Tago Mago

Holger Czukay studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen before helping found Can. Damo Suzuki was a street performer in Munich whom Malcolm Mooney’s replacement was found by chance — the band heard him busking and invited him to play that night. That contingency became one of the defining vocal instruments of Krautrock: Suzuki sang in Japanese, German, and invented language, phonemes treated as percussion rather than meaning.

Tago Mago (1971) is the record where the tape-edit approach Czukay had absorbed from Stockhausen became a pop method — extended improvised sessions cut and rearranged into something that sounds live but is constructed. Public Image Ltd, The Fall, Radiohead, and LCD Soundsystem all cite Can more than they admit; what they absorbed was the logic of the groove as a long, patient, evolving structure rather than a repeated unit. Can’s influence tends to be underacknowledged because it arrives through intermediaries who don’t always know the source.