Can: Ege Bamyasi (green vinyl) [MUTE/SPOON]

Why you'll love it

This Mute/Spoon edition is remastered and pressed on green vinyl, which suits a record named after Aegean okra. "Spoon" reached No. 6 on the German singles chart and sold 300,000 copies as the theme to the TV thriller Das Messer.

This edition

• Green vinyl
• Remastered

About the album

Can's surprise hit paid for the studio. Czukay said the song was named as a companion to the knife, less aggressive. With money from "Spoon" they moved into a former cinema in Weilerswist near Cologne, christened it Inner Space, and set about making their third album under a strict June 1972 deadline from United Artists.

Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit and singer Damo Suzuki worked fast, though Karoli recalled Schmidt and Suzuki finding time for a daily game of chess. "Pinch" is tough, dissonant funk, "Sing Swan Song" a lullaby whose acoustic guitar Karoli recorded out in the garden, and "One More Night" runs on a lean, Steve Reich-like pulse. Short of material, they added the singles "Spoon," "Vitamin C" and "I'm So Green," then cut "Soup," a ten-minute improvisation with no edits, a day before the deadline. Pitchfork called "Vitamin C" the best funk ever to come out of Europe.

Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, Wire and Pavement all took notes. Schmidt's wife Hildegard, the band's manager, soundproofed the studio with fifteen hundred army mattresses, which is either serious acoustic engineering or the comfiest studio in Europe.

Also at Kops: more Can on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Spoon / Mute (cat# 9378-1), a reissue of the 1972 album.