There’s got to be something destabilizing about handling vocal duties in the German rock group Can. When two of your singers — Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki — quit after a few years to seek either psychiatric treatment (in Mooney’s case) or religion (Suzuki became a Jehovah’s Witness), you know that’s some powerful mojo going on.
Interest in ’70s band Can has spiked lately thanks to liberal use of their music on the soundtrack to the 2010 art movie Norwegian Wood, based on the Haruki Murakami novel. Last year saw the release of “The Lost Tapes,†a three-hour journey into the band’s more experimental moments, culled from some 300 hours of rehearsals and jams over the decades. (Can stopped recording by 1980.)
Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore describes first listening to Can as experiencing a band that approached rock from a place “outside of rock.†That place probably goes by the name of Germany. Nominally part of the “krautrock†genre, Can’s music always owed more to psychedelic jam music than motorik, though there is one other undeniable influence: The Velvet Underground’s 17-minute Sister Ray, around the part where Maureen Tucker’s drums start to sound like a printing press in overdrive, and Lou Reed’s guitar starts to disregard melody altogether, embracing atonality just as John Cale’s organ finds a La Monte Young-like groove and wears it into infinity. Can understood that kind of dedication to the outer realms of rock. And just like the Velvets, they never looked back.
Though Can’s key albums, from 1969’s “Monster Movie†to 1973’s “Future Days,†contain the classic “rock†lineup — guitar, vocals, bass, drums, keyboards — nobody ever sounded quite like them. Though the group’s been defunct for decades, its version of krautrock has influenced any number of punk or alternative bands since. (Public Image Ltd., Radiohead, Pavement, The Fall, Flaming Lips, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and even, er, Kanye West cite them as an influence.) Its core members — Holger Czukay on bass, Irmin Schmidt on keyboards and tape loops, Jaki Liebezeit on octopus drumming and Michael Karoli on guitar — were dedicated to jamming, but their albums are carefully crafted collages of improvised sound: layers of guitar, keyboard washes, syncopated percussion, often surfed over via improvisational lyrics shrieked out by a “singer†who borders on the paranoid.
While Can’s studio albums are edited down to perfection like trimmed and manicured lawns, the music contained on “The Lost Tapes†spreads across three hours like an overgrown field of weeds. Some of the weeds are very beautiful indeed.
Opening with krautrock hummer Millionspiel, it’s clear Can’s best moments weren’t limited to their dozen or so albums; the tapes reveal a band that never seemed to run out of ideas. Post-rock was born from this fusion of surf guitar, loose-limbed drumming, psychedelic keyboard washes and punchy, Morse Code-like bass. The essence of German rock — what UK critics quickly dubbed “krautrock,†though Germans didn’t appreciate the term — was a fixation on pulse: mesmerizing, hypnotic vistas of repetition (think Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk) that merged perfectly with a lock-step style of rock drumming.
A sense of humor is part of Can’s enduring charm. Waiting for the Streetcar features pretty much that same line repeated endlessly by Mooney over the course of 10 minutes, growing in manic intensity as the jam develops. There are tape experiments that are good for a laugh, if not much else, such as Suzuki’s improvised A True Story and The Agreement which captures the sound of two men talking while urinating for 37 seconds. A number of jams go on too long. But Can is a band best listened to while in a previously engaged environment, such as a noisy club, while watching a movie, or in front of a canvas. They make perfect abstract wallpaper music.
Elsewhere “The Lost Tapes†shows the band’s more reflective turns, such as Oscura Primavera’s delicately plucked guitar lines, or Dead Pigeon Suite, where pastoral flutes give way to a freeform drum solo, driven by a mesmerizing organ line, before mutating into a crazed version of Vitamin C. The 16-minute Graublau meanwhile is the kind of intense tape manipulation workout that bands like Tortoise originally sought to emulate before retreating to the safer fields of jazz.
The third CD winds its way through the funky pyrotechnics of Barnacles to the very pretty interludes of Private Nocturnal and Alice, ending on two live cuts — Mushroom and One More Saturday Night — that remind us what an agitated entity Can could be at their best.
Strip away the arty layers, and Can were basically a jam band, but nothing on “The Lost Tapes†will put you in mind of, say, The Allman Brothers. For these guys, jamming was always something radically different from a blues progression. Discovering this music, as chaotic as ever, after wearing out the grooves to “Tago Mago†or “Future Days,†is like manna to post-rock fans.