Soundtracks (Remastered)

This album has been added to 2 public lists:

• 

  2026 Discovery

  Greg

  #spotify

  • Root Genre: Rock
  • Primary Branch: Krautrock / Experimental Rock
  • Secondary Influences: Psychedelic Rock, Proto-Ambient, Funk, Jazz-Rock, Film Music
  • Textural Identity: Hypnotic, raw, collage-like, rhythm-forward, studio-experimental
  • Energy Axis: Low → High, with drifting atmospheres interrupted by sharp motorik/funk-rock intensity

  Can – Soundtracks (1970) sits in a transitional but fascinating place in Can’s discography. It is not a “soundtrack album” in the conventional orchestral or cinematic-score sense; rather, it gathers pieces written for several films, functioning almost like a laboratory between Monster Movie and Tago Mago. You can hear the band moving away from late-60s psychedelic rock toward the more radical, groove-based, trance-like language that would define Krautrock.

  The album’s identity is split between two vocal eras: Malcolm Mooney appears on the volcanic “Soul Desert” and “She Brings the Rain,” while Damo Suzuki enters on tracks like “Deadlock” and the monumental “Mother Sky.” That last piece is the album’s gravitational center: a long, propulsive, proto-motorik rock-funk ritual where Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming becomes almost mechanical but still deeply human. Elsewhere, the record drifts into hazier, more atmospheric territory, showing Can’s ability to make music that feels both improvised and architecturally controlled.

  Small review: Soundtracks is less cohesive than Tago Mago or Ege Bamyasi, but that looseness is part of its charm. It feels like a set of portals: some brief, strange, and cinematic; others opening into the full Can universe. “Mother Sky” alone makes it essential, but the quieter pieces reveal another side of the band: shadowy, suspended, almost ghostly. It is a bridge album, but one where the bridge itself is already alive, vibrating, and dangerous.

• 

  10001 album

  Pásztor Károly (Charles Shephard)