BOOK REVIEW: ALAN WARNER - TAGO MAGO

 

 

 

Perhaps imitation is the most sincere form of critique, so I'll begin this review of novelist Alan Warner's monographic ode/memoir with something similar of my own. 

I don't know when I first saw the name CAN (a copy of NME or Melody Maker - Nick Kent or syndicated Lester Bangs?) My first direct audial exposure was through a copy of the German experimental rock group's Unlimited Edition borrowed from the State Library of Tasmania. It was here that I was later able to borrow pressings of Cage, Stockhausen, Ligeti and Berio on modern classical imprints like Wergo, Nonesuch and Deutsche Grammophon. I discovered these classical composers (highly influential figures for the group’s founding members Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay) more through Zappa interviews/biographers and an encyclopaedia in my high school library than Can itself at that stage. I had also heard Pink Floyd's 1969 release Ummagumma (a second-hand cassette copy - now long gone - smelling of glove box deodorant - or soap? - that was purchased at an open-air market on the northern side of Canberra near my old suburb of Charnwood). The Floyd’s double album of live and studio-based improv-composition fusions certainly helped prepare my youthful brain for the historical melding of those two forms of musical practice, as did Hawkwind releases like Space Ritual and Warrior at the Edge of Time. Improvisation vs composition: a strategic dichotomy maybe best reconciled for me by engineer Czukay's psychically explosive edit points.

There's a case for placing Can's seminal 1971 release Tago Mago (hereafter referred to as TM - synchronicity alert: also used as shorthand for Transcendental Meditation) in a league table with Hawkwind's 1973 live favourite Space Ritual as the greatest of that decade's double album releases. (Hawks leader Dave Brock has long been vocal about the importance of the Germans to his own musical development). TM is definitely an example of the format's most creative and unconsciously conceptual use. It was originally only intended to be a single album, but the group succumbed to manager Hildegard Schmidt’s persuasion and released it as a double to include the more experimental tracks ‘Aumgn’ and ‘Peking O’.  

The blogger must thank  Alan Warner for introducing him to the term 'eidetic' in his 33⅓ monograph, which was first published in 2015. Unlike Warner, I don't think I've ever thought of other locations and people listening to this album other than the groups and artists I know to have been influenced by it - Brian Eno & David Byrne, PiL's John Lydon and Jah Wobble, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Jesus and Mary Chain, Talk Talk/O'rang, Radiohead, Hunters & Collectors, etc. I certainly think of the musicians in Can themselves creating the music in the legendary 'castle' Schloss Norvenich (more a modern mansion by the late 60s as Warner points out). This is where Warner's elucidation of the recording process is most fascinating (there's a tantalising reference to a breakdown of the closing section of 'Peking O' by ... in The Can Box which I'm tempted to track down as funds allow. More on this section of Can's most underrated track later). 

My eidetic, cross-cultural impressions of TM have always taken the form of imaginary movie soundtracks. Like Warner, my first LP purchases were soundtracks (Star Wars, Close Encounters, Grease, Saturday Night Fever) along with prog releases like Peter Gabriel's Car (as disparate a collection of song-movies as that singer has ever produced). Other mail order purchases include Kansas' Point of No Return (purchased mostly for Dust in the Wind', a sizable hit in Australia in 1977. The instrumental 'The Spider' appealed just as much for its proggy complexity) and Ted Nugent's Stranglehold (about which the less said the better, other than to say The Nuge was a fine blues-rock player back before his neo-conservative political tendencies become too obvious to ignore). There were other krautrock albums too: Kraftwerk's Autobahn (a record club mail order purchase); Tangerine Dream's Encore and Zeit (purchased at a record shop near mum's old workplace in the Canberra CBD). The Tangs' 70s releases, like Can's, were important precursors to the short-lived (though perhaps gradually resurgent) imaginary soundtracks genre associated with the 90s releases of David Toop and Australian musician Paul Schutze.

The first disc of TM signifies for itself and plenty has been written about it already (as Warner says, we all know how 'Hallelulah' goes; and how). I'll concentrate more on the second disc for this piece. The chanting sections of 'Aumgn' always used to (and still do) conjure a form of post-apocalyptic Thelemic voodoo ceremony - spiritual syncretism emerging out of the ruins of future civilisations. The opening section of 'Peking O' made (makes?) me imagine a cinematic translation of J. G. Ballard's The Crystal World: the echo shock waves of percussion strikes, guitar and keyboard phrases like phase states of crystallised space-time spreading through a Central American jungle. Schmidt’s solemn organ conjures the novel’s abandoned church scenes. Diamond birds taking off into the radiant air above transmogrified tree lines, stirred into flight by Suzuki's ecstatic caveman-experiencing-his-first-solar-eclipse shrieks; anticipated/met by snare drum blasts. Time out of joint, but forever finding means of cohesion and synthesis. What philosopher Leon Niemoczynski, in his brief introductory work Speculative Realism: An Epitome, calls the 'post-contemporary condition'. Can may have officially been producing in the postmodern age, but their significance will perhaps survive all the philosophical paradigms to come. 

This closing section of 'Peking O' has always sounded like my environment. Not my immediate physical environment so much as a semi-mediated psychological environment. An eidetic amalgam of sensory impressions as Warner describes it, alluding to its potential weaponisation by the US military.

Van der Graaf Generator/Peter Hammill may have been influenced too, if marginally. Hammill once revealed to the author that Guy Evans "was particularly keen on Neu!" but admitted only to sharing a "commonality of spirit" with the "German Lourdes" (Lords?).

Warner's book is an ideal companion piece to other fine works of Can scholarship like Rob Young's All Gates Open and David Stubbs' Future Days, but should be read more for its imaginative inspiration than its musicology. 

 (C) Copyright 2021 Jon Kromka