Can burst free of its formalism on the double-album Tago Mago, kicking out the jams on the nearly structureless "Aumgn," seventeen minutes of texture and eerie mood. Other tracks feature long improvisations built around hypnotic rhythm patterns, backwards vocals, tape effects and other innovations. (Ironically, the LP's shortest track, the four-minute "Mushroom," has become something of a post-punk staple.) At this point, Can began making the albums that would wield enormous influence on '80s groups as diverse as the Fall, Einstürzende Neubauten and Zoviet France. -- Trouser PressNext was the greatest of Can albums, the monumental double album TAGO MAGO, which, although starting on safe ground, draws the listener in with a succession of even greater weirdness and invention, not least "Aumgn" with Jaki's manic drums and "Peking O." where Damo lets out some of the most agonising vocal sounds amidst a plethora of electronic and percussive effects. Weird and radical innovation, that still sounds bizarre twenty odd years on! -- Cosmic Egg
Krautrock, innit. The Mothership. Sometimes I think Ege Bamyasi may have the edge on this, other days the rolling power of the drums on "Hallelulwah" utterly seduces me. I remember Julian Cope taking a very purist line that by "Tago Mago" Can had burnt out, that the Malcom Mooney-era was the shit and that "Soundtracks" was their last great record, but really, what twaddle. -- Woebot, #2
As a young high school student growing up in Texas, I became aware of a group simply called Can. I was blown away by the sound, the guitar experimentations, and the avant-garde days of early hip-hop meets New Wave of the 21st century. That and their third album with their first collaboration with japanese singer they found in the streets of Hamburg, Damo Suzuki who made his first appearance on the Soundtracks album and then the first time singing with the band on here, it remains the perfect teamwork they pulled together to create a fucking masterpiece that would have made Johnny Rotten so goddamn happy. Tago Mago remains a favorite of mine in my taste of experimental music on my iPod and it still is to this day. It's not just an album, its an experimental ride that you can't get off and it goes off like a machine gun that bleeds for blood.
It starts off with the ambient spacey ballad jam session 7-minute suite, Paperhouse. It begins as a dance tune from the sounds of the late Michael Karoli's virtuoso guitar work while Jaki Liebezeit's drum pattern follows the guitar and Irmin Schmidt's electric piano styling and in 4/4 and 3/4. Then all of a sudden it becomes psychedelic freak-out that almost comes out of the Velvet Underground's first album as Damo sings quietly like an evil psychopath that hunts for its prey. Holger Czukay's bass line just goes up and down as he and Karoli's guitar work goes off the wall. And then goes back to the ballad again in the same time signature as it segues into the sinister proto sinister nuclear war hip-hop rocker Mushroom, which deals with a total annihilation. This time the band go evil as any Krautrock band could get into pasaging trouble than Faust. Jaki's drums starts off like a war-like gun that won't go off while Damo sings 'When I saw Mushroom head, I was born and I was dead' and then screaming 'I'm Gonna Get My Despair!' four times, it sounds so powerful and it gave me goosebumps hearing this song to set the scenery of a post-apocalyptic land of hell as it goes into Oh Yeah with a bomb going off and then becoming a free-for-all composition. With Holger's bass lines that become funky while Damo singing japanese backwards and Irmin's keyboards sounding like a horror soundtrack from the 1930's while Irmin is pounding the drums like a motherfucker with the bass, hi-hat, and snare as they do a jam session that would have made the Grateful Dead bow down on their knees over to the new masters of gods.
The next track which almost sounded very Bitches Brew meets A Tribute to Jack Johnson in an avant-garde way with the 18-minute composition Halleluhwah as Holger takes over with fusion bass line which almost could have been on any Funkadelic album that would have make Bootsy Collins proud over and sounding like a James Brown record that had gone awkward and strange as the synths come in to make it more bizarre as the drums go electronic while they go into the boxing ring to duke it out like big macho instruments battling to the death of drums vs. synths over who would win and who would be crowned champions. Aumgn which starts off as a reprise from Paperhouse left off as the 17-minute synth music of Tangerine Dream going wrong in an omish andy warhol homage that would have the Monks run like motherfuckers from Jaan's keyboards and Damo's screeching voice filling up the album that would be perfect for Ridley Scott's Alien. And then the last 5-minutes it becomes an African samba gone haywire as Irmin takes over to close it up to a dramatic climax that makes you jump in fear. And then it becomes an Atmospheric funeral arrangment turned into a darker rock technique of Kraftwerk's debut album in a mystrious cave for once again the Avant-Garde of 11-minutes that would get Stravinsky and Edgard Varese happy for joy on Peking O.
The acoustic jazz fusion crooner Bring Me Coffee or Tea closes it up as Damo sings very stonish as he and the band go off like masterminds as it ends with a T. All in all, Tago Mago remains strange, mysterious, whatever you want to call it, this is a must have for anyone who wants to get into the music of CAN. -- Zmnathanson, Head Heritage
In his seminal work on Kosmische, Krautrocksampler, Julian Cope writes that Can's Tago Mago "sounds only like itself, like no-one before or after". 40 years on from the album's initial release, it's an observation that still holds true. There have been many bands who have attempted to recreate the heady, woozy, dark whirl of rhythms invoked on Tago Mago -- from Public Image Limited to The Horrors -- yet none of them have ever managed to truly capture the combination of the sinister and the sublime that have made it such a modern classic.
I discovered Tago Mago in 2002 at a friend's house party, when I heard the strains of 'Mushroom' emanating in waves through the miasma of marijuana smoke and stale beer fumes. I was 19, just about to enter my second year of University, and had a spent a year in a tiny room in Camden wearing a duffle coat and listening to weedy, poorly-recorded C86 records on an old Dansette I'd purchased with my student loan. To say that it came as a bit of a revelation to my cloth ears would be an understatement.
There is this brilliant, creeping sense of unease that permeates 'Mushroom', from Damo Suzuki's overwraught vocals to Jaki Liebezeit's unrelenting, driving beat (a drumbeat which, over the years, I have played to many people -- usually while drunk -- demanding that they listen to it, just listen to it). The next day, I went into a record shop, bought the album on vinyl and played it over and over again, drinking in each of the rhythms and cursing the fact that my larger than average chest size meant that I'd never be able to become a drummer. To drum like Jaki would have meant investing in a bra that was more a minor feat of engineering that a piece of underwear.
It's not just the music that makes Tago Mago so exciting as much as who Can were when they recorded it; a bunch of experimental West German hippies who delighted in the strange. The album was recorded in Schloss Nörvenich, a castle near Cologne owned by an eccentric art collector. Can spent a year living and recording there, and would spend their days playing long, disorganised jams (more streams of musical consciousness than actual songs) that their bassist, Holger Czukay, would then splice into songs.
It's this recording process that has provided Tago Mago with its signature sound - long, uninterrupted series of rhythms, all punctuated with tape-loops, analogue synths, and primitive drum machines, providing it with an intensely stoned, woozy feel. Even the more 'difficult' tracks on Tago Mago, such as the echoed drone of 'Aumgm' (which, to modern ears, sounds like a precursor to some of the material later recorded by bands like Sunn 0))) and Boris) and the Hari Krishna-esque 'Peking O' show a band who thrilled in experimentation and playing with the limits of noise and technology.
Tago Mago shows Can at the height of their powers. Whilst their sound became more polished and poppy as they progressed through the 1970s (even earning them a minor UK chart hit with 1976's 'I Want More'), it still remains arguably their finest work. Over the years, it has become an album I've carted around with me everywhere I go -- and have been forced to replace numerous times after lending it to ex-partners and leaving copies of it at house parties. I've yet to find another album that makes me wish I could turn back time and live in its world -- in this case jamming with four German blokes for long days in a castle. And I've yet to find another album which contains drum patterns that make my bones shiver in delight. When it comes to Kosmische classics, this is an essential. If you don't have this in your record collection, you're doing yourself a massive disservice. -- Cay McDermott, The Quietus
Can have long been one of those bands that are more talked about than heard. They were enormously influential on certain kinds of forward-thinking rock artists (their fingerprints are all over Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, not to mention more more recent underground acts like Woods and Implodes); their records have never been out of print for long. But they've got a big, disorderly discography, and they don't really have any signature songs (the Can tracks that pass for pop-- "Spoon", "I Want More", and not many others-- are alarmingly unlike the rest of their work). They're also tougher to "get" than a lot of their contemporaries: They specialized in long, jam-heavy rock grooves, and they had (two different) aggressively difficult vocalists, as well as a guitarist (the late Michael Karoli) who liked to noodle way up in the treble range. So where do you start?
You couldn't do much better than beginning with 1971's Tago Mago, freshly reissued in a "40th Anniversary Edition" (whose main difference from previous editions is the addition of a live disc from the following year). It's a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be. The core of Can was four German musicians from wildly different backgrounds-- when they initially came together in 1968, two of them had studied with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one had played jazz, and one was a teenage guitar whiz. They recorded soundtrack music and a few straightforward rock songs early on, but what they were really interested in doing was going beyond kinds of music for which they had language.
For some musicians of that time, that meant replacing (or augmenting) composition with improvisation: letting the unconscious mind take over in the instant, and recording the results. Can's insight was that jamming alone wasn't going to do the trick. One of their solutions to that problem was that, like Miles Davis' electric group at the time, they were not a jam band but a jam-and-edit band. Their working method involved collectively improvising on little riffs and grooves at enormous length, but that's not quite what you hear on Tago Mago. Bassist Holger Czukay chopped up, layered and extensively reorganized pieces of their recordings (including recordings they made when they didn't think the tape was rolling), imposing afterthought on instinct to create something as densely packed as composition but distinctly different.
Their other solution was smashing the crutch of language. After Can's original singer Malcolm Mooney had left the band in 1970, they'd encountered a Japanese street artist named Damo Suzuki "singing or 'praying' in the streets of Munich" (as Czukay put it) and immediately installed him as their new frontman. Suzuki is ostensibly vocalizing in English-- the lingua franca of rock-- but English that's either seriously mangled or almost totally faked.
Tago Mago is seven songs in 73 minutes; the first half is big-beat floor-fillers, the second half yanks the floor away. For those first four songs, drummer Jaki Liebezeit is the star of the band, setting up rhythmic patterns of his own devising (isolate his part of almost any Can song, and you'd immediately know what you were listening to) and repeating them like mantras. His drumming is actually the lead instrument on "Mushroom", which could very easily pass for a post-punk classic from 10 years later; everything else just adds a little tone color. (The song might be about a psychedelic mushroom, or a mushroom cloud, or maybe just the kind that comes in a can.) And his deliberate, crisply articulated marching-band-of-the-unconscious beat is the spine of the overwhelming "Halleluwah", possibly the only 18-minute song that would be too short at twice its length.
Then the trip turns sour and trembly. "Aumgn" is almost as long as "Halleluwah" but clammy, deliberately disjointed, and nearly rhythmless; its central sound is keyboardist Irmin Schmidt's repeatedly intoning elongated, mangled variations on the meditative "om." Both "Aumgn" and its follow-up "Peking O" mess with their listeners' perception of time-- everything in them happens much more quickly or slowly than it's supposed to, and as soon as any pattern of sound has stuck around long enough to grab onto, it shudders and evaporates. By the time the dreamy, softly throbbing one-chord piece "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" arrives to conclude the album, it's almost hard to trust it not to be a mirage.
The bonus for the new edition (aside from a reproduction of the original sleeve, with four variations on a semi-abstract image concerning the mouth and the mind) is a three-song 1972 live recording: something identified as "Mushroom" that shares nothing but a couple of lines with the Tago Mago version, a "Halleluwah" that fades out after nine minutes without generating the studio recording's heat, and a half-hour workout on the band's three-minute German hit "Spoon". It's okay-- they were a solid jam band, and Liebezeit could pull off those remarkable rhythms on stage, too-- but it's mostly interesting for its perspective on how much less a band Can might have been without Czukay's keen razor blade slashing away their excesses and preserving their flashes of revelation. -- Douglas Wolk, Pitchfork
“The castle discovered with the excavation rectangular four bay window towers was 25 metres about 11 times and had a kennel offshore to the north.” (Make allowances: it’s a German-English translation website.) “Werner von Vlatten, a clerk between 1366 and 1394, might have inhabited them. His son Wilhelm, after a division, owned the castle.” (Here comes the relevant bit.) “In 1968--9 the rock group Can furnished their studio here.” (The quintet based themselves at the castle for three years, before relocating to a disused cinema at Weilerswist.)
The castle -- Schloss Nörvenich in North Rhine-Westphalia -- was where Tago Mago, surely Krautrock’s greatest double album, was recorded over several months in 1971. It’s a record with a powerful reputation, and not just because it inspired bands like Radiohead and PiL. Links with Satanism and witchcraft have been suggested over the years; we’ve read of Can learning “forbidden rhythms” from West Africa, and having a fascination with Aleister Crowley. Irmin Schmidt’s grim bellow on “Aumgn”, as he intones as if from a coffin, is as chilling as rock vocals get, akin to an encounter with a cloven-hoofed goat-creature. The word ‘aumgn’ is derived from Om (or Aum), the sacred incantation in Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was also, according to his disciples, “Crowley’s ultimate word of power” -- the word he believed would enable him to rule the planet by magick. Schmidt stretches out the two syllables (‘aum-gn’) for 20 or 30 seconds at a time, while a violin saws away and a double bass circles menacingly like the Jaws theme. The music loses all inhibition, building orgiastically to a frenzy.
The rhythms on Tago Mago; they get into your eyeballs. When drummer Jaki Liebezeit first invented the hypnotic beat that became the foundation for “Halleluhwah”, it caused such a strong reaction in guitarist Michael Karoli that he began hallucinating. He begged Liebezeit to keep playing it, and we can empathise; it’s a groove that seems to suck our minds into its sorcerous clutches. Liebezeit, one of the acknowledged masters of the drums, could create these mesmerising patterns at will. On “Mushroom” we hear him judging the weight of his foot-pedal like a chemist measuring drops of liquid from a beaker to a flask. On “Paperhouse”, he sensually tickles the drowsy 6/8 beat in the opening bars, only to beat his drums and cymbals viciously when Karoli leads the charge into squealing acid-rock. At times, Can reveal a technical expertise on a par with prog-rockers like King Crimson, but Can always placed technique second to the communal responsibilities of improvisation. Schmidt, for example, would take his hands off his keyboards if he felt he had nothing to add. The music on Tago Mago was derived not from songwriting but from extensive jamming at the castle, which bassist Holger Czukay edited down into shorter pieces. Not too short, though. Even abridged, “Aumgn” lasts more than 17 minutes, and “Halleluhwah” runs to 18-and-a-half.
It’s a fool’s errand to try to describe the styles and genres that Can touch on here; suffice to say that if there were an HMV category called Shockingly Beautiful And Pulsatingly Thunderous Space-Jazz-Concrète, Tago Mago would be at the front of the racks every time. Invoking and evoking just about all the spontaneity and scariness that you’d want from rock’n’roll, Tago Mago can offer experiences as spellbinding as the sequence that originally comprised side one (“Paperhouse”, “Mushroom”, “Oh Yeah”), or can be so extreme that you feel yourself under attack by maniacs. Not everyone, certainly, will carry a torch for “Peking O”, an 11-minute detour into drum-machine lunacy and babbling nonsense. Then again, “Peking O” is followed by its polar opposite, “Bring Me Coffee Or Tea”, a weird folky lullaby in the same ballpark as “Willow’s Song” in The Wicker Man. You learn to expect the unexpected with Tago Mago. Just as you think you’ve got a handle on “Mushroom” -- singer Damo Suzuki must be describing a psilocybin trip when he speaks of being “born” and “dead” when he sees the “mushroom head” -- something about his odd phrase “my despair” nags at you. Mushrooms? Despair? Then you remember that Suzuki was a child of 1950s Japan, when the country was rebuilding itself after the mushroom clouds of 1945. Dark riddles, occult practices, atom bombs. Perhaps, as some have suggested, this was the preferred reality -- the only reality -- for four Germans and one Japanese born either side of World War II.
To mark its 40th anniversary, Tago Mago (which, like all Can’s early albums, was remastered in 2004), is being reissued with a bonus CD of live material from a Cologne gig in June 1972. Previously available on the bootleg, Free Concert, the tracks are “Mushroom”, “Spoon”, “Bring Me Coffee Or Tea” and “Halleluhwah”. The recording is in mono and the sound quality is passable, but not great. “Spoon”, all 20 minutes of it, has a dramatic performance from Suzuki as it nears its climax: first he starts urging “you gotta love me”, then he starts screaming it, at which point the momentum is halted by Karoli’s feedback and the music is hesitantly reshaped into “… Coffee Or Tea”. “Halleluhwah” is surprisingly laid back to begin with, but as funky as The Meters, with Liebezeit in mind-boggling octopoid form as usual. Schmidt organ-solos like a man demented as the track fades.
In 1989, I got a chance to ask Can about Tago Mago. Karoli, a lovely man, sat next to me in the restaurant, enthusing about Liebezeit and explaining that Suzuki sings “searching for my black dope” in “Halleluhwah” -- “because he’d lost it, you know”. Schmidt, a grumpy intellectual, told me that Can had revealed their ‘secrets’ only once, to a journalist in 1975, and she’d phoned up in a panic because that part of her cassette was inexplicably blank. We went back to a house in Notting Hill where Schmidt groped his wife on the settee all night, and Karoli bopped to Chic records. An unassuming guitar hero, he died in 2001. -- David Cavanagh, Uncut