Of all the tags attached to the music of Cologne band Can, Krautrock is the least revealing (and, arguably, the most offensive).
It's a catch-all term, intended to compartmentalise the diverse range of experimental acts that established a foothold in Germany in the late '60s and went on to influence scores of bands across many contemporary genres.
Accurate descriptors aren't easy to find.
Harder still is the task of summing up Can's strange and wonderful 1971 double album Tago Mago.
Let's just say that somewhere in its soupy mix are elements of soul, funk, trip-hop, progressive and industrial rock, avant-garde noise music and . . . err . . . magic.
Tago Mago was Can's second studio album and the first with Japanese vocalist Kenji Damo Suzuki, who replaced American Malcolm Mooney.
Suzuki had been busking outside a cafe in Munich when approached by bassist/producer Holger Czukay and asked to join the band.
The new vocalist's style meshed perfectly with the Can ethos.
Here, free-form spontaneous expression was the key to everything, and Suzuki obliged by speaking, singing and shrieking his way through a series of extended jams that would be edited by the savvy Czukay into seven tracks, two of which (Halleluhwah and Aumgn) each occupied an entire side of the LP.
Despite the loose rules around structure, extended patches of rock-solid groove, laid down by Czukay and metronomic drummer Jaki Leibezeit, gave the album its gigantic pulsing heart, allowing guitarist Michael Karoli and keyboard player Irmin Schmidt to drift in and out of hypnotic central themes.
Elsewhere, vast waves of eerie, doom-laden noise gave way to shimmering sections of funk or the old-school beats from rudimentary rhythm boxes.
This was exotic, heady, inventive stuff.
With each of Can's players at his idiosyncratic best, the rest was left to Czukay.
By surreptitiously recording the downtime jams between takes, he ensured none of the magic would be lost.
