Can – Live In Brighton 1975 – 2021 (Hi-Res, 24bit)
Krautrock.
Germany.
1. Brighton 75 Eins (13:47)
2. Brighton 75 Zwei (10:06)
3. Brighton 75 Drei (9:10)
4. Brighton 75 Vier (14:33)
5. Brighton 75 Fünf (14:50)
6. Brighton 75 Sechs (10:29)
7. Brighton 75 Sieben (18:19)
Bass – Holger Czukay
Drums – Jaki Liebezeit
Guitars – Michael Karoli
Keyboards, Synths – Irmin Schmidt
The second album in Mute’s planned series of archival Can shows captures a group figuring things out in real time. After 30 tentative minutes, things turn transcendent.
When you’re improvising a piece of music from scratch, you’re bound to spend some time fumbling in the dark. You take a tentative stab at this chord change or that groovy ostinato, you listen to your bandmates conducting their own halting experiments, you wait for the idea that will illuminate a compelling path forward for everyone. For Can, on the evening of November 19, 1975, the light took its time showing up. But once the legendary German avant-rock band found it, they never looked back.
Live in Brighton 1975 is the second in a planned series of Can archival concert recordings, perhaps the next best thing to seeing them live for those of us who were born too late to witness their decade-long run. And if records must suffice, we might as well embrace the positives the medium has to offer. Given Can’s habit of pulling jams from thin air, there are no song titles here, just identifying numbers in German. The first few excursions have their moments, but if you’re digging into Live in Brighton 1975 for the first time, I recommend skipping straight to track vier.
We hear a rowdy audience, itself something of a revelation for a band whose legacy can seem phantasmagoric for a modern American listener—they were envisioning new forms for rock music that were far beyond the visions of their contemporaries, and doing so in relative obscurity, especially outside Europe. (Who are these people who had the good sense to see Can when they had the chance, and did they appreciate what they were getting?) Irmin Schmidt’s painterly electric piano chords suggest a pastoral scene, then Michael Karoli’s guitar feedback and Jaki Liebezeit’s snare drum rain down like napalm and gatling gun fire. Fans will recognize the riff that emerges from the onslaught as “Vernal Equinox,” a highlight from 1975’s Landed, the otherwise middling album that Can were ostensibly promoting at the time. But Can were never a band to merely recreate their records, and their take on “Vernal Equinox” here reaches a delirium that the studio version only hints at. Liebezeit, Can’s greatest individual player, propels his bandmates with a drumbeat that may as well have been pulled off a d’n’b record from 20 years later, envisioning the future as he skitters forward at 160 bpm.
The musicians are at their best when they have an anchor, some agreed-upon germ of an idea from which to build their improvisation outward. The set’s highest peak comes at the end with “Brighton 75 Sieben,” a jam clearly derived from 1972’s immortal “Vitamin C.” By ’75, vocalist Damo Suzuki had left Can, and in lieu of his manic hook, the band reorients “Vitamin C” around its instrumental bridge, a minor-key organ line that comes across as nearly incidental on the studio version but emerges as monumental here. Liebezeit’s barrages of percussion in the final section of “Sieben” would be astounding if they were the first things he played that night, and are even more so when you realize he’s been at it like this for an hour and a half.
What about everything else, the 30 minutes of music that come before Can hit their stride with “Brighton 75 Vier”? Other than a brief dip into the reeling melody of “Dizzy Dizzy,” it sounds to me like they’re working from scratch. And while they surely found magic in these unexplored zones on many other nights, it just wasn’t happening here. “Eins” and “Zwei” lean heavily on leads from Karoli, who was a wildly inventive guitarist in his approaches to texture and rhythm, but not at his best when playing more traditional solos.
The mere existence of recordings like Live in Brighton 1975 is a gift to Can listeners.
-
Back in the Seventies I must confess I was not a fan of Can and am not sure I had even heard the name, as none of my mates were into experimental Krautrock, and they continued to pass me by until about 20 years ago when I first dipped my toes in the water to see what they were all about. Needless to say, it was a revelation, but I soon realised there was a difference between Can in the studio and Can in concert, as the latter was something which took improvisation and experimentation to new levels. This is the second in a series of releases by Mute, the other two featuring Stuttgart in 1975 and Cuxhaven in 1976, and has the band back as the original quartet of Holger Czukay (bass), Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Michael Karoli (guitar), and Jaki Liebezeit (drums).I am sure all these tracks are based on others which appeared on albums, even if they are only influenced by them, and here the seven songs (91 minutes in length) are literally just numbered 1-9 (in German). I read one review which said to miss out the early songs altogether and go straight to 'Vier' as that is where the magic starts, and while that may be true I found the build to that was wonderful. Here was a band who were improvising on the spot, looking to each other for direction and inspiration, then travelling in that direction and bringing the audience with them. By this time they had been playing together for seven years, and it had been a couple of years and an album since the departure of Damo Suzuki, so they were again used to working as a quartet, and through the set they gradually warm up and get into the groove, finding the special place where everyone turns into trans galactic space goats where all that exists is the music and everything else just pales into no existence.
This is classic Can, captured in wonderful sound quality and one would never imagine this recording is now nearly fifty years old as it could have been from last week, except people just don't perform music like this anymore, or do they? Classic progheads, lovers of experimental music and Can aficionados need to dig this out.