Amidst the seemingly unending procession of more-or-less desultorily reissued masterpieces which now function as a risk-free profit source for an embattled record industry, the offering up of canonical krautrock touchstone Tago Mago, repackaged to celebrate its fortieth anniversary, might perhaps be taken as a lamentable step. This is not to cast aspersions on the motives of those involved — as a collaborative venture between Mute and Spoon Records, the latter run by the wife of Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, it forms part of a laudatory venture of opening up the extensive vaults of recorded material the band amassed throughout the '70s. Yet as a precursor to a forthcoming boxset compiling some of this material, it might seem a somewhat diminutive package: only a bonus disc of live recordings is offered to justify the re-release of a record that has long been easily available on CD. Indeed, the status of krautrock's legacy has changed immeasurably since the mid-90s, when Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler offered a rare insight into an obscure and apparently largely closed-down avenue of musical investigation — a widespread reappraisal which in part explains his reluctance to reprint it, alongside perhaps a keen sense of the irony that his book is now unavailable, while the records it championed are easily accessible.
Once confronted by the record itself, however, it suddenly seems entirely apposite that should it find itself commemorated, if only to accentuate how detached from any straightforward chronology of influence or nostalgia it seems. The simple fact that the album is forty years old is shocking, not because the album feels surprisingly contemporary to us, but because we do not yet feel like contemporaries of it — and this recognition might in itself justify the reissue treatment. The list of citations and homages Can, and Tago Mago in particular, have received is extensive and luminous, of course, but the album itself seems to pull out of any retroactive focus, evading the pacifying capture of its own canonisation, still unrecognisable, bizarre, stretching out beyond reach. Stuttering suddenly into life, opener 'Paperhouse' cuts quickly into a deceptively simple groove — a maximalist minimalism, with layers of chiming guitar and intricate piano figures weaving around the tight rhythmic pulse. Avoiding any straightforward structural hooks, the track establishes a strange, metastable oscillation between a mid-tempo swing and a double-time burst of frenetic guitar licks and rattling drums. Climaxing with a flurry of piercing solos, it crashes blindly into the opening of 'Mushroom', a stripped down mix of jittery syncopated percussion and droning bass. It is on this track that vocalist Damo Suzuki, then new to the band, comes to the fore, lurching unpredictably from laconic slurring to demented shrieking to convey lyrics which, like the album itself, hover just beyond the reach of comprehension.
The oddly ominous duelling guitars of 'Oh Yeah' lead into the album's dual centrepieces, 'Halleluwah' and 'Aumgn', totalling some thirty-six minutes between them and pushing to opposite ends of the band's astonishingly broad sonic spectrum. These tracks make clear that Can were not simply psych-rock jammers or cosmic minimalists, but were following a much stranger muse; one that speaks to an equal influence of Stockhausen and Hendrix, without resorting to a facile synthesis or self-congratulatory postmodernist juxtaposition. Listening to 'Halleluwah' is like being plugged into a gigantic machine, switched on and manipulated by the locking mechanisms of the rhythm engine. A respite of off-beat jazz piano is just a momentary pause, time to get your breath back, before the track decides to experiment some more with the distribution of your limbs. If krautrock was innately conceptual, trying to assemble an alien music from the detritus of rock and putting the avant-garde to work, then Can were there to show that concepts can make you move. After that eighteen-minute abduction, 'Aumgn' is the dawning realisation that you are not quite where you thought you were — stuttering percussion and wildly oscillating tape drones merge and drift, sounding like auto-assembled musique concréte from a dystopian future, all trace of funk stripped away. The second half of the record pursues this trajectory relentlessly, offering little in the way of formal reference points to orient the listener. The woozy closer 'Bring Me Coffee or Tea' shows how far we've come, as something akin to a narcotised lounge band tries to make itself heard over the persistent industrial clatter that is never quite reduced to background noise.
Even this loosely-sketched movement is perhaps a disservice to a record which, despite its monumental length and ambition, rarely seems inclined towards systematic organisation or pseudo-narrative progression. It possesses instead a paradoxically coherent inconsistency, and it is to this we might attribute its still-perplexing untimeliness — the record sounds like a message from a future which never actually came about, a mess of still largely undeveloped lines of attack on the outer limits of rock. One can only hope that this reissue does not mark another step towards its successful incorporation, but rather a reaffirmation of its mobilising force, an invitation to follow its lines of flight. The bonus disc, featuring three live recordings from 1972, is, while not essential, certainly a compelling look at how the band themselves were trying to explore the possibilities of their material. The standout is an incredible thirty-minute deconstruction of the relatively simple pop number 'Spoon' from the follow-up to Tago Mago, 1972's Ege Bamyasi, transforming it into searing VU-style hard rock and then heading for the stratosphere on waves of distortion — creating the kind of perverse mutant blues that Les Rallizes Dénudés and Fushitsusha would go on to push to its logical conclusion (it is entirely unsurprising, on this evidence, that Cope would go on to write Japrocksampler).
Ultimately, though the reissue does not convince as a vital addition to Can's catalogue, and the bonus disc has a sense of the for-completists-only about it, the album itself still stands out as a uniquely remarkable achievement in the history of what can only dubiously be termed progressive rock. As a taster for next year's Lost Tapes release, and as an incitement to revisit a perhaps too-readily assimilated outré masterpiece, it can only be met with approval.