Ege Bamyasi

Ege Bamyası
Studio album by
Can
Released29 November 1972
RecordedDecember 1971 – June 1972
StudioInner Space Studio [de] (Weilerswist, West Germany)
Genre
Length40:06
Label
ProducerCan
Can chronology
Tago Mago
(1971) 		Ege Bamyası
(1972) 		Future Days
(1973)
Singles from Ege Bamyası
  1. "Spoon"
    Released: 1971
  2. "Vitamin C" / "I'm So Green"
    Released: 1972

Ege Bamyası (Turkish pronunciation: [ˈeɟe ˈbamjasɯ], lit. "Aegean okra") is the third studio album by German krautrock band Can, released on 29 November 1972 by United Artists Records. The album contains the single "Spoon", which charted in the Top 10 in Germany after being used as the theme song to the German television mini-series Das Messer [de] (1971). The success of the single allowed Can to establish their own studio, Inner Space Studio, [de] in Weilerswist, where they recorded the rest of the album. In 2004, Spoon Records remastered Ege Bamyası and reissued it as a hybrid Super Audio CD.

Ege Bamyası has received critical acclaim, praised for skilful fusion of experimental music, electronic sounds, and avant-funk. Spectrum Sounds magazine called the album's experience as "maybe the most danceable that experimental music gets".[2] Pitchfork highlighted that the album stands out among Can discography for being one of the most focused and "tetchy" records.[5] A number of musicians, particularly rooted in electronic music and post-punk, cited Ege Bamyası as their influence. Some of those musicians (e.g. Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, The Orb, Bruce Gilbert of Wire, and System 7) participated in the Can tribute remix album Sacrilege (1997).

Background

By the end of 1971, Can relocated their Inner Space Studio [de] out of the communal space of the Schloss Nörvenich, where the recordings sessions were time-limited due to noise disturbance concerns, and moved into a large ex-cinema in Weilerswist near Cologne. Hildegard Schmidt, Can's manager, outfitted the studio with fifteen hundred soundproofing seagrass mattresses bought from army barracks at Cologne-Ossendorf.[6] Irmin Schmidt, previously using two Farfisa organs, order a complex effects unit custom-built by Swiss engineer Hermi Hogg and dubbed the "Alpha 77". Alpha 77 allowed "far greater degrees of spontaneity in the way Schmidt handled his synthesizers", a heavy unit incorporating multiple switches and tape loops.[7]

Ege Bamyası became the first Can album recorded in the Weilerswist's Inner Space, starting with the song "Spoon". After their success with Das Millionenspiel (1970) soundtrack, Can got a commission to record the theme song for the future installment directed by Rolf von Sydow and titled Das Messer [de] (The Knife). According to Holger Czukay, the song's name was chosen as "a companion to the knife, less aggressive".[8]

"Spoon" rapidly climbed German charts, reached #6 place, and sold 300,000 copies,[9] which inspired Can to throw a free concert "to give them a taste of what they had already been brewing up in Weilerswist".[10] Peter Przygodda the "Can Free Concert", filmed by Martin Schäfer, Robbie Müller, and Egon Mann at the Cologne Sporthalle on 3 February 1972. The film was included on the "Can DVD".[11]

In the first half of 1972 United Artists "requested a follow-up 45 rpm single to capitalize on the success of "Spoon". Can released "Vitamin C" / "I'm So Green".[12]

Production

The success of "Spoon" built momentum for Can, and Siggi Loch at United Artists strained them to come up with a new album under a strict June deadline. Can had only a "piecemeal assemblage of tracks and out-takes"[13] and "completing recording became a frantic process, with some tracks having to be recorded practically in real time".[14] According to guitarist Michael Karoli, the band's recording sessions were "frustrated by keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and vocalist Damo Suzuki's playing chess obsessively day in, day out".[14]

One day before the deadline, Can recorded and edited only three tracks put together on side one ("Sing Swan Song", "One More Night", "Pinch"). [12] "Spoon", "Vitamin C", and "I'm So Green", previously recorded singles, were added to make up for a shortfall in material, the inclusion which the band hadn't originally planned. However, the band still needed to fill side two. "So that afternoon they took up position in the studio and abandoned themselves to a monstrous ten-minute improvisation which they vowed to include, whatever the outcome".[12]

In a 2006 interview with David Stubbs in Uncut magazine, Schmidt commented: "People imagine Can was all done in the editing, but for 'Soup' there was no editing at all. We'd found out the record was too short; it needed ten more minutes of music by the next morning, so we wrote, played and recorded it the night before. No editing!" Czukay added: "We recorded Ege Bamyası in a new studio, which had formerly been a cinema. That new environment affected the sound. The drums were not so heavy and rough, the vocals and instruments were separated out. 'Vitamin C' became the title track of Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, a movie by Samuel Fuller. That's often how it was. We made music, then found a use for it later. 'Soup' is my favourite track."[15]

Ege Bamyası was edited by Holger Czukay and Michael Karoli.[12]

Release

Ege Bamyası was originally released in 1972 by United Artists. The label pressed eight thousand vinyl copies at the record's release.[16] In September 2004, Spoon Records remastered and re-released the album, along with the majority of Can's discography, as a hybrid Super Audio CD.[17] The re-released version included a booklet with David Stubbs' commentary on the album, as well as previously unreleased photos of the band.[14]

Cover artwork

The album cover shows a can of "Ege Bamyası" (Turkish for "Aegean okra"), translated to German as Okraschoten ("okra pods"). In the August 2006 Uncut interview with Stubbs, Schmidt explained: "The can on the cover is not a silly concept idea. It was a can Jaki had found in a Turkish shop. There, the word Can means something like Life. There's no concept behind titles like 'Vitamin C' and 'I'm So Green', but certainly we were very organic in our sound by now."[15] The Turkish word can (pronounced [dʒan]) means "soul," "spirit" or "life".[18]

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[19]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[20]
The Great Rock Discography7/10[21]
Mojo[22]
Pitchfork9.8/10[5]
Q[22]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[25]
Spin Alternative Record Guide8/10[23]
StylusA[24]
Tom HullB+[26]

Ege Bamyası has received critical acclaim from both contemporary and retrospective critics. Melody Maker wrote in a contemporary review that "Can are without doubt the most talented and most consistent experimental rock band in Europe, England included."[27] Duncan Fallowell, writing for The Spectator in 1973, compared the album to both the "extreme rhythmic physicality of Monster Movie and the blood-curdling sophistication of Tago Mago", calling Ege Bamyası as "Can's most approachable album so far".[28][29]

NME deputy editor Ian MacDonald reviewed the album in a less favorable light, writing that Can, "a unique band of intellectuals struggling to make people's music in a prevailing anti-cerebral climate and epitomize a central contradiction of German rock. [They] play some good and some awful music, and look unusually happy for a bunch of incipient schizophrenics. At the very least they're honest and articulate and cannot be ignored. Try Ege Bamyası for yourself. I'm not a Can person, but it's possible that the world is full of them and they ought not to be denied."[30]

In contemporary review, PopMatters characterized the album as "every bit as compact and tetchy as its predecessor was epic and spacey," calling it "a masterful piece of psychedelic rock fused with tightly wound funk."[3] Encyclopedia of Popular Music described Ege Bamyası as a major step in the band's development "from the edgy experimentalism of their earlier albums to the softer ambience of their later work. 'Soup' and 'Pinch' were reminders of their wilder excesses, but on tracks such as 'One More Night' and 'Sing Swan Song' they demonstrated that they could be equally inventive within tighter song structures, while 'I'm So Green' and 'Spoon' were almost conventional pop songs.[20]

Spectrum Culture described Ege Bamyası as a midpoint between Miles Davis' Jack Johnson and On the Corner.[2]

Accolades

Accolades for Ege Bamyası
Publications/Sources Accolade Year Rank
Pitchfork "Top 100 Albums of the 1970s" 2004 19[31]
Rolling Stone "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" 2020 454[32]
Uncut "200 Greatest Albums of All Time" 2016 75[33]
NME "NME's The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" 2013 297[34]
Stylus "Top 101–200 Albums of All Time" 2004 113[35]
Paste "The 70 Best Albums of the 1970s" 2020 63[36]
Fact "The 100 best albums of the 1970s" 2014 97[37]

Legacy

Influence

A number of artists have cited Ege Bamyası as their influence. Stephen Malkmus of Pavement told Melody Maker in 1992 that he listened to the album "every night before [he] went to sleep for about three years".[38] Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth recalled in 1998: "I found Ege Bamyası in the 49-cent bin at Woolworth's. I didn't see anything written about Can, I didn't know anything about them except this okra can on the cover, which seemed completely bizarre. I finally picked that record up, and I completely wore it out. It was so alluring. Something about it made Can seem to be playing outside of rock 'n' roll. It was unlike anything else I was hearing at the time."[39]

Geoff Barrow of Portishead picked Ege Bamyası as one of the band's thirteen favourite albums in a 2011 interview with The Quietus.[40] The band Spoon took its name from the eponymous track on this album, and has cited Can as a major influence.[41]

Covers, samples, and remixes

In February 1999, NME magazine announced "Can Forgery Series", a Can tribute album set for release in Spring 2000, would feature "I'm So Green" song covered by Beck. The song, as well as the album, hasn't been released.[42] Sacrilege (1997) includes remixed versions of "Vitamin C" and "Spoon", performed respectively by U.N.K.L.E. and Sonic Youth.[43]

Kanye West sampled "Sing Swan Song" for his song "Drunk and Hot Girls" on the album Graduation (2007), and derives many of the song's lyrics from Damo Suzuki's vocals.[44] In 2008, The Kleptones have incorporated "Vitamin C" into their mix "Hectic City 7 – May Daze".[45] On 1 December 2012, Stephen Malkmus played Ege Bamyası in its entirety at WEEK-END Festival in Cologne, marking the album's 40th anniversary.[46] The recording of this performance was released as a limited-edition Record Store Day LP in 2013.[47]

"Vitamin C" has been prominently featured in film soundtracks, appearing in Pedro Almodóvar's 2009 film Broken Embraces,[48] in Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack for 2014 film Inherent Vice,[49] in The Get Down: Original Soundtrack for the 2016 Netflix series of the same name, and in the second season of Preacher.[50] In addition to Das Messer (1971), "Spoon" also appeared in the soundtrack to 2002 film Morvern Callar, while "I'm So Green" was used in the 2020 documentary Spaceship Earth.[51]

In the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a character named Damo Tamaki has an ability named "Vitamin C".[52]

Track listing

All tracks are written by Can (Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Irmin Schmidt, and Damo Suzuki).

Side one
No.TitleLength
1."Pinch"9:30
2."Sing Swan Song"4:49
3."One More Night"5:36
Side two
No.TitleLength
4."Vitamin C"3:32
5."Soup"10:32
6."I'm So Green"3:06
7."Spoon"3:04
Total length:40:06

Personnel

Can

Production

  • Ingo Trauer – original artwork
  • Richard J. Rudow – original design
  • Andreas Torkler – design (2004 re-release)

References

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  3. ^ a b Begrand, Adrien (5 August 2005). "For the Sake of Future Days Can's Second Golden Era". PopMatters. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
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Works cited