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Finally, a brilliant exploration of the German rock band Can's 1971 album Tago Mago . This hugely unique and influential album deserves close analysis from a fan, rather than a musicologist. Novelist Alan Warner details the concrete music we hear on the album, how it was composed, executed and recorded--including the history of the album in terms of its release, promotion and art work. This tale of Tago Mago is also the tale of a young man obsessed with record collecting in the dark and mysterious period of pop music before Google. Warner includes a backtracking of the history of the band up to that point and also some description of Can's unique recording approach taking into account their home studio set up.Interviews with the two surviving members: drummer Jaki Liebezeit, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist Holger Czukay make this a hilariously personal and illuminating picture of Can.
List of contents
PART ONE
HALLELUWAH
AN ANATOMY OF LISTENING
CAN WITHOUT THE MUSIC
'LIKE CAN'S DRUMMER.'
THE TERRIFYING SEX PISTOLS
MR IAN DURY & THE BLOCKHEADS
SWEARING
A 'RECORD COLLECTION'
VAN HALEN & BAGPIPES
PART TWO
A SPANNER IN THE SKY
MADE IN A CASTLE WITH BETTER EQUIPMENT
TAGO MAGO
CAN WORLD
NOT A DREAM
THE EDITS
A SINGLE SONG WHICH NEVER ENDS
NOSTALGIA DANGER
THE MYSTERY OF LA ISLA DE TAGOMAGO
About the author
Alan Warner is a Scottish novelist. His 1995 novel
Morvern Callar won the Somerset Maugham Award and was made into a feature film directed by Lynne Ramsay. In 2013, he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel
The Deadman's Pedal.
Foreword
An officially approved account of one of the most influential and powerful albums of the 1970s, this brilliant addition to the 33 1/3 series by Scottish novelist Alan Warner will explore in detail the conception, recording and release of the album Tago Mago by Can.
Additional text
I really can't recommend Warner's Tago Mago highly enough. I've never read anything by Warner that isn't artful and considered, a mix between the analytical and passionate, but that has never been better demonstrated than in this short book. You may not want to go out and get a copy of Can's album (personally, I prefer Ege Bamyasi), but that's not what he is setting out to do. This is [his] story, one which is both personal and universal, or at least common to the sort of people whose relationships with music, and other art forms, can be as important as their relationships to people - basically, the sort of person who buys the 33? books.
Report
Warner asserts that the musical criticism and musicology "ignore the material and autobiographical details that have been built into a web of deeply personal associations". This is true of a certain classical model of music writing, and [this] book is a deeply enjoyable and lyrical rebuttal to that Frances Morgan The Wire 20150301
