Can
Monster Movie

The end of the sixties coincides with the end of the hippie dream of a "possible better world" to live in... in the American and English psychedelic trips, the emotional effect that showed soft and warm journeys was fading, making the awakening traumatic and dark, and the collective consciousness shifted towards the stripping of the futuristic thought, bringing nihilism deep into the most hidden recesses of individuals' guts.

In Germany, this could not happen. The country was still engaged in overcoming the burdensome recent past, trying to liberate its image from the one that only a couple of decades earlier had shaken the very foundations of the planet. Even music, in the Federal Republic of Germany, had been the colonizing music of the countries that won the war, so entire generations of children and young people grew up with American rock 'n' roll first and then English beat. High music, on the other hand, had taken the path of deconstruction and decontextualization... hence a figure like the experimental composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen had shaken the country with his 1966 composition "Hymmen" ("Anthems") which took the national anthem and tore it apart with cut-and-paste electronic manipulations, provoking collective outrage in the face of this "atrocity". But his influence on the new generations of musicians was almost total, and many of his students became devoted to the composer's thought and began a journey from which they could never return. They attempted (successfully, in hindsight) to create a form of typically German rock (popular), starting from the musical demands overseas and across the Channel, transfiguring them and immersing them thoroughly in the Central European soul. Two of these students, Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay (who in turn became a music teacher), came into contact with psychedelic music thanks to a young student of the latter, Michael Karoli, who introduced them to the colorful kaleidoscope of sounds with "I’m The Walrus", Jimi Hendrix, and the Velvet Underground. Instinctively, the two felt the urge to become part of this colorful world.

The first formation of Inner Space consisted of Schmidt on keyboards, Czukay on bass, the young Karoli on guitar and violin, and the free-jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit on percussion. The voice was not contemplated until Schmidt's wife introduced them to the African-American sculptor, Malcolm Mooney. Mooney had never sung until then, but he immediately resonated with the group, soon indulging in schizophrenic vocal interventions during sessions. His psychotic voice launched into epic ancestral mantras, thus he automatically became the vocalist of Can (an acronym chosen by Mooney himself because it was short, incisive, and had multiple meanings). Some concert-events and sound forms of performing art exhibitions at Schloss Norvenich in Munich by their friend Mani Lobe made them very popular, so much so that Lobe himself set up a recording studio inside his castle for them. In the summer of 1969, from these walls, Can's debut comes out: "Monster Movie", a true masterpiece of what would soon become the German Krautrock wave, better defined by the protagonists themselves as "Cosmic Music". The initial "Father Cannot Yell" is the soul of the Velvet Underground which is stretched into an exasperating sonic transfiguration, with Mooney's voice appearing to want to go directly out into the Universe, from which it then returns lacerated in the next hypnotic "Mary, Mary So Contrary" with Karoli's violin disintegrating the surrounding air. "Outside My Door" is the link between the early Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" and the space-rock of Hawkwind or the deviant rock 'n' roll of early Roxy Music. End of side A. The second side of the record opens and closes with the twenty minutes of "Yoo Doo Right" where Czukay's mantric bass hypnosis leads the whole group in a purifying journey of the most hidden nightmares within each of them. Mooney's voice paints incredibly well the paranoias of being black in Germany (so much so that soon, on his psychoanalyst's advice, he would return to New York in search of lost balance), while Schmidt's ethereal keyboards dialogue in hyperspace with Karoli's sharp guitar, and Liebezeit pounds his skins like a Native American shaman directly touched by the voice of Manitou. The journey is over, even though it's just the beginning, and perhaps to fully understand a work of art, it needs to be contextualized in the period that gave birth to it (when one is not fortunate enough to have lived it); even though true understanding, I believe, lies in the emotions that it unleashes within us... it's a doubt from which I have not yet found the comfort of getting out.