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Soon Over Babaluma
Soon Over Babaluma is the fifth studio album by the rock music group Can, released in November 1974 by United Artists. This is the band's first album following the 1973 departure of their second vocalist Damo Suzuki. The vocals are provided by guitarist Michael Karoli and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt. It is also their last album that was created using a two-track tape recorder.
It takes the ambient style of Future Days and pushes it even further at times, as on "Quantum Physics", although there are also some upbeat tracks, such as "Chain Reaction" and "Dizzy Dizzy".
After the departure of the band's vocalist Damo Suzuki, Can auditioned several singers to fill the role of Suzuki, but eventually decided their guitarist Michael Karoli would take over vocals on most songs, with keyboardist Irmin Schmidt singing on "Come sta, la luna". Karoli later recalled that someone should fill the role of a vocalist, because he "thought, or we [Can] thought, that there had to be somebody singing: it was necessary for the music". Karoli added that he "never enjoyed singing"; never getting "into a state where I was actually singing the way I play guitar, where the thing happened which Desse and Damo both did. They were drifting in the music, and using their voices, and I never did that."
The word "Babaluma" came out of a conversation between Schmidt and Jaki Liebezeit about words, where Liebezeit misheard a sentence said by Schmidt and asking him "what did you say? Babaluma?" Schmidt liked the word, admiring its rhyme with the word "luna" and describing it as "true surrealism". He explained the title, Soon Over Babaluma, as an event taking place in space; "seeing the moon and, from there, soon being over Babaluma – which must be another star or something".
The cover art-collage was done by Ulli Eichberger, depicting a blue-black three-dimensional landscape of a mountain range lit by a distant star.
Karoli sings on "Dizzy Dizzy" with particular attention to percussive sibilants, the "T" and "S" sounds, which "entwine with the artificial hi-hats of a rhythm concocted by Schmidt using his slide guitar and a delay effect on the Alpha 77". Pitchfork reviewer saw "Dizzy Dizzy" as "something like Can's version of ska" and one of their best attempts at world music.
"Come sta, la luna" is a "solemn mechanical tango that suggests a drowsy fiddler perambulating from table to table, punctuated at times with neo-romantic flourishes at the bottom end of the grand piano". It uses a field recording loaned from the department of the WDR sound effects library, giving the song a "nineteenth-century palm court ambience", and a cawing raven gave the sound a "note of nocturnal melodrama". Pitchfork reviewer described it as a "murky electro-bossa".
The song "Chain Reaction" was characterized as a "premonition of tribal trance", and its intro compared to "dirt bikes roving across a Martian rockscape". At the 3:44 mark the energy culminates to an "excess and the track bursts into a disciplined 3/4 plod". Rob Young deemed the track to be unofficial part of Ethnic Forgery Series ("EFS"), the series of tracks recorded by Can while inspired by world music.
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Soon Over Babaluma
Soon Over Babaluma is the fifth studio album by the rock music group Can, released in November 1974 by United Artists. This is the band's first album following the 1973 departure of their second vocalist Damo Suzuki. The vocals are provided by guitarist Michael Karoli and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt. It is also their last album that was created using a two-track tape recorder.
It takes the ambient style of Future Days and pushes it even further at times, as on "Quantum Physics", although there are also some upbeat tracks, such as "Chain Reaction" and "Dizzy Dizzy".
After the departure of the band's vocalist Damo Suzuki, Can auditioned several singers to fill the role of Suzuki, but eventually decided their guitarist Michael Karoli would take over vocals on most songs, with keyboardist Irmin Schmidt singing on "Come sta, la luna". Karoli later recalled that someone should fill the role of a vocalist, because he "thought, or we [Can] thought, that there had to be somebody singing: it was necessary for the music". Karoli added that he "never enjoyed singing"; never getting "into a state where I was actually singing the way I play guitar, where the thing happened which Desse and Damo both did. They were drifting in the music, and using their voices, and I never did that."
The word "Babaluma" came out of a conversation between Schmidt and Jaki Liebezeit about words, where Liebezeit misheard a sentence said by Schmidt and asking him "what did you say? Babaluma?" Schmidt liked the word, admiring its rhyme with the word "luna" and describing it as "true surrealism". He explained the title, Soon Over Babaluma, as an event taking place in space; "seeing the moon and, from there, soon being over Babaluma – which must be another star or something".
The cover art-collage was done by Ulli Eichberger, depicting a blue-black three-dimensional landscape of a mountain range lit by a distant star.
Karoli sings on "Dizzy Dizzy" with particular attention to percussive sibilants, the "T" and "S" sounds, which "entwine with the artificial hi-hats of a rhythm concocted by Schmidt using his slide guitar and a delay effect on the Alpha 77". Pitchfork reviewer saw "Dizzy Dizzy" as "something like Can's version of ska" and one of their best attempts at world music.
"Come sta, la luna" is a "solemn mechanical tango that suggests a drowsy fiddler perambulating from table to table, punctuated at times with neo-romantic flourishes at the bottom end of the grand piano". It uses a field recording loaned from the department of the WDR sound effects library, giving the song a "nineteenth-century palm court ambience", and a cawing raven gave the sound a "note of nocturnal melodrama". Pitchfork reviewer described it as a "murky electro-bossa".
The song "Chain Reaction" was characterized as a "premonition of tribal trance", and its intro compared to "dirt bikes roving across a Martian rockscape". At the 3:44 mark the energy culminates to an "excess and the track bursts into a disciplined 3/4 plod". Rob Young deemed the track to be unofficial part of Ethnic Forgery Series ("EFS"), the series of tracks recorded by Can while inspired by world music.