Sleeve notes
Can
Future Days · 1973
Can formed in Cologne in 1968 around Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, both former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen, alongside guitarist Michael Karoli and drummer Jaki Liebezeit, a jazz musician whose metronomic precision became the band's defining instrument. Early vocalist Malcolm Mooney, an American sculptor, gave way in 1970 to Damo Suzuki, a Japanese street musician the band discovered busking in Munich and invited on stage that same night — he sang with Can for the next three years without ever properly rehearsing a lyric.
Tago Mago (1971) is the sprawling, avant-garde landmark most listeners meet first, built from tape edits and extended improvisation; Future Days (1973), Suzuki's final album with the group, moved toward something calmer and more atmospheric before he left to become a Jehovah's Witness. Ege Bamyasi (1972) sits between the two. Can never had a hit and rarely toured outside Europe, but Liebezeit's motorik drumming and Czukay's tape-collage production techniques run directly through post-punk, ambient, and electronic music — David Bowie and Brian Eno both named them as a formative influence.
