from the LP Ege Bamyasi, UA Records, 1972I can remember my first encounter with the bizarre music of Can: having been primed by some of my older peers for an experience that was going to absolutely blow my mind, I had prepared myself for some super crazy shit, and upon hearing the first few measures of this track, all I could think of was cavemen---it sounded like a group of Neanderthals who had just come upon some instruments in a cave and decided to fuck around with them. Hell, even Damo Suzuki’s “vocals” sound as if they might be coming from the throat of early man! Admittedly, being a snotty punkish brat at the time, it didn’t excite me much and I heaped them into my then-sizeable pile of “weird trendy rubbish” which I fancied set myself apart from the typical undergrounder (I don’t know how any of us had any time for anything other than our own identity management when we were teenagers?!). Over time, these wild German acid-heads have grown on me like humidified fungus, blissfully submitting to the near-modal cycles of their grooves, the danciest, not to mention hypnotic, goddamn deconstruction of pop music around. Heavy breaks-heads out there, if you don’t already know, you better get up…
