In the tradition of Gavin Bryars’s Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet and William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, Canaxis 5 (later shortened to Canaxis) is one of the most important items in the extended Can catalog. If you find yourself sympathetic to experimental or ambient music in any sense at all, chuck whatever you’re listening to and get with this. Czukay and his friend Rolf roamed through the WDR studios in Cologne and created a forest of tape loops. The two big sources were a Folkways recording of Vietnamese folk songs and a recording of Pierre de La Rue’s Offertorium. Reports differ as to what tracks were used, though as far as I can tell, the first track uses “Doh Dam Tara (Love Song).” Over the course of two twenty-minute tracks, Czukay and Dammers create something more elegant and piercing than anything else in the Can catalog. The keening, multi-tonal vocal performance is both sort of unsettling and profoundly beautiful. Behind that and the symphonic sample being looped, Czukay and Dammers set up a subtle sequence of guitar and electronics, kind of like a finger brushed across the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Really affecting and completely contemporary stuff.

– Sasha Frere-Jones