Line-Up:
Holger Czukay (bass)
Michael Karoli (guitar)
Jaki Liebezeit (drums)
Damo Suzuki (vocals)
Irmin Schmidt (keyboards)

Review:
The monumental Tago Mago (UA, 1971 - Mute, 2004), permeated with mystical overtones, incorporated avantgarde techniques (notably collage and sound effects) within the structures of rock music. Paperhouse opens the album with an agonizing blues, but at the first opportunity the guitar intones a cosmic psalm over tribal drumming, and then, teased by sinister whispers, unleashes a raga-like whirwind of rapidly strummed metallic tones. Suzuki's psychodrama in Mushroom is set in a rarefied atmosphere of skitting drums, booming bass and atonal guitar, a cold dub-jazz doodling for alien lounges. Suzuki's voice is centerstage again in Oh Yeah, except that the context is the exact opposite, with a steady syncopated gallop filling the void and an unstable crescendo of dissonance and blues guitar.
The eleven-minute Peking O starts out as another vehicle for Suzuki's psychological handicaps but instead mutates into a Dadaistic essay on how to deconstruct dance music: a Brazialian rhythm that implodes into a supersonic drilling industrial beat against the backdrop of a limping jazz piano. The inconsequential music ends in an orgy of random drones, theatrical vocals and metronomic drums.
The closer, Bring Me Coffee Or Tea, basically a delirious hare-krishna chant for loose rock quintet, pretends to link the album to the contemporary fad of Eastern-tinged psychedelia.
As innovative as these compositions were, they paled compared with the two towering masterpieces of the album.
The 18-minute Halleluwa creates an Amon Duul II-style rhythmic bacchanal at a totally different level, with torrid funk music scoured by Suzuki's jungle chanting. Slowly, the African component of the rhythm takes over and obliterates everything else. After five minutes the piece restarts in a purely instrumental form with a new funky pattern as the habitat for a population of both instrumental, vocal and artificial noises. Soon the most petulant guitar leads a jazzy improvisation punctuated by irregular drumming and looping keyboards. Suzuki resurrects at the very end, engaging the bluesy guitar in a playful duet of inarticulate accidents.
The 17-minute Aumgn begins in psychedelic lands of floating tones and distorted instruments, but soon the sounds take off in alien orbits and the piece begins to disintegrate into musique concrete and Dadaistic noise. When the voice emerges, it is merely a distorted mantric chant that blends with the fluid amalgam of free tones. The percussion instruments are initially employed not to pace the flow but to add hues and shadings to the soundpainting process. Towards the end, though, it is the drumming that creates the dramatic tension that was missing. The drums take the role of the melody in guiding the music towards a narrative and emotional ending.
Despite the electric guitar, the drums and the vocals, much of this double album is avantgarde and jazz music. Its relationship to rock music of the 1960s is, ultimately, limited to the instrumentation. With just one album, Can pioneered several genres that would become popular in the 1990s: industrial music, noise-rock, trip-hop and post-rock. (Scaruffi, Rating: 8)


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