Can: InCANdescence

Nowadays Can have been canonised. Every serious music fan is expected to know their stuff. But when I bought this, in '84 or '85 (again from the Our Price on Bridge Street, where it was only £2.99), they were close enough to prog rock and long hippy songs to be treated as suspect by the post-punk tastemakers. I'd read about them probably in connection with the even more unfashionable Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, but I didn't know anyone who had (or would admit to having) any of their records, and I never saw the 'classic' older albums in record shops. So I bought this.

It's a mixed bag, combining tracks from the later years on the Virgin label with unreleased materials from earlier years and earlier incarnations of the band. In their different ways the first and the last tracks appeal most to me. The opening song is I Want More which apparently was a minor hit and is pretty damn catchy. The closing one is called E.F.S. No.36. E.F.S. stands for Ethnological Forgery Service, and it's a postmodern piss-take (from 1974) of the fetishisation of all those recordings made by Alan Lomax and collected by Harry Smith (except that Smith wouldn't have included anything as Jelly Roll Morton-ish as this). I definitely wouldn't have got the joke at the time. As John Gill (did he write for Sounds?) writes in the sleeve notes, "Jazz musicians and fans usually leave the room in disgust when played [this track]. A shambolic and highly suspect blues for piano and sax, it's recorded so badly (intentionally?) that it sounds like an original 20s recording."

Using the wonderful web, I've just found that there's a number of other E.F.S.'s on the Unlimited Edition album. Curiously this album (inCANdescence) doesn't appear on many of their discographies (like this one or this one).

Discogs entry for this album.

Comments

[datre]

E.F.S. = Ethnological Forgery _Series_

See 'Track Notes' on your link to Unlimited Edition above (or back sleeve of InCANdesence, column 3 para 2) :)

[David]

Many thanks for the correction!