# Ege Bamyasi

Ege Bamyası (Turkish pronunciation:, 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 reissuing 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". Pitchfork highlighted that the album stands out among Can discography for being one of the most focused and "tetchy" records.
Ege Bamyasi helped popularize the German rock, krautrock, inspiring a number of later musicians, particularly the electronic and post-punk scene. Some of those musicians, for example Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, the Orb, Bruce Gilbert of Wire, and System 7, participated in the Can tribute remix album Sacrilege (1997). In later decades, publications such as Rolling Stone and NME ranked Ege Bamyasi as one of the best albums created by Can and among the best albums of all time.

## Background

By the end of 1971, Can had relocated their Inner Space Studio [de] out of the communal space of the Schloss Nörvenich, where the recording 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. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, previously using two Farfisa organs, acquired a complex effects unit custom-built by Swiss engineer Hermi Hogg. Dubbed the "Alpha 77", the unit allowed "far greater degrees of spontaneity in the way Schmidt handled his synthesizers".
Ege Bamyası became the first Can album recorded in the Weilerswist Inner Space, starting with the song "Spoon". After their success with Das Millionenspiel (1970) soundtrack, the band were commissioned to record the theme song for a future series directed by Rolf von Sydow, titled Das Messer [de] (The Knife). According to Holger Czukay, the song's name was chosen as "a companion to the knife, less aggressive".
"Spoon" rapidly climbed the German singles chart, reaching #6, and sold 300,000 copies, inspiring Can to throw a free concert "to give them a taste of what they had already been brewing up in Weilerswist". Peter Przygodda directed a film of the concert titled "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".
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".

## Production

The success of "Spoon" built momentum for Can, and Siggi Loch at United Artists pushed them to come up with a new album under a strict June deadline. Can had only a "piecemeal assemblage of tracks and out-takes" and "completing recording became a frantic process, with some tracks having to be recorded practically in real time". 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". One day before the deadline, the group had recorded and edited only the three tracks that would comprise side one of the album ("Sing Swan Song", "One More Night", and "Pinch"). The previously-recorded singles "Spoon", "Vitamin C", and "I'm So Green" were added to make up for a shortfall in material. 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"; this became the track "Soup".
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."
Ege Bamyası was edited by Czukay and Karoli.

## Release and promotion

Ege Bamyası was originally released in 1972 by United Artists. The label pressed 8,000 vinyl copies at the record's release. 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. The re-released version included a booklet with David Stubbs' commentary on the album, as well as previously unreleased photos of the band.
In September 1972, Karoli was hospitalized with a perforated stomach ulcer, spending most of his time in recovery until the new year. At the beginning of 1973, Hildegard Schmidt had booked upwards of thirty live dates for the band around the UK, Germany, and France for the upcoming winter and spring. Can spent a month touring Britain between the mid-February to the mid-March of 1973, encompassing such cities as Newcastle upon Tyne, Stirling, Plymouth, Penzance, Chatham, Westcliff-on-Sea, Norwich, Birmingham, Kingston upon Hull, Leicester, and Bristol (Top Rank Suite). The band's show on 19 February at the Paris Theatre in London was recorded by BBC Radio and broadcast on their In Concert series. A day after the London show, Can attended the Langham Street studios to tape their first BBC session, aired on Top Gear on 13 March and hosted by DJ Anne Nightingale. The nineteen-minute track from this session resurfaced on the 1995 compilation album The Peel Sessions under the title "Up the Bakerloo Line with Anne". Several UK shows were supported by Gunner Kade, a short-lived outfit formed by ex-Groundhogs member Ken Pustelnik.
Four days after their last British date, at Bristol Top Rank, Can made their first live appearance in France. On March 22, they appeared on Pop 2, a prime television slot for live rock on France's national radio station. It was the show where Irmin debuted his lap steel guitar with sound treated by the Alpha 77. In April, the band briefly returned to West Germany, performing in Esslingen am Neckar, and in May they were back in Paris, playing at Bataclan and Olympia. Spoon Records released the recording of the Olympia show in 2024 as Live in Paris 1973. Two days after the Paris shows, Can played their last date at the Stadthalle in Heidelberg.

### Cover artwork

The album cover shows a can of "Ege Bamyası" (Turkish for "Aegean okra"), translated to German as Okraschoten ("okra pods"). Schmidt explained in 2006: "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." The Turkish word can (pronounced) means "soul", "spirit" or "life".

## Reception

Professional ratings :
| Review scores ||
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic | |
| The Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| The Great Rock Discography | 7/10 |
| Mojo | |
| Pitchfork | 9.8/10 |
| Q | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Spin Alternative Record Guide | 8/10 |
| Stylus | A |
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." Duncan Fallowell, writing for The Spectator in 1973, felt the album had both the "extreme rhythmic physicality of Monster Movie and the blood-curdling sophistication of Tago Mago", calling it the band's "most approachable album so far".
NME deputy editor Ian MacDonald reviewed the album in a less favorable light, calling the group "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."
In a retrospective 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." The 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.
Spectrum Culture described Ege Bamyası as a midpoint between Miles Davis' albums Jack Johnson and On the Corner.

### Accolades

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

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

### 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. Sacrilege (1997) includes remixed versions of "Vitamin C" and "Spoon", performed respectively by U.N.K.L.E. and Sonic Youth.
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. In 2008, The Kleptones have incorporated "Vitamin C" into their mix "Hectic City 7 – May Daze". On 1 December 2012, Stephen Malkmus played Ege Bamyası in its entirety at WEEK-END Festival in Cologne, marking the album's 40th anniversary. The recording of this performance was released as a limited-edition Record Store Day LP in 2013.

### In popular culture

"Vitamin C" has been prominently featured in film soundtracks, appearing in Pedro Almodóvar's 2009 film Broken Embraces, in Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack for 2014 film Inherent Vice, in The Get Down: Original Soundtrack for the 2016 Netflix series of the same name, and in the second season of Preacher. 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.
In the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a character named Damo Tamaki has an ability named "Vitamin C".

## Track listing

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

## Personnel
### Can

* Holger Czukay – bass guitar, engineering, editing
* Michael Karoli – electric guitar, acoustic guitar
* Jaki Liebezeit – drums
* Irmin Schmidt – Farfisa organ and electric piano, electronics (Alpha 77)
* Damo Suzuki – vocals

### Production

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