Soundtracks in the best Can album

People skip "Sister Ray?" Weird. I always thought that "The Gift" was the obvious clunker on WL/WH..

just sayin is all.

-- poortheatre

B-b-but "The Gift" = "Mother Upduff"! (Narratively, I mean.)

Can't work out quite where to put "Delay 1968" and "Unlimited Edition". "Tago Mago" and "Soundtracks" are interchangeable, depending on mood, as are "Future Days" and "Landed", as are "Saw Delight" and "Flow Motion"...

It's really struck me how much Mother Sky is a blues-reduced interpolation of the long version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's version of Suzie Q. It was the beat at first; contrary to lazy received opinion it's mostly not a straight four to the floor 'motorik,' but Karoli also seems to be riffing on the guitar solos while Damo does those little angelic vocal interludes.

And then I realised that the name of Jane Asher's character in Deep End is... Susan.

By astonishing coincidence I was watching that very film for the first time not an hour ago, and spent the red light district scene where Mother Sky plays on the soundtrack involuntarily air-drumming along.

xpost pedantic thing, sorry, but four to the floor isn't motorik. four to the floor is a bass drum on every quarter note, on the beat (like pink floyd's 'another brick in the wall').

the bass drum in a motorik beat is typically struck on all the eighth notes (or the variation where it's struck on every eight note in a measure except for the 2's and 4's, when the snare drum is struck), like Neu's 'hallogallo'. technically, i'm not sure there's any motorik on "mother sky" - generally Jaki is just hitting the BD on the off-beats (every other eighth note), which if anything is a slower precursor to the 'blast beat' in a lot of hardcore punk.

i know none of this matters, and also 'mother sky' RULES

I think in parts of Mother Sky (near the beginning) he is hitting every 8th note, then the same with accents on the off-beats (or it might be an overdub) then the cut and it switches to those off-beat syncopated kicks where it mostly stays. Very cool - and very much the same as Suzie Q.

Does Dinger skip the 2 and 4 in Hallogallo? I think they're all there.

I don't think it's at all fanciful to suppose the director wanted a version or suggestion of that song and that's what they came up with. The lyrics would fit with the lad Mike's obsessed condition and it makes sense of what that song is doing in that sequence.

i'm not hearing this at all

You don't hear that it's a very similar (and quite unusual) drum pattern? Then listen to the guitar solo that starts around 3:48 and the way the bass simplifies and the drums intensify with it. Speed it up a bit and that's Mother Sky rght there. Karoli even uses a similar guitar tone that you don't hear in any other Can song I can think of. The atmosphere of the songs has a lot in common as well, and those spacy delayed / feedback noises that sound like Irmin Schmidt's keyboard synthy things.

https://youtu.be/YJe5sMBpnNY

The guitar solo which then follows the trippy vocal bit, Michael Karoli almost literally copies parts of it except he plays it way tighter. Meanwhile the added crash and snare hits (6:26...) are almost exactly replicated in the instrumwntal parts where Mother Sky builds.

I think it is possible, especially considering Can pretty much just improvised their music. Start with an idea and go, probably with the deadline for the film in the background.

i am currently watching roland click's modern-day spaghetti western DEADLOCK (1970) which among other things helps you hear that can's* song deadlock is clearly conceived as being morriconish

•the can, call them by their on-screen name

good movie, if you appreciate very unattractive and sweaty men in a desert landscape