Founded in the late ‘60s and disbanded ten years later, Can’s
unprecedented and bold marriage of hypnotic grooves and avant-garde
instrumental textures has placed them at the pinnacle of Germany’s
exports to the rest of the world.
So why, you ask, has there never been
an official series of live Can albums before now? The fact is, gremlins
always seemed to get into the machinery whenever the band tried to
record their gigs.
Thankfully, the curse of the Can live album has now, at last, been
dismissed. The best of the band’s existing live recordings has been
collected and Irmin Schmidt – the group’s last surviving founder member
of the group – has overseen the clean-up of some of the best moments.
Digital restoration technology is now so much more powerful than ever
before, which means that new dynamics can be sculpted from previously
lo-fi cassettes or degraded reel to reels. The best possible audio quality
has been squeezed from fuzzy audience recordings or distorted radio
tapes.
Since Can stopped touring in 1977, this is the closest that fans will
ever be able to come to hearing the legendary band in concert,
spontaneous, unedited and unconstrained by a 20 minutes-per-side time
limit.
During the 1970s a typical Can concert could last three hours with one
interval, though they were known to play even longer. If you are familiar
with Can’s music from their albums alone, prepare to be amazed. This
was not a band that liked to appease the crowd with a greatest hits
selection.
These recordings reveal a totally different perspective on the
group and their music. You may hear familiar themes, riffs and motifs
popping up and rippling through these jams, but they are often fleetingly
recognised faces in a swirling crowd. Other times you’ll hear music that
never made it at all onto the official album canon. It goes to even more
extreme ranges than their studio work: from mellow, ambient drift-rock
to the white-dwarf sonic-meltdown moments they used to nickname
‘Godzillas’. And even as they adapt and chase the rhythm from minute to
minute, you can hear the extraordinary musical telepathy its members
shared.
If you think you knew Can, even after all the albums and through
recently discovered material such as the legendary ‘Lost Tapes’, you’ll
still find masses here to surprise you. This music is never the same river
twice.
