First Lines of Rob Young's "All Gates Open: the Story of Can"

 "Can Studio, Weilerswist, February 1997.

It's the mattresses that strike you first. There must be scores of them, fixed to these walls, floor to ceiling. And the ceiling is a good eight meters above our heads."

- Rob Young, All Gates Open

This is probably the best musical bio I've ever read. Young combines the history of the band and interweaves it with the contextual story of the post-war German musical scene and cultural happenings. His insightful and poetic deep listens of album tracks help those of us who may not know what it is that we're listening to (even if we like it). Like all musical bios, it runs out of steam at the end as the musicians do, but Young combats this with a nice summation of the band's influence. The second part of the book is a series of interviews and journals from Irmin Schmidt, the last surviving member of the band, and is interesting but not essential reading. My only quibble with the book is that Young obviously relied a lot of Young - I didn't get a sense of who some of the other band members were as people. I would have loved to learn more about the upbringing and history of Jaki Liebzeit, Can's drummer and the engine behind their propulsive music. Regardless, I learned a ton about a band I admire and came away with an even greater appreciation for their work.

Here's a good overview of the Can story to wet your appetite.

Tab Dump 2021: Music

As with the 2021 in Art: The Tab Dump, this is a collection of interesting links both for you and for my personal reference. Enjoy!

Catching Covid in late 2021 gave me an opportunity to lay around and listen to all of the Can re-releases. More on this later, but for now, check out these summaries of their complication of The Lost Tapes - a collection of music they discovered when cleaning out their old studio. Like all albums of that kind, it's a grab bag, but both "Millionenspiel" and "Grablau" are powerful improvisational epics, and "Oscura Primavera" sounds like it could have been recorded by Sonic Youth 10 years before they were formed.

1. Freq's summary
   
2. Pitchfork's review
   

David Toop's Oceans of Sound  exposed me to a lot of new musicians and musical styles, including:

• The minimalist influence of Erik Satie. His Early Piano Works are absolutely compelling solo piano pieces, slow, halting and haunting piano sketches.
  
• Gamelan was a genre to which I had never been exposed. Listening to this long, rhythmic, pulsing music reminded me of Can or Stereolab. Lou Harrison is a good introduction to this type of music; his The Gamelan works of Lou Harrison is a great listen.
•  Edgar Varese: a composer who envisioned electronic music before the capability existed.
•  Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist who wrote a manifesto called The Art of Noise and invented a wide array of bizarre instruments. Bizarre but inventive!

I get a huge kick out of Børns' video for the Faded Heart sessions.

Growing up, my love of electronic music was sparked by "Headphones Only" every Sunday on WIZN. I used to record some of the shows onto cassette so I could listen to the music all of the time as opportunities to hear electronic music was limited in Burlington, VT. One of the cassette songs that I loved but never knew what it was - and finally realized this year was Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Computer Game" off of their eponymous album. Great music! (Note: some listings divide the song into the "Computer Game" and "Firecracker" tracks - but it's all one song to me.)

My favorite ambient artist is Tetsu Inoue. His classic Ambient Otaku LP is a perfect album; I only wish I could purchase a copy for less than hundreds of dollars. You should know more about him, so here's a collection of some writings.

Another good ambient album I enjoyed was Meg Bowles A Quiet Light - particular the track "Chant for a Liquid World." Here's Meg talking about her music.

Brian Eno's Neroli is perhaps one of the most relaxing pieces of music I've ever heard. The technical reason for this, as Pitchfork’s Chris Ott wrote is that “The hidden side of Neroli appeals to a select class of music theory buffs, fascinated by the flattened second and seventh of this Phrygian modal, and an insistent hang on the scale’s fifth.” 

Public Image Ltd (PiL)'s box set The Public Image is Rotten - especially the live tunes - reminded me of how much great music Johnny Lydon produced after the Sex Pistols. Streaming it while doing a woodwokring project inspired me to read up on what might have been the most powerful incarnation of PiL - the studio magicians who Lydon and Bill Laswell recruited for 1986's Album. It was always mysterious who exactly played what - this PopLife article details who did what. I mean: Tony Williams and Ginger Baker on the same album! You've got to give it a listen. Williams work on "FFF" might be my favorite power rock drumming of all time.

Running in Las Vegas recently I laughed at a street sign that literally read "Road to Mandalay." It immediately lodged Midnight Oil's "Mountains of Burma" in my head. Not being an Australian, I never knew what the song was about: mystery solved! 

 Related:

Time for another Tab Dump

Science Tab Dump 

Bride of Tab Dump

Obscure 70s rock

I'll be writing more about Roxy soon - did I mention that i'm obsessed? - but for now let me observe that the creativity of some of the more obscure '70s bands has really been entertaining me recently.

Other then the first five Roxy albums, another example is the drumming by Jaki Liebezeit on "Halleluhwah" from Tago Mago - Can's 1970 acid-drenched masterpiece: the guy plays the shit out of this recurring riff for all of the song's 17+ minutes. It if you didn't know better, you would think that it was the world's most soulful drum machine. It's easily the most stunning drumming i've ever heard in Rock music, rivaling even Keith Moon's pounding.