CAN

May 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By James Rotondi

Holger Czukay, looking a bit like an aging hippie Einstein, is simply beaming: “Vonderful! Vantastic!” Backstage after a Mr. Bungle concert in his hometown of Cologne, Germany, in 2000, Czukay is intrigued and excited by the group's blending of a seven-piece live band with a nonstop array of samples and snippets from sundry musical genres such as gypsy jazz and surf rock. After all, his own group — the legendary Krautrock band Can — began playing with a similar formula more than 30 years previous, using tape splices and extended improvisations to construct a sound and a science of recording that would come to influence bands from Stereolab to Mouse on Mars and eventually lead to the art of sampling as it is known today.

Did Czukay “invent sampling,” as has often been floated? No, he certainly didn't, but his clever and distinctly political mixing of tape splices of the 1968 student riots in Germany into Can's first experiments as a band was among the earliest attempts to exploit the techniques previously known as musique concrète in a rock music context. And sampling is a technological extension of that practice. A bass player, Czukay studied with German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who toyed with electronics and tape loops in the late '50s and '60s. But even Stockhausen could not have foreseen the lengths to which an inspired bohemian like Czukay might go to marry those techniques to a band that came across like a jazz-inspired Pink Floyd on a bratwurst binge.

In studio spaces — invariably dubbed “Inner Space” — that ranged from mattress-insulated ex — movie houses to industrial lofts, Czukay would record dictaphone, short-wave radio and other odd devices and then spend hours painstakingly splicing tape and constructing sound collages over the band's hypnotic live jams — a process that today's producers accomplish in minutes. Even so, on recent solo albums such as Good Morning Story (Tone Casualties, 1999), Czukay has chosen to do it the hard way, using an Akai 4-track digital recorder to capture guitar, bass, short-wave radio, synth and “trumpet mouthpiece,” and then cutting and pasting directly to hard disk rather than sampling and synching to MIDI. “With a lot of today's dance music, the process is fully automated,” Czukay says. “My music is really played by hand, you could say. I really like the idea that technical development takes you one step forward but also throws you 30 years back.”

Thirty-year-old Can albums — such as Monster Movie (Enigma, 1969), Tago Mago (United Artists, 1971) and Ege Bamyasi (United Artists, 1972) — have since become cult classics and prized vinyl admired by postrockers, techno heads, ambient tweakers and even hip-hop producer Dan the Automator, who lists those LPs among his all-time favorites. That respect is certainly due in part to Can's forward-thinking vision of an electronic rock style, but it's also a tip of the hat to the group's amazing grooves lovingly laid out by core members Czukay, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli (a rare minimalist in an era of guitar overkill). Can also had an ever-evolving cast of vocalists, most notably Malcomb Mooney and Kenji “Damo” Suzuki.

Breakbeats from tracks like “Vitamin C” and “Pinch” tend to show up whenever a hipster's hand is guiding the sampler, and the sampladelic generation saw fit to pay their respects on the 1997 remix album Sacrilege (Mute), which featured artists such as The Orb and U.N.K.L.E.'s James Lavelle, who weighed in with retooled versions of Can's watershed moments.

Ultimately, Can's influence, particularly on electronic music, has more to do with the aesthetics of reinvention than with the actual invention, or even foreshadowing, of sampling as a musical technique. Radical remixing entails a deconstruction and subsequent manipulation of material that may have originally been relatively traditional, and that's exactly the spirit in which Can exploited the instruments of rock and the developing science of recording to reconfigure the sounds and structures of pop music into an alien and exciting new form: an act that remains at the very heart of “underground” music.

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