Unlimited Edition

Performer: Can
Engineer: Holger Czukay; Rene Tinner
Producer: Can
Distributor: Caroline Distribution

Notes: Can: Damo Suzuki, Malcolm Mooney (vocals); Michael Karoli (guitar, shenai); Jaki Liebezeit (winds, drums, percussion); Irmin Schmidt (keyboards, synthesizer); Holger Czukay (bass). Recorded at Can Studio, Weilerswist, Germany between September 1968 and July 1975. This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players. Expanding the original Limited Edition release to a full double-LP/single-CD set, Unlimited is very much a dog's breakfast -- albeit a highly entertaining one -- of previously unreleased performances. Suzuki and Mooney take the spotlight on some songs, while on others the key foursome go at it in their usual way. A number of songs are mere snippets, like the vaguely tribal-sounding "Blue Bag," while one tune, the 20-minute "Cutaway," from 1969, is a sprawling pastiche of oddities. (Keep an ear out for the very formal request to keep modulations in frequency with other bandmembers!) Five cuts are listed as part of the band's continuing Ethnological Forgery Series, on which they recreate or interpret a variety of world musics through their own vision. The majority of songs come from 1968-1971 -- manna from heaven for those interested in the band's roots. Many cuts show off the varying abilities of the players. Leibezeit plays wind instruments on five separate cuts, while Schmidt is credited with "schizophone" on the Mooney-sung funk-soul of "The Empress and the Ukraine King." Though a few tracks are seemingly here to fill space, a lot of what's present easily stands up on its own, and with the band's legend as well. The opening cut, "Gomorrha," recorded after Suzuki's departure, is quite fine, an understated but still epic piece with lovely keyboards from Schmidt and intoxicating Karoli guitar. On the Suzuki-era cut "I'm Too Leise," Leibezeit's medieval flutes and light percussion add to a half-folk/half-something-else vibe. Mooney gets an interesting moment of glory with "Mother Upduff," a spoken-word tale of tourists in Europe that turns increasingly strange after the encounter with the octopus. ~ Ned Raggett Released in 1976 as a double-album expansion of 1974's LIMITED EDITION, UNLIMITED EDITION collects previously unreleased recordings made by Can between 1968 and 1974. Because the group owned their own rehearsal space/studio, Inner Space, they could record pretty much at whim, not only when release schedules dictated. While in some hands, this lack of structure would be an open invitation for endless, boring jams, the members of Can are far too self-disciplined for that. While a distinct looseness permeates these songs, none of them are unstructured or repetitive enough to truly be called jams. Instead, they're explorations, like the improvisations of a talented, intuitive jazz combo. While many of the 19 tracks--including several entries in their ongoing Ethnological Forgeries series--are instrumentals, former singers Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki are both represented here.

Uncut (p.132) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[E]xhibiting both Can's workings and playfulness, particularly on the Faust-like extended patchwork of 'Cutaway'." Mojo (Publisher) (p.112) - 3 stars out of 5 - "Rough, flawed and fascinating, this is Can at their most spontaneous, running through weird skanks, cosmic abstractions, soundtrack pieces and fake folk music."

Though they were one of the key bands of the 1970s Krautrock movement, Can always saw themselves as individualists. They were influenced more by composers like Stockhausen than by psychedelic rock, but this seminal German band combined their avant-garde tendencies with rock trappings and funk-inflected rhythms in an amazingly natural way, influencing subsequent generations of iconoclasts.

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