The Story
CAN formed in Cologne in 1968 around Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli and Jaki Liebezeit, with Malcolm Mooney and later Damo Suzuki taking the vocal role. They built their own studio and recorded obsessively, editing hours of improvisation into songs — a working method that made the band as much a compositional laboratory as a rock group.
Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyası (1972) and Future Days (1973) form the core of a run that helped define what became known as krautrock: hypnotic, cyclical rhythm — Liebezeit's steady 'motorik' pulse — wrapped around dub-like production and funk, jazz and electronic textures years ahead of their wider adoption.
Few bands are cited as an influence as often or as specifically. Radiohead have named CAN as a direct influence on Kid A and Amnesiac, going so far as to build their own studio partly inspired by CAN's example; Stereolab built a career on the same motorik pulse; Talk Talk, Sonic Youth and countless others have acknowledged the debt.
The band's four core instrumentalists have all since died — Karoli in 2001, Liebezeit and Czukay both in 2017 — but the catalog they built keeps finding new listeners, reissued and championed by the band's own label, Spoon Records, and by Mute.