Ege Bamyasi by CAN

CAN's 1972 album, Ege Bamyasi, is a masterpiece of their discography, a masterpiece of krautrock and experimental music, second only to  Future Days in my opinion.

It's part of a remarkable series of albums, beginning with their debut album, Monster Movie (1969), followed by Soundtracks (1970), Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyasi (1972), and concluding with Future Days (1973), their pinnacle. Few bands can boast such a series.

The sound is characterized by great refinement, splendid rhythmic grooves with moments of psychedelia and funk, where song form is very present in structured and intense songs.

In this album, experimentation and improvisation are clearly defined, both ingeniously and creatively, less spontaneous than their previous masterpiece, Tago Mago, and perhaps for this reason more defined and coherent in its overall structure.

Some notes on the tracks

- "Pinch," the second longest track on the album, opens with a crazy drum and percussion groove, featuring beautiful spoken word and guitar flourishes. Liebezeit's drum work is exceptional. The rhythm and delivery are memorable. The song sustains this rhythmic foundation for a long time, and the vocals rise, moving from spoken word to screamed, always in control. The groove forms the basis for numerous guitar and synth accents, with a splendid bass enriching the rhythmic foundation along with the excellent percussion. A masterpiece.

- "Sing Swan Song" begins with light, liquid sounds and then begins a slow ballad with a psychedelic atmosphere, a slow, dense rhythm, and bagpipes accompanying the beautiful synth and guitar backing. The vocals are great in the melancholic melody, while synth accents and scattered sounds suddenly intervene. A growing and intense atmosphere. Great song.

- "One More Night" is a rhythmic and energetic track with a drum, bass, and synth harmonies that create a sort of hypnotic loop of exceptional modernity. A song that will make you jump out of your seat and sway around the living room every time, with its driving groove, over which the guitar does a great job of rhythmic work and the vocals intervene with whispers, sighs, and a light spoken word. The crescendo at the end is beautiful, with heightened intensity and funky digressions combined with beautiful guitar improvisations in an overall extraordinary storyline.

- "Vitamin C" opens side B with an exceptional bass drum groove, a song that denotes an expressive urgency, tending to define moments of unease and tension, with a superb vocal performance, a sumptuous rhythm section full of counterpoints and twists, and accents and virtuosity that are never exaggerated. When the organ enters, it sounds like an Eastern European folk song, with whistling in the background, ancient sounds, a fading voice, and a chaos of synths arriving over a carpet of dissonant strings, and we're already in the next track.

- "Soup," a song over 10 minutes long, has an intro with background vocals and slow, low drum and bass sounds, light touches and hits of snare and cymbals, before igniting into a splendid, driving psychedelic rock. Then the drums and bass become energetic and powerful, the screaming voice is decisive and scratchy, guitars and synths enter with almost disturbing effects, until the sound shifts to "quasi-jazz," a highly technical and creative drum and synth improvisation that grows and develops into a sort of controlled chaos, pure overall experimentation, with simply monstrous synth work and an overall atmosphere bordering on nonsense, disturbing, with the intervention of distorted guitar and the "room" sounds typical of jam sessions. Fantastic, difficult, but fantastic.

- I'm So Green returns to the rock-psy-kraut groove this band masters with a beautiful, rhythmic song, featuring a wry voice, extraordinary bass work over a solid and precise drum base, with guitars rhythmically shaping the melody and synths in the background. The song accelerates almost madly towards the end. Very enjoyable after the long experimental jam that preceded it. Nice rock.

- Spoon closes the album with lots of electronics, synths and electronic percussion that combine with traditional drums and a pressing, hypothetical, and unsettling tempo, with something Indian in the musicality and medieval in the vocals, a very strange mix of inconsistent styles. The electronic percussion and synths are reminiscent of Kraftwerk's long loops, but everything else is acoustic and psychedelic. The voice itself is deliberately ethereal and light in a melodic phrasing over which synth and guitar virtuosity unfolds. Beautiful yet atypical and challenging.

The iconic cover features a CAN of Ege Bamyası (Turkish for "Aegean okra"), translated into German as Okraschoten ("okra pods"). Schmidt says the idea for the cover came when Liebezeit found a similar can of okra in a Turkish grocery store in Cologne. The cover also references the band's name but in Turkish CAN it means "soul," "spirit," or "life," creating a beautiful interplay of meanings. The culinary theme of the artwork is also echoed in song titles like "Vitamin C" "Soup" "I'm So Green" and "Spoon"... nothing has been left to chance on this album; contrary to appearances, there's no simple jar on the cover...

This album condenses the essence of the band into about 40 minutes: its melodic, rhythmic, and compositional aspects, its experimental aspects, its improvisations, and the anarchic freedom of individual interpretations, into a cohesive and at times disharmoniously harmonious whole.

A band that always surprises and always seems in step with the times, relevant, after more than fifty years, as on this great album.

A must-have, without a doubt.

Tracklist

1. Pinch (9:28)
2. Sing Swan Song (4:18)
3. One More Night (5:35)
4. Vitamin C (3:34)
5. Soup (10:25)
6. I'm So Green (3:03)
7. Spoon (3:03)

Duration 39:26

LineUp

- Damo Suzuki - vocals
- Michael Karoli - electric, acoustic, and 12-string guitars, shehnai
- Irmin Schmidt - organ, electric piano, violin, steel guitar
- Holger Czukay - bass
- Jaki Liebezeit - drums, flexatone

Note: All links to the musicians' works are in the TAGS under the article title or on the "Artists" page