Audio By Carbonatix
In the early Seventies, while the American flower-power movement of the Sixties withered and blew away, hippie culture invaded West Germany. In America, the Woodstock generation had revitalized the still-young rock idiom by infusing it with fresh dollops of blues, gospel, bluegrass, Appalachian music, and other roots-based genres. But dipping into the past was more problematic in Germany, where Hitler’s exploitation of the culture of the “common man” (das Völk) made an embrace of its folk history distasteful to baby boomers. German hippie bands like Amon Düül and Ash Ra Tempel took the easy path by aping American psychedelia. More progressive artists adopted a clean-slate approach in order to invent something genuinely new: Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream created divergent streams of electronic music — one minimalist and repetitive, the other lush and pseudo-symphonic.
The Cologne-based Can went down a bumpy road all its own, adopting a scattershot approach that appropriated elements from sources as diverse as world music and compositions by electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen — whose students at one time included band keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bass player and tape-loop manipulator Holger Czukay. Can’s most revolutionary discovery is something we simply take for granted today, but at the time it seemed unspeakably odd. Neo-tribal drumming took the lead in their songs. Melody, such as it existed, along with the piling on of electronic textures via homebrew oscillators and recorded sound effects, were both subordinated to the engine of pure rhythm. “One More Night” from the 1972 album Ege Bamyasi flaunted a mixed meter of alternating 4/4 and 3/4 measures set to a bouncy ambience derived from Brazilian samba. Singer Damo Suzuki, whose staccato delivery turned his voice into yet another percussive element, added to the sense of international dislocation with heavily accented English-language lyrics.
Can anticipated world-beat fusion with its Ethnological Forgery Series recordings (collected on the anthology Unlimited Edition), an outgrowth of its rhythm-based excursions that created ersatz African and Asian styles. 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma and 1975’s Landed toyed with Brazilian flavors, while reggae flicked a sinuous tongue at 1977’s Saw Delight. Czukay took foreign-music appropriation to an avant-garde climax with his 1980 solo album Movies, which featured “Persian Love,” a song built around Farsi-language vocals plundered from a shortwave radio broadcast by way of spliced tape recordings, an early precursor to sampling. North African-influenced drumming by Can percussionist Jaki Liebezeit added to its borderless feel. David Byrne and Brian Eno would later acknowledge “Persian Love” as the genesis for their 1981 aural collage album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. More recent works like Moby’s merging of folk blues and techno on Play and Clothesline Revival’s Of My Native Land also owe a sizable ancestral debt to Czukay.
Czukay left in 1977 to work on solo projects, leaving the rest of the group — augmented by bassist Rosko Gee and Nigerian percussionist Reebop Kwaku Baah, both from Steve Winwood’s jazzy British rock group Traffic — to try and recover the momentum that had been slipping away since Suzuki departed in 1974 to become a Jehovah’s Witness. The band’s final album from that era, 1978’s Out of Reach (Horgi Music/Caroline), is the only title that hasn’t been re-released on Can’s own Spoon Records label. Its ragged eccentricity may be the reason why. “November” opens a can of wriggling worms as Karoli unfurls thick ribbons of distorted electric guitar over a rock-ified Nigerian juju beat. Schmidt throws his whole body into pounding out doom-laden piano chords, while Gee’s bass bucks and dances like a fire raging against wet wood. This trancelike clatter must have sounded scarily exotic 25 years ago and still would make a good theme for an episode of Animal Planet. But aside from building up intensity, “November” doesn’t really go anywhere except into the inevitable fade-out. “Seven Days Awake” suffers the same fate despite an appealingly ominous hand drum and bass opening somewhat reminiscent of a Burundi ceremony.Two of the album’s three vocal tracks are so strange they make you wonder if anyone in the band even bothered listening to the playback. On “Pauper’s Daughter and I,” a weak-voiced Gee sings the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme in a performance that should have served as the guide track rather than the end product. (Think Paul McCartney releasing “Yesterday” as “Scrambled Eggs.”) On “Like Inobe God,” a funky disco number with reggae undertones, Baah’s double-tracked caterwauling doesn’t just sound like drunken karaoke — it sounds like drunken karaoke on a particularly bad night. While you can’t listen to it without wondering what they were thinking when they committed it to vinyl, its clumsy exuberance is oddly compelling, even endearing. The entire album is something of a train wreck that nags you to keep revisiting the accident scene in search of survivors. Its strange appeal is partly due to the bristling energy and an idiosyncratic mix of tightly scripted and loosey-goosey elements.
Nothing else in rock history remotely resembles Out of Reach or any other Can album, which may be why such an obscure band maintains a following that seems disproportionate to its body of work. Apart from a few flawless, forward-looking moments on Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, it’s the band’s missteps that stand out in their discography rather than the accomplishments. But that just makes it the model of a band willing to try anything to avoid rehashing rock clichés.
