When I first walked into the legendary Manhattan record store Other Music in 2006, I was terrified. I needed new music: at 21 and in a new city, I hated everything I used to love. Having dealt with stereotypically condescending record store clerks in my hometown, I braced myself as I asked for some suggestions. Much to my surprise, I spoke to the perfect person and walked out of Other Music with an album that would totally flip my concept of what a band could be: Can’s 1972 album Tago Mago.

For all of their albums, the band would improvise for hours on end and then bassist and sound engineer Holger Czukay would edit the best moments together, fundamentally applying the same concept as modern day sampling. Sample based music production is, in essence, the curation of the most ecstatic moments from an existing recording to create a new work with its own life. Sampling’s origins, from the French Musique concrète movement of the 1940s to J Dilla’s MPC wizardry shaping the 21st century.

The opening track on J Dilla’s 2006 masterwork Donuts is made up almost entirely of samples from one song, 10cc’s “Worst Band In The World”. He uses roughly 30 total seconds of the song - all the right seconds. The 11 minute “Dead Pigeon Suite” from Can’s 2012 compilation The Lost Tapes reveals moments from the session that would become their best known song. All the bones are in place, the mechanical James Brown groove, the pizzicato bass line and the rapturous refrain, ‘You’re losing your Vitamin C! “Vitamin C” is made up of the tightest and most emotionally deep moments of a musical meditation, molded into an unforgettable 3 minute pulsing future funk song. The 11-minute suite is itself an edit of different, much longer sections - you can subtly pick out the edits when the song shifts in dynamics. Technology has advanced considerably over the 34 year span between Dilla and Can, but the same idea applies: all the right seconds. “Vitamin C” has been sampled 17 times by artists like Sa-Roc,  Spank Rock, Raury & Jaden Smith.

In August of 1944, Studio d’Essai, a center for the resistance movement in France, was responsible for the first broadcasts to a liberated Paris during the second World War. In this same studio, iconoclastic and influential composer Pierre Schaeffer began experimenting with magnetic tape, creating what he called a symphony of noises. This would spawn a whole movement of musical works made out of manipulated pre-recorded sounds, dubbed Musique concrète. Along with Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh’s tape music experiments of the mid-1940s, these works redefined how recorded sound could be used within a compositional context. Magnetic tape had, up to this point, been used for the faithful reproduction of a natural sound; from recorded speeches, field recordings, or performed music, tape was meant to faithfully reproduce. A drum set sounded like a drum set, a human voice sounded like a voice, etc. It was the exploration into the unfaithful reproduction, like musique concrete where an orchestra could sound like an elephant or a mouse, that pushed the envelope. Suddenly, the Western 12 note scale seemed like using a ruler to measure sunlight. The space between the notes on a piano, or any instrument, as well as the definitive nature of the instrument's sound was no longer a limitation. This leap from measured intervals to absolutely endless possibilities is the genesis of sampling.

One immediate successor to the musique concrète movement was German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the 1950s, Stockhausen contrasted the recorded natural sounds of musique concrète by creating pieces using only electronically produced sounds, a form he called Elektronische Musik. By the mid-1960s Stockhausen was teaching at a music conservatory in Cologne. The renowned composer took in eventual Can founders Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt as his apprentices. They ran sound experiments with sine wave generators, faders and recycled radio station equipment in the basement of a coffin supply store.

Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt was born in Berlin two years before the start of World War II. By the late 1960s, German youth culture looked to transcend their past. A generation removed from the atrocities of the war, student protests ignited against the Vietnam War while many towns were run by former members of the Nazi party. During World War II, Joseph Goebbels, the Chief Propagandist for the Nazi party, made sure to drown German radio with “Schlager”, squeaky clean, apolitical and inoffensive pop music. In starting Can, Schmidt says, “We wanted to do something which referred to our experience in a destroyed Germany in a devastated culture.” In 1966, Schmidt traveled to New York City and met avant-garde royalty La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. However, it was a trip to Andy Warhol’s Factory that corrupted his conservatory thinking with the possibilities of rock music. He was frustrated that contemporary and innovative acts like Sly Stone, James Brown and the Velvet Underground were not considered “New Music” in the same way Serial composer Pierre Boulez or Stockhausen were.

Irmin Schmidt, his conservatory mate and bassist Holger Czukay, Free-Jazz drummer Jaki Leibeziet, psychedelic guitarist Michael Karoli and American sculptor and vocalist Malcolm Mooney formed Can in 1968. They would perform extended experimental improvisations yearning to ignite the new German culture. Seeking tools that were not anglophonic or tainted by Germany’s past, synthesizers and tape manipulation became a part of their collective improvisations. The hypnotic, spontaneous musical creation was both the perfect outlet and an excellent breeding ground for inventive sounds. On their first album, the 20 minute epic “Yoo Doo Right” was edited down from 6 hours. The composition minded Czukay would curate the strongest moments into works that ranged from the sprawling chaos of “Peking O” and “Augmn” to the dance pop perfection of “Moonshake” and “I Want More.”

Jamaican producers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, contemporary influences on Can, began using recordings of reggae rhythms to produce Riddim tracks, an often edited instrumental of a popular song. A Deejay or Toaster would then provide a unique vocal known as a Voicing. In the early 70s, hundreds of different songs with different interpretations of the same instrumental were produced in Jamaica. DJ Kool Herc was born in Kingston, Jamaica, home to an essential piece of sampling’s history, Dub Reggae. On August 11, 1973, Herc hosted a back to school fundraiser party that gave birth to Hip-Hop in the Bronx. Using 2 Bogart amps, 2 Girard turntables and no headphones, he was able to transition between songs while hyping the party up using both a dry and echo drenched mic. In the 1980s, Hip-Hop production leapt forward once producers like Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy got their hands on early samplers, creating chaotic orchestras with James Brown horn squeals. “I wanted to do some things that were not musical in music” Shocklee said of his approach, a sentiment in line with the tape experiments of musique concrète’s Pierre Schaeffer.

On Can’s 14 minute epic “Mother Sky,” you can hear echoes of 80’s Hip Hop’s avant garde production, using noise as sonic texture. The song explodes with screaming psychedelic guitar over a relentless groove. The fourth wall is torn open and the listener is placed in the studio mid-freak out. A gorgeous reverb drenched tom cues a drop into an edit of the same groove, from a different part of the session. The band plays hushed and restrained, all vibe. An ethos of the band was to always stay true to the original idea, the seed of the song, when contributing your element - play for the part, not against it. Japanese singer Damo Suzuki’s confident and mournful voice reminds me of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke as he sings what sounds like “I say mothers ain’t too cool like Mother Sky”. Throughout the song, Holger layers tape loops reminiscent of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” from 1968. By the 12th minute you can hear tape shrieks like squeaking car brakes, building tension along with the driving pulse of the band.

On 1973’s “Future Days” Can ventured into the sonic territories that would eventually become ambient indie rock and electronic dance music. The track opens with soft swaths of static and manipulated tape sounds and noises akin to Edgard Varese’s “Ionisation.” A soft accordion drifts in as static becomes a controlled oscillating synthesizer, morphing into something that sounds like a John Cageian samba with a somber mumble that resembles Gorillaz 2010 album Plastic Beach. A far cry from the macho frontmen of 1970’s rock, Damo delivers everything like a mellow MC spitting stream of consciousness tones- all vibe. The final minute of the song launches off with sped up drum samples, throbbing static and alarm bell synths, reminiscent of a late ‘90s Rave or Drum and Bass song.

As standalone work, Can’s recordings feel like a contemporary band. Sonically closer to Hip Hop and Techno than Rock n Roll; using samples as texture, groove minded and unique patterns that reach beyond conventional rhythms. If Can were transported to a hip Brooklyn venue in 2022, their approach and style would feel of the moment, if not forward-thinking. This is not to say that all these artists have stolen the idea of an obscure German band but, that Can has had the right idea all along.