LIVE IN PARIS 1973

For many Can fans this will be the most essential of their archival live releases. While live recordings with Damo Suzuki have surfaced before on the Can Live box, The Lost Tapes and the bonus disc on some Tago Mago reissues, this is the first (more or less) complete concert to see the light of day. At the time of this recording Can were between Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, and this set leans more heavily towards Ege Bamyasi in both feel and content.

Disc one kicks off with Eins, a 36 minute spontaneous composition in which Can conjure up a vinyl album's worth of music apparently out of thin air. At times familiar themes briefly emerge, but the piece builds up and maintains its own fevered momentum; Czukay and Liebezeit lay down an ever evolving, waxing and waning groove, Karoli's blues raga guitar floats serenely overhead, Schmidt adds washes of keyboard colour and Suzuki declaims in the language of the stone age. The behemoth finally comes to a halt after 36 minutes and then we get Zwei, which turns out to be a remarkably straight reading of One More Night. Can always included familiar pieces in between their lengthy improvisations (Spoon would usually surface at some point in the Suzuki era, and Dizzy Dizzy was regularly included post 1974), but they rarely stayed as close to the recorded version as this.

Disc two starts with Drei, which uses Spoon (a minor hit single in Germany and probably their best known song at the time) as the basis for a 16 minute extended jam, while Vier is another spontaneous composition, this time clocking in at a comparatively brief 15 minutes. Finally, Funf starts out as Vitamin C before morphing into a dazzling free form freak out that ends rather abruptly after slightly less than 14 minutes. According to the sleeve notes this is "...due to no adequate sound sources existing of the final notes of this show", although those 'final notes' may have gone on for another 10 or 15 minutes.

For your money you get an hour and a half's worth of Suzuki era Can at the top of their game. The sound quality is remarkable for a 1973 bootleg recording, most likely primarily from a C90 recording by the same bootlegger responsible for the Brighton and Stuttgart sets, and Renee Tinner has worked minor miracles in cleaning it up for release. Knock off half a star if you are after pristine sound quality (thankfully there is no audience noise during the songs) and round it up to five stars if you have been dreaming of a fill Suzuki era concert.