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There have been times when a single album has produced a paradigm shift in my listening, though never have I seen it coming. I can, however, pinpoint when I turned my back on the cotton candy mainstream and went questing for deeper water. It happened the morning of my 19th birthday, awake to watch the Santa Cruz sunrise, copasetic as a daydream, listening to Can's Tago Mago for the first time. To my ears, nothing was ever the same.
This installment features heavy praise for a new project from Tago Mago's singer Damo Suzuki, as well as insights into the 1971 classic from producer and bassist Holger Czukay, who peels back the layers of one of the most important albums of the 20th Century. If Can is new territory for you then I envy the discoveries that await you, and if you already hold these archetypal Krautrockers dear then you'll dig what spilled out of the horse's mouth.
Now, let me introduce you to one of the first great records of the New Year...
Pick of the litter:
Litmus: You Are Here (Space Music)
Rarely has an album made me want to take heroic amounts of LSD. The pummeling, gravitational waves of "My Bloody Valentine" slap against subliminal philosophy, underpinned by a Hawkwind-ian longing, dreams of star fields blossoming and dying in quick succession. England's Litmus actively carves sound, shaping the air with light and rhythm. They steal chords from that man on the silver mountain and ride away on a rainbow slide. The monstrous riffing and Deep Purple analog keys are juicy enough to make you hop up and down like a caveman who's found a new proggy obelisk to fondle. The title cut is a gossamer-winged ode to being present wherever you are on the cosmic map. Like American spiritual cousins Sound Tribe Sector 9, Litmus produces a kinetic ooh-aah, conjuring shifting, alive landscapes for wide-eyed travelers. Take the trip. You won't be disappointed.
Runner-up:
Cul de Sac/Damo Suzuki: Abhayamudra (Strange Attractors)
In recent years, former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki has been mastering what he calls "spontaneous composition," which goes some distance from pure improvisation by using collaborators whose approach is naturally mercurial and touched with wildness. He'd be hard pressed to find a more appropriate band than Boston's Cul de Sac, brave souls who've also fenced with John Fahey and lived to tell the tale. Four hours after meeting Suzuki they played their first shows together. No rehearsal, no premeditation, no specific goal besides making pure music of the moment. This double disc tour document culled from the US and European tours in 2002 and 2003 is exhilarating. So much music purports to be bold or fearless and then fails to stretch past the familiar. Not so here. This pairing is opaque yet immediate, an intense puzzle bathed in transcendent guitars, a steady pulse dueling with pin pricks of intense artificial light. Suzuki's voice is a wild bird's cry, a dove's trill, a powerful warning shriek. His vocalizations are the evolution of jazz scat and William S. Burroughs' cut-and-paste poetry. Joined to music that captures autumn's slow motion tumble one minute and transports us to a humming Mosque the next, the results are stymieing. The very freshness of the playing is astounding; their perfect instincts hitting so many right notes in what could have been a cluttered minefield. While dabbling in avant jazz and gutbucket rock, this dispenses with generic tags. At its haunting best, Abhayamudra (Strange Attractors) is a ghost story told in Esperanto, things understood by tone rather than context or history. It's also quite possibly the single fullest project any member of Can has done since their early '70s heyday.
DJ Krush: Jaku (Red Ink/Sony)
6 a.m. hip-hop, the fading colors of a peyote trip bleeding way to a black and white haze. DJ Krush, Japan's chief turntable representative, has a soundtrack composer's dynamics not unlike the X-Files' Mark Snow or Stewart Copeland's film work. Jaku comes across as the hip, younger sibling to the Kung Fu television score, using bamboo flutes and Taiko thuds to a most Oriental effect. That's meant exactly like it reads. Despite being from Japan, this often sounds artificial, exotic for the sake of exoticism. The danger with instrumental hip-hop is sounding too much like a pretty backdrop for an unfinished foreground. Outside of a pair of blazing rhymes from Aesop Rock and Mr. Lif, this work largely suffers from that problem. All the shaken bells and Cecil Taylor-esque piano can't add weight to what are fairly thin concepts. For fans of down tempo electronica, this may be a very kosher affair, the perfect nightcap after abusing one's synapses. But in the harsh light of day, Jaku appears as pale as a bleached bone.
Acid King: Busse Woods (Small Stone)
Acid King is a band for anyone who still sees Blue Oyster Cult, not out of nostalgia but because they make the walls sweat and your nuts vibrate like possessed oysters when Buck Dharma goes off. It's music experienced exclusively through bong gurgles and beer haze. They call it stoner rock, but it's equally appealing during a good drunk. This reissue of their hard-to-find first album is all consuming psychic sludge that muddies flesh and weakens muscle. Leader-singer-guitarist Lori S. kneels before the altar of Iommi (Black Sabbath) but dispenses with much of metal's screaming in favor of a lush, turbulent trippiness. If High On Fire or Bongzilla flips your skirt up then Acid King will make you go down with a grin. They've got a new album on the way in 2005, but until then we can study up on their first steps into the black unknown.
Mike Ladd: Negrophilia (Thirsty Ear)
A calliope being melted by sudden, high heat, the tin cup shaking monkey glad to be free of the leash. Spoken wordsmith Ladd has teamed with some of jazz's creamiest provocateurs on this high concept excursion inspired by Archer-Straw's book about 1920's Paris and the Gallic love of Negroes. Ladd is fully aware of the push-button quality that word possesses and taps it frequently here. Recent antecedents include Buck 65 and Jaga Jazzist, but this has more dirt in the works. Musically, it's Phil Woods' European Jazz Machine kidnapped by Black Flag's Greg Ginn, professionally punk as fuck, the work of inspired craftsmen who also dislike rules. Drummer Guillermo E. Brown (David S. Ware Quartet) and wind player Andrew Lamb continually shine, as does keyboardist Vijay Iyer whose piano interjections rival Don Pullen or Abdullah Ibrahim. Beyond any stated objectives, Negrophilia deals with the disunity of things out of harmony but still possessed of melody. Complex stuff with a visceral glove slap brashness.
Eddie Turner: Rise (Northern Blues)
Turner first came to attention playing barbed, psychedelic solos on Otis Taylor's White African and Respect The Dead. This debut is a far cry from that material, moving from the raw subject matter and dream-like mood to a set closer to John Lee Hooker's '70s rock excursions. Turner has a ferryman's voice that works well with his spiky, incisive guitar, which by turn evokes James Blood Ulmer, Freddie King, and Jimi Hendrix. This last reference has plagued Turner's press, inspiring the lyric, "I ain't no voodoo chile, voodoo chile done come and gone." It's strange then that he covers the overdone "The Wind Cries Mary" and fails to find anything fresh. Turner channels Hendrix better on his own "Play It Cool." Frequently, his original lyrics are lightweight and clunky, and there are a few too many tangents. Turner would benefit from a more focused follow-up with a sustained mood as on Taylor's albums. Once again, Kenny Passarelli displays top-of-the-game production skills as he did with Taylor. Fans of Los Lobos, Buddy Guy's recent work, or John Scofield's quieter side could really connect with Turner, a talent clearly just getting started.
Vintage Stash Special:
Can: Tago Mago (Mute)
I've never heard this album the same way twice. The fact that it's been swimming around in my ear hole for 18 years and still yields new secrets with each pass testifies to its overabundant originality. There was a lot in the pantry in 1971 – free jazz, psychedelics, sexual revolution, post-Beatles rock, worldwide political uprisings, global television - and Germany's Can concocted a savory mélange with pinches of all of it. While their first two albums, Monster Movie and Soundtracks, exhibited an electric cinematic madness, it was Tago Mago, their third, that revealed Holger Czukay (bass), Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Jaki Liebezeit (drums), Damo Suzuki (vocals), and Michael Karoli (guitar) as brutish visionaries. There's primal freedom in every note, which Czukay explains, "Everything was created on scratch. The recordings were completely spontaneous, but completing them was done by compositional strategy." The results were music that has informed bands as diverse as Stereolab, Comets On Fire, Air, The White Stripes, and several generations of others.
Holger Czukay |
In a profound way, Can set out on the same sonic jihad on which Miles Davis embarked in the early '70s. Then, as now, there's nothing quite like it. "The reaction was surprisingly good," states Czukay. "The producer of Pink Floyd, whose name I forgot, thought we could have made it more commercial. Obviously we couldn't follow his thoughts, and so he never became our producer though he seemed to be interested."
With most music, one cites their forebears as a frame of reference. With Can, that shorthand isn't possible. They are a root source, an early strand of DNA from which others develop.
"Well, of course there have been influences from others from the very beginning, but we never have even attempted to play in the same way as they did. This was impossible anyway for us. All we could have achieved doing that would have been a big laughter. Can was beyond all kinds of talent castings. No way ever to win any trophy, though we amazingly won some. Must be an error!"
Besides his tactile bass playing, Holger Czukay was the engineer and editor for the album.
"The technique of intensive editing helped us not necessarily needing a multi-track machine. All was recorded straight to stereo, and the mixing had to be done while I was playing bass. We had considered editing of similar importance like splitting atoms and thus setting free a lot of energy. Each edit leads to sampling when you chose a beginning and an end and give this part a name. Especially on Tago Mago, we were building sound landscapes in combinations of spontaneous playing and sophisticated editing, much more than following song structures."
Holger Czukay |
One of the most mesmerizing aspects is Michael Karoli's distinctive, wholly original guitar playing which has no better showcase than these tracks. Czukay comments, "Michael started to take guitar lessons from me when I became a music teacher in his school in Switzerland. Recognizing his talent, I invited him to become a founder of Can." As heady and seemingly off-course as some moments seem, one can always tune into Karoli, who never seems uncertain about where to go next. "His effect tools were all self-made and just as basic as the whole recording situation. His playing always starts out from rhythm. His aim was to get people to listen and dance at the same time. And that could be most effectively accomplished by giving the drummer a real counterpoint."
Language is broken down all over this record. The title alone is something outside of any meaning, words that gain definition only by repetition. Damo Suzuki's singing is often a fifth instrument rather than something floating on top of the music as in most bands.
"The singing approach was exactly as you said: just another instrument, the language often a fantasy language," states Czukay. "With Can, it worked out. Any other band would have caused an irrational head shaking I presume."
Speaking of heads, the cover of the album is a striking, abstract skull. Asked why it was chosen, Czukay responds, "No, we have tried to reject the cover at that time and named it 'the vomiting head.' These days we have already eaten that soup."
If it is a soup, then it's a primordial one, dense with strands that have attached to new carriers, grown limbs, and wandered into the hills. Despite these small passes at explication, Tago Mago remains shrouded in mystery, perhaps even to its own creators. It has the quality of received knowledge, a truth that has slipped from behind the veil, carried to us by the right prophets at the right time. Studied, enjoyed, puzzled over, it remains elusive in the very best of ways.
Next time we'll ponder new releases from Julian Cope, Hazy Malaze, and more, including the first Brian Jonestown Massacre anthology. We'll also be adding a look at new music DVDs with a fab documentary about SF's Mother Hips. Until then, find yourself something you've never heard before and embrace it like a puppy. Don't be surprised when it licks your face in gratitude...
Dennis Cook
JamBase | Worldwide
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