Can
Delay 1968

One day, Mr. Holger Czukay, a young music professor and esteemed avant-gardist, unexpectedly entered the realm of esoteric pop thanks to his student, Michael Karoli, who secretly played him “I’m the Walrus,” the quirky masterpiece by the Beatles.

Dazzled by that whimsical psychedelic theater, Czukay, for a prolonged enchanted moment, became Semolina Pilchard, the strange character who finds himself atop the Eiffel Tower in that song,

And up there, higher and higher on that tower more imaginary than real, Semolina Czukay was enveloped by a mad whirl of acid sounds that led him to see before him a kind of vortex... and, in the midst of that vortex, shone (oh yes!!!) shone the spontaneous science of the moment.

I know, I know...it seems strange to you that it was the little song of a pop group that brought him up there (up there where all important things happen). Yet that's exactly how it went, and it would be history, if you don't mind.

In any case, Czukay informed his old study companion Irmin Schmitd, an esteemed avant-gardist himself, of the discovery. And on a fateful night, the two found themselves with the young student for a crash course in other kinds of music.

Only this time it wasn't the Beatles who were the subject of study, but more challenging and obscure people. Imagine that, from late evening to morning, the three listened in sequence to Velvet Underground, Zappa, Hendrix, and who knows how many others.

Well, imagine if something like that happened to you as well, imagine, I mean, being completely unaware and discovering all the big names and beautiful sounds I mentioned in one single night.

Well, I imagine you too would lose a little bit of your mind. With the difference, compared to Holger and Irmin, that you are just any fools, while they were brainiacs accustomed for the most part to the frequentation of gaseous and hyperuranic lands.

Oh yes, Holger and Irmin were really brainiacs (they were students of Stokahausen, for instance), but they were brainiacs with balls, and they abandoned those gaseous and hyperuranic lands instantly. Thus was born the idea to form a rock group, the avant-garde, for the moment, could kindly take a seat in the waiting room.

After a while, Jaki Leibezeit, a free jazz drummer, also recently enlightened, joined in. During a concert in Spain, someone had told him something like: “what kind of crap is this stuff you're playing, you need to play less, you need to play monotonous.”

Now, Jaki could have dismissed it as any nonsense, but he didn’t... he granted that supposed idiot the status of a passing aesthete and changed his style. And thus was born the fabulous rhythmic machine of Can, the metronomic, surgical, and tribal rhythm that would influence much of the music to come.

Only the singer was missing. And the one who arrived, Malcom Mooney, wasn't a singer, he was a shaman. And also a sculptor and a poet.

A rather mad and over-the-top character, the only black American in a group of whites, Mooney was a sort of instinctive bluesman, all emotions and passion. And he was also a fabulous narrator that others followed spellbound.

His was a voice that transformed lack into hand-to-hand combat with the sky, or at least gave the impression of doing so like few others,

Besides this fabulous attitude, he brought to the group a new social reason, Can, a word opener that in Turkish means life and soul and in Japanese means feeling and emotion, all meanings that ultimately refer in some way to the expressive power of his voice.

Now, to get an idea of ​​“Delay” you have almost all the elements: the enthusiasm of strange ultra-thirty-year-old novices for music that, in their eyes, seized the moment like no other; a shaman singer who coagulated and distributed a crazy creative energy to the others; a paradoxical (for the times) rhythmic idea of monotony.

You only need, to fully understand, a few splashes of deviant funk and a few reference names like Captain Beefheart and the Fall ten years before the Fall. Because these are the badass Can.

But, are the badass Can better (these and those from the next album “Monster Movie”) or the cool ones from “Tago Mago” onwards?

Better the howl or the meow? The flatbread with sausage or the salmon? The screaming passion of an album like this or the sonic mathematics exercises of an album like “Future Days”? The heaviness of extreme rock or the volatility of those gaseous and hyperuranic elements we’ve already discussed?

In the end, there's no issue, that, wherever you pick from, with Can you always get it right.

Gun to the head, however, I hold onto tracks like “19th century man” where a groove almost like James Brown meets, in order of appearance, psychedelia and garage rock. And a tense and haunting hyper ballad like “The thief” and the brutal obsessiveness of “Butterfly” or that mood almost like “Tago Mago” of “Little Star of Bethlehem” which here, far from being yet a cool thing, struggles to emerge from the mud.

“Delay” is the great lost album of Can. Rejected by everyone, it was only released in the eighties. It doesn’t have the greatness of the subsequent “Monster Movie,” but it’s not far off. Get it and, as Julian Cope says, lose your head over it.