Can
Tago Mago

“Tagomago is a really small islet: just over a kilometer long and 113 meters wide, it doesn't host architectural structures or anything else. In other words, in Tagomago you'll find the perfect fulfillment of your desires!”

This description, taken from a site about the Balearic Islands, comes very close, in my opinion, to the essence of the record.

Let's overlook the revealed presence of Aleister Crowley's figure, who was a student of esotericism linked to the British intelligence services. When dealing with students of esotericism, not true esotericists, they might pick up some technique, some little secret, which they then use to deceive by promising superpowers, wealth, and selling various salvations. The true esotericist is immune to all this because they don't sell anything and will tell you that you can't do anything; they have climbed the mountain and seen what the reality is. The only thing left to do is to surrender to these truths and thus begin to live life as it should be lived, that is, as a spectator. And isn't this a good and just condition to approach listening to this TagoMago produced by the enigmatic CAN?

Impersonal, phantasmagoric, it is a conscious, balanced work that has the gift of freedom because it is a work that produces its fruits not for itself but for others. In this work, the work of the individual becomes a team effort where there is no one who stands out over another, and thus we have harmony, all tuned together without one note overpowering the others.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” we unsettle Aleister Crowley again, but the CAN indeed do what they want: a person is not free by merely doing whatever they like but is free who manages to have full control of themselves and has no ties that bind and condition them. The CAN entity confronts us with an inner reality in which there are no traditions, no pasts; there is only an eternal present and, at most, a projection into the future through the work of the present. In some way, we could say that TagoMago is the work of a music that doesn't exist, absurdly revealed with the classic instruments of rock (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, voice). This only confirms the group's evolved nature, which does not enclose itself in its empyrean and remains connected to reality while aware of its strength, respecting the fundamental maxim of Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below; as below, so above...” always staying within the esoteric realm and inevitably remaining epigones of themselves and therefore unique and unrepeatable, especially in this work. In this synthesis of mine, I want to focus on the deep structures of the work as already exposed above and not cling to the description of individual pieces. Here, my memory helps me when in 1989, I recorded a compilation of CAN for a dear friend on a cassette with tracks from their early works and a massive presence of tracks from TagoMago (practically the whole first album). A few days later, my friend called me saying that on Sunday, returning by car from the sea with three other friends of ours, he had played the CAN cassette I made for him. To make it short, he told me that after ten minutes of listening to a track, which I later understood was Halleluwah, they all suddenly started shouting in unison, and then they felt good, were happy. In short, they got hit with a piece of impersonal joy stimulated by the mantric and hypnotic listening of that great piece that is Halleluwah, all this without any improper substance intake and it is a mini-ecstasy that I have also experienced several times. That's why I candidly confess to being shamelessly biased, but my subjectivity towards TagoMago is so quick that it turns into, thus I hope, an objective esoteric praise. And if I were forced to choose to take a single record to the classic deserted island, not by chance there's always an island, a (sacred) mountain, or a desert involved, I wouldn't hesitate a moment to take TagoMago. The hermetic nature of the record shouldn't scare those who approach it, lose the boundary, drown in the all, grasp the essence, don't surrender at the first obstacle. Conscious acceptance of suffering and the effort of understanding commutes the pain into joy. When younger, I used to skip Aumgn and Peking O because I didn't want to face them as I didn’t understand; the egoic vision limited me. Now I can't help but listen to them; TagoMago is an indispensable unity. The appearance of TagoMago marks a point of no return, and our apprentice sorcerer Crowley said on his deathbed: “I am perplexed.”

In the case of TagoMago, we are not perplexed at all.