The Can book that is part biography, part archive and part continuation of the band's own method
Can are unusually difficult to fit into a conventional rock biography. Their music was collective, improvisational, edited, anti-showboating and often created through processes that make the usual singer-guitarist-songwriter narrative feel almost useless. All Gates Open: The Story of Can responds to that problem by refusing to be only one kind of book.
The first major part, written by Rob Young, is a researched biography of the group. The second is a "symposium" curated by founding keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, bringing together reflections, conversations and other material around Can, art and the band's continuing influence. The structure is not an accidental flourish. It mirrors a group that routinely treated recorded material as something that could be cut, reorganised, recombined and made to reveal a new shape.
For readers who want one substantial book on Can, this is the obvious place to begin.
From Cologne to Inner Space
Young starts before Can existed. That matters because the band's personnel arrived from unusually varied musical backgrounds. Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay had connections to the post-war European avant-garde and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Jaki Liebezeit came from jazz but moved toward the fiercely controlled, repetitive drumming that became one of Can's defining sounds. Michael Karoli brought a younger rock sensibility. Vocalists Malcolm Mooney and later Damo Suzuki arrived from entirely different cultural backgrounds again.
The book shows how these ingredients became a band in Cologne in 1968 and how Can developed a working practice in which hierarchy was constantly resisted. Their music could begin as extended improvisation, but the final records were also shaped through editing, especially Czukay's tape work. Inner Space, the group's studio, became part laboratory and part instrument.
That process helps explain why albums such as Monster Movie, Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days sound neither like conventional rock performances nor like academic electronic composition. The musicians possessed formidable ability, but Can's aesthetic often depended on redirecting that skill away from obvious virtuoso display and toward group motion, repetition, texture and the transformation of improvisation through editing.
More than a sequence of albums
A useful Can history also needs to explain the ecosystem that allowed such music to exist. The group worked on film soundtracks, developed an unusual level of studio independence and operated with the crucial management of Hildegard Schmidt. All Gates Open pays attention to those practical structures rather than pretending that experimental music appeared through inspiration alone.
The book also deals with the two best-known vocal periods without reducing Can to its singers. Malcolm Mooney's forceful presence is essential to the early music; Damo Suzuki's arrival opens another phase, one whose flexible vocal language became inseparable from some of the band's most celebrated recordings. Yet the instrumental identity remains central throughout.
By the mid-1970s, Can's internal chemistry changed. Personnel, technology, professional pressures and individual ambitions shifted. The story therefore avoids the common fan-fiction version in which a perfect experimental commune simply produced masterpieces until fashion moved on. Can's working method was productive precisely because it contained tension.
Why the Schmidt half matters
The Irmin Schmidt-curated section is what makes All Gates Open different from an ordinary biography. Rather than simply adding a short afterword from the surviving founder, the book opens into conversations and reflections involving artists, filmmakers and musicians influenced by Can.
The symposium will be one of the book's attractions for some readers and a source of frustration for others, particularly those who would prefer more tour chronology, recording minutiae or everyday band history. Both responses are reasonable. The second portion works best when approached as an extension of Can's intellectual world rather than as a conventional continuation of Young's biography.
That is also where the title becomes meaningful. "All gates open" suggests permeability: between rock and modern composition, Germany and the wider world, improvisation and editing, music and visual art, historical documentation and new conversation.
What it does especially well
Young is particularly effective at placing Can inside post-war German culture without turning the musicians into symbols first and people second. The band's relationship to Stockhausen, Fluxus, modern art, jazz, American rock and the political atmosphere of the era gives the story depth.
The workings of Inner Space are another major strength. Can's studio mythology can become mystical very quickly, but understanding the room, the tapes and the group's process makes the records more concrete.
The book also benefits from unusually strong access. Young drew on interviews with the group's members, vocalists, associates and people around the band, while Schmidt's participation gives the project an insider dimension without making the entire account an authorised memoir.
Limitations
Contemporary reviews identified a real tension in the book: intellectual and cultural context can sometimes crowd out the ordinary human details of being in a band. Readers looking for every tour date, exhaustive recording-session documentation or a relentless stream of backstage anecdotes may occasionally want more grit.
Schmidt's presence is invaluable but also means his perspective naturally carries unusual weight. No collaborative history can entirely escape that problem, especially when several core participants had died before publication.
And the prose can become as expansive as the music. If your ideal music biography is short, chronological and ruthlessly factual, this is not that book.
Who should read it?
Anyone already captivated by Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi or Future Days should put this near the top of the list. It is also excellent for readers interested in how a band can use improvisation and studio editing without becoming either a conventional jam band or a purely electronic studio project.
For a general history of the wider German scene, read David Stubbs's Future Days. For a compact, opinionated map of canonical records, read Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler. For Can specifically, All Gates Open goes much deeper than either.
Buying note
The 2018 hardback and later paperback editions can differ in physical presentation and page count.