Monster Movie - CAN (1969)

What I know about CAN could fit in … well, some sort of small, cylindrical container, I’d imagine….

This band are a missing link. On one end you had the academic end of European Modernist composition: serialism, musique concrete, tape manipulation, and electronics as a distinct instrumental voice. Stockhausen, Messiaen, and Jarre. On the other you had the more commercial (at least in theory) realm of distinctly post-war German art rock and dancefloor music including early industrial and what I still don’t really like calling “krautrock” but apparently it’s not going anywhere.

These guys brought a little from each end of the spectrum and made some heady, if difficult, rock that sounds unrelentingly modernist.

This is their debut, recorded in an ancient castle on the Rhine and released only about a month after recording. It won’t win any awards for sound or engineering quality but it succeeds in staking out a new space that the band would start to fill in later.