To give you a clearer picture, here is a quick breakdown of the album's official 2005 remastered tracklist:
Consider the track "Future Days" itself:
Four data points. One infinite horizon.
For a track like "Sing Swan Song," the layered overdubs of Suzuki’s voice create a hallucinogenic choir. FLAC preserves the phase coherence of those layers. In MP3, they collapse into phasey mush. CAN - Future Days -1973- Remaster -2005- FLAC -...
In the sprawling cosmos of 1970s experimental music, few bands carved out a sonic architecture as enduring or influential as the German collective CAN. Standing alongside Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Faust under the stylistic umbrella of "Krautrock"—a term originally reductive but later badge-of-honor—CAN dismantled the traditional structures of rock and roll to build something entirely foundational for the future of electronic, ambient, and post-punk music.
The rhythmic, texturally rich indie rock of Radiohead (particularly In Rainbows ), Deerhunter, Stereolab, and LCD Soundsystem is heavily indebted to the template laid out on Future Days .
The remaster significantly increases the clarity of Jaki Liebezeit's intricate drumming and Irmin Schmidt’s spatial synthesizer work. To give you a clearer picture, here is
To listen to Future Days as an MP3 is to view a Renoir through a screen door—you get the gist, but you miss the texture. To listen to the is to walk into the gallery, stand inches from the canvas, and feel the brushstrokes. It honors the atmosphere Can bottled in 1973, revealing the album as a landmark in European electronic music that is as fiercely progressive and beautiful today as it was over fifty years ago.
The title track opens with the sound of breaking waves and electronic chirps, immediately establishing the album's coastal, oceanic atmosphere. Jaki Liebezeit enters with a light, skittering jazz-fusion rhythm that feels impossibly airy yet entirely unbreakable. Michael Karoli’s guitar lines ripple across the track like sunlight reflecting off water. When Damo Suzuki’s vocals drift into the mix, they are heavily treated with reverb, sounding like a voice carried across a vast distance by a warm breeze. The track is an exercise in sustained bliss, a utopian vision of avant-pop. 2. "Spray" (10:13)
This track brings more urgency, opening with "outer space improvisation" before settling into a heavily percussive groove. It is a study in tension, with Michael Karoli’s choppy, phased guitar interacting with Damo Suzuki’s delicate vocals. FLAC preserves the phase coherence of those layers
The centerpiece and closing epic, Bel Air is a 20-minute suite that critics have described as “Can’s most impressionistic song, with an almost painterly sense of blended colors and landscapes”. Bel Air progresses so slowly and subtly that the listener barely notices the shifts in harmony. It ends abruptly , cutting off exactly at the 20-minute mark as if waking from a dream. This track is the ultimate test for audio quality: the spaciousness of the keyboards, the tactile rustle of the percussion, and the depth of the low end (played on double bass) require a lossless format to be fully appreciated.
Vocals, percussion (his final album with the band) . Holger Czukay: Bass, double bass, editing . Michael Karoli: Guitar, violin . Jaki Liebezeit: Drums, percussion . Irmin Schmidt: Keyboards, Alpha 77 synthesizer . Tracklist and Musical Structure