, in which Can strip the
sullen 'Mushroom' down to an ominous chug and lash at it with
squeals from Karoli's guitar, until the tension is broken with a
scream from the synths and a sudden collapse; it's frighteningly
good. These are the moments where what Can "lost" in a cupboard
sounds most beautifully like what most of us lost when we learned
to speak.
In between are a number of minor tracks, highlighting the
endlessly-curious eclecticism which kept Can six steps ahead.
These range from the entirely abstract ('Blind Mirror Surf',
'Evening All Day') to snippets of ambient dislocated folk
('Private Nocturnal', 'Obscura Primavera'), serrated Teutonic funk
('Bubble Rap', 'Midnight Sky') and even, on 'The Loop', a stunted
and shivering Chicago blues. These odd diversions and little
tossed pebbles were always a part of Can, and while none of these
tracks are shattering, it wouldn't be the same without them.
And whatever reservations can be rustled up in the name of
objectivity or whatever, ultimately this is just... amazing. The
Lost Tapes is in no way comparable to previous authorised doggy
bags like Delay 1968 or Unlimited Edition. This is something else
entirely - Can at their peak, indomitable.
And so, that lofty prescription, then: any group could learn a lot
from close, repeated listening. It's still true, I think, but...
well, that's it. It's still true. Isn't it? Now more than ever.
Trying to copy Can is irredeemably stupid, of course, unless you
happen to have been trained up by a giant of the avant-garde, and
have access to the greatest drummer in the history of popular
music (anyone else intending to try should change the name of
their band to Can't). People still talk about Can a lot, or steal
a riff, or steal a beat, but what's worth taking is under the
surface. The courage, the constant communication, the idea of the
band as a cell; the countless possibilities suggested by Can in
those five, six, seven years are still there ready to be used, and
will bring light and space and something indefinable to any music
brave enough to use them.
Anyone, in fact, could learn a lot from this; anyone caught in a
present defined by atomisation and anomie. You only have to
listen. The beauty and strength of The Lost Tapes is a reminder of
that unused alternative, something drifting in from another time,
a glimpse of what we could really achieve by living and working
together.
--http://thequietus.com/articles/09079-can-the-lost-tapes-review
p l a y l i s t
CD1 ..
..
01 Millionenspiel 05:49
02 Waiting For The Streetcar 10:08
03 Evening All Day 06:58
04 Deadly Doris 03:10
05 Graublau 16:47
06 When Darkness Comes 03:48
07 Blind Mirror Surf 08:39
08 Obscura Primavera 03:19
09 Bubble Rap 09:24
..
CD2 ..
..
01 Your Friendly Neighbourhood Whore 03:43
02 True Story 04:30
03 The Agreement 00:37
04 Midnight Sky 02:44
05 Desert 03:20
06 Spoon - Live 16:47
07 Dead Pigeon Suite 11:47
08 Abra Cada Braxas 10:12
09 A Swan is Born 03:00
10 The Loop 02:33
..
CD3 ..
..
01 Godzilla Fragment 01:59
02 On The Way To Mother Sky 04:35
03 Midnight Men 07:35
04 Networks Of Foam 12:36
05 Messer, Scissors, Fork And Light 08:24
06 Barnacles 07:46
07 E.F.S. 108 02:07
08 Private Nocturnal 06:49
09 Alice 01:56
10 Mushroom [Live] 08:18
11 One More Saturday Night [Live] 06:34
195:54 min
g r e e t i n g s
agw - amok - bass - bcc - bex - boss - cmg - cmc - cms - d2h
def - dh - disc0 - drum - emp - ftd - fwyh - gem - i8 - ipc
jce - jfk - jrp - just - khz - kinky - kw - lame - maem - mbs
mgc - psycz - r2r - rac - radial - rapid - rks - rtb - sb
sever - sfe - soup - sour - sq - tr - trt - ube - uc - upe
uki - xtc - yard - zi
respect to music lovers worldwide
never forget : go to the show. buy the t-shirt. order the vinyl