Pitchfork

Im Anfang war die Tät. In the beginning was the deed. This is the first line of Goethe's Faust and arguably the most famous words in the German language. The opening lines of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word" are inverted in a penstroke. The whole Christian tradition is turned on its head. We do not originate in the benediction of an incarnated word, but in the hazard of an unmediated act. That single line contains an entire manifesto of work, the rough beauty of human effort and human suffering. Can anything be quite as Protestant, quite as German as that?

If ever there was a band to whom the Protestant work ethic could be applied, it is undoubtedly Can. If there was music that discarded the timelessness of pop for the earthbound temporality of experimentation, it is Can music. The sound of Can is the sound of labor, of unbelievable human exertion. Other collective improvisers like the Mahavishnu Orchestra approach the idiom of the mystical, while Can seems geared for construction. They had mastered a true industrial sound before that term was squandered on the sound of sparse rhythm and dreary, martial noise under Genesis P. Orange screaming: "Discipline!" ad nauseam. Can is itself an industry. Indeed, an industrial revolution. Their product strains description.

The double disc Box Music (1971-1977) also eludes language. If architecture is frozen music, then Can is liquid architecture. These five men build earthworks so impossibly elaborate that it cannot even survive the process of its own construction: when the workmen have disappeared, so has the building. Box Music outstrips the tight tapeloop experimentalism of classics like Tago Mago and Future Days precisely because it is so heavy, so material: Jaki Leibezeit's jackhammer drums, the pig-iron slabs of Holger Czukay's bass, Irmin Schmidt's bright sheet metal keyboards, and the relentless industrial drill of Michael Karoli's guitars. The cumulative effect would be machine-like if the collective sound were not so violent and haphazard. The music remains organic because it sweats and suffers; you can hear fatigue and elation, strategy and struggle. Silence is weakness.

Box Music culls non-professional recordings-- mostly cassette-- from the group's most experimental years, the years when Japanese street poet Damo Suzuki handled the vocals, following the departure of their original lead singer, the African-American Malcolm Mooney (who actually appears on a track from 1975). Suzuki's role on Box Music is somewhat limited, but then again, Can's music was never driven by vocals. The sound is too intensely collective to allow space for a single voice, almost tribal. The title of their earliest recordings captures it: Future Primitive. One can never tell whether it's the music of civilization coming or going. It is always devouring itself.

The 14-minute "Voo Doo Right" from a 1975 show, is tribal savagery at its zenith, spiraling guitar and keyboards into a huge bonfire, burning over wartime drums. The audience applauding cannot even disrupt the listener; the whole affair approaches religion. The pyre skitters out into tight, phase-shifted funk as Schmidt's keyboards surface. Karoli's guitar is lyrical and lysergic, looping the upper air in serpentine passes before devolving into mechanized crunch. There is a momentary interlude of jagged no wave exchange of sloppy strums and broken drums, coalescing into a graceful bluesy reunion.

The jazz-fusion of "Fizz" and the calypso-classical of "Cascade Waltz" reveal a sense of humor that would be unthinkable in the fractured noise of the 37-seven minute "Colchester Finale" from 1972. "Colchester" completely dominates the second disc of the collection, chugging sloppily along like the Velvet Underground's locomotive signature "Sister Ray" in space. Suzuki's beat whispering is unnerving, rinsing in and out with the lightning cymbals, occasionally lashing out as sadistic howls. The recording on "Colchester" is wretched, but the low fidelity effect is perfect. Flying Saucer Attack might have been born out of this matrimony of lockstep synchronicity and dead, white interference.

Eventually, the reviewer must concede that Box Music is simply a critical black hole, swallowing every turn-of-phrase lightlessly; it will evade all my descriptions, comparisons and evaluations. Nobody's thoughts can keep up with this music. It was born of deed, not of word; it is from a time before or after language. Box Music is perfect work, pure expenditure. Like a fire, it takes everything into itself, into its own all-consuming energy. All these words we can toss on the fire, because you and I, we can't even come close.