Ege Bamyasi

Ege Bamyasi (1972) was made immediately after Tago Mago, and the two albums are best understood together. Where Tago Mago is abstract and expansive — two sides of which are largely improvised long-form pieces — Ege Bamyasi is more compressed, more melodic, more willing to arrive somewhere. “Spoon” became the theme for a German television crime drama and gave Can their only genuine chart success.

The method is the same across both: extended improvised sessions, heavy tape editing by Czukay, Suzuki’s voice as a rhythm instrument. What Ege Bamyasi demonstrates is that the Can approach, applied with slightly more restraint, could produce something that sounded almost like a pop record — which makes the influence on post-punk bands even more legible. Wire, PiL, and the post-punk English bands absorbed the version of Can that Ege Bamyasi showed was possible: groove as structure, the edit as composition.