Can's 'Live in Keele 1977' is sonic philanthropy in action. by Dave Segal Every day, I sift through the hundreds of tracks that bombard my inbox. On a biweekly basis, I tell you about the two artists whose music most impressed me. This time, the focus is strictly on krautrock legends Can and the latest jewel from their live archives. Honestly, they deserve to have the column to themselves. Back to regular programming next time. Can, “Drei” (Mute Records) The run of recordings that the German group Can racked up from 1968-1978 represents the pinnacle of ingenuity in rock music. Their rhythmic and textural innovations arose through telepathic improvisation, nonchalant virtuosity, and unerring instincts for making mantric repetition sublime. They were inveterate diversifiers, transforming psychedelia, funk, dub/reggae, musique concrète, proto-techno, etc. into strange new shapes. That they also had the guile to enlist wildcard vocalists such as Malcolm Mooney, and the late Damo Suzuki only multiplied the band's greatness. Their influence has never stopped waxing over the past 45 years, but nobody has ever surpassed these pioneers. With keyboardist Irmin Schmidt now the only surviving original member, Can obviously will never reunite, but in recent years they have kept their name in the public consciousness by doling out digestible chunks of their vast live-performance archives. (Let's take a moment to note that Can never played a show in North America. Mind-boggling, in retrospect.) Over the decades, Can concerts have been prolifically bootlegged, but the group's label, Mute, thankfully decided to make this stuff official, and it's now six albums deep into the project. Not everything has lived up to my stratospheric expectations, but no edition has not been at least interesting. To date, Live in Keele 1977—recorded in Staffordshire, England—ranks among the best of the batch. Coming off their underrated eighth album, Saw Delight, Can were a well-oiled juggernaut, with new addition Rosko Gee of Traffic coming in on bass, freeing Holger Czukay to perform, as the press notes say, “waveform radio and spec. sounds.”  As with all of these live recordings, Schmidt, his manager/wife Hildegard, and/or Mute numbered rather than titled the tracks, which tags them as spontaneous creations, not works from their catalog, per se. That being said, motifs from previously released songs occasionally surface like signposts amid the torrent of unfamiliar sounds. But it's those unfamiliar sounds that lend these live Can documents their true value. And if you're one of those misguided souls who think that post-Damo Suzuki Can is ignorable, then you need to hear Live in Keele 1977—among other releases in the Can canon. (Out of Reach and Rite Time are the only LPs not worth owning.) "Eins" begins the album seemingly in media res with some radiant quasi-funk that's animated by serpentine, cyclical chord progressions, marked by guitarist Michael Karoli and Schmidt's mesmerizing, Möbius strip riffs. By minute two, I was already envious of the patrons at this performance. The 15-minute "Zwei" begins with mildly suspenseful ambient meandering that gradually evolves into a cauldron of early Pink Floyd-ian turmoil.   From the embers of this jam, "Drei" rockets into a way higher gear and, whaddaya know, it's a rough take on Saw Delight's "Don't Say No," which is itself a variation of the coolest surf-rock tune ever, "Moonshake," from the 1973 classic, Future Days. Choppier, funkier, and even more hypnotic and chaotic than the Saw Delight version, "Drei" finds Can figuratively announcing, "You want our 'hit'? Here it is, at twice the complexity and thrice the intensity." "Vier" showcases Jaki Liebezeit's incredible martial precision, impeccable timing, and funkiness. After two minutes of his soloing, which inspired the crowd to clap along, the rest of the band leap in and erect a towering edifice of triumphant prog rock that becomes more intense and discombobulated as it burns toward the 13-minute mark. Keele closes with the bombastic funkadelia of "Fünf," in which all of the players stretch out and flex flashy moves for nearly 26 minutes; it's a staccato chug of stunning virtuosity. Live in Keele 1977 is sonic philanthropy in action.