hiding their nightingale

When I first saw the Inner Space’s soundtrack to Agilok & Blubbo in a record store a few months ago, I had a wave of excitement: an album I’d never heard by the band that turned into Can! And then I thought: no, this has to be a reissue, and if it were any good I’d already have heard it, right?; completism is the same thing that made me buy Out of Reach; life’s too short.

I left it on the shelf, and then found myself wishing I’d bought it—it was from 1968, just slightly before they recorded Delay and Monster Movie, and I’d never even heard of it before. I looked it up online, and discovered that it wasn’t a reissue, but a soundtrack that hadn’t been released at the time. So the next time I saw it, I bought it.

It’s interesting, because it’s audibly the work of the band that would make great records a few months later. (Jaki Liebezeit always sounds like himself.) It’s also terrible: half-in-the-bag psychedelic doodling with a recurring instrumental motif of the melody best known as “nanny nanny boo boo.” Also, somebody is playing flute, although it’s not clear from the liner notes whether it’s Irmin Schmidt or David Johnson, who seems to have left the band shortly after the recording. I’m sorry, but flute is impermissible in this context. I should’ve trusted my second impulse.