Tago Mago is the second studio album by the German krautrock band Can, originally released as a double LP in August 1971 on the United Artists label. It was the band's first album to feature Damo Suzuki after the 1970 departure of previous vocalist Malcolm Mooney. Recorded in a rented castle near Cologne, the album features long-form experimental tracks blending rock improvisation, funk rhythms and musique concrète techniques. Tago Mago has been described as Can's best and most extreme record in sound and structure. The album has received widespread critical acclaim and is cited as an influence by various artists. Drowned in Sound called it "arguably the most influential rock album ever recorded." Recording and production After Malcolm Mooney left Can in 1970, the band was left without a vocalist. Bassist Holger Czukay met Kenji "Damo" Suzuki, who was busking outside a cafe in Munich, and invited him to join the band. That evening, Suzuki performed with the band at the Blow Up Club and subsequently became a member of Can. Tago Mago was recorded by Czukay at Schloss Nörvenich, a castle near Cologne, between November 1970 and February 1971. Early in 1968, the band had been invited to stay rent-free at the castle for one year by art collector Christoph Vohwinkel, who had rented the castle with the idea of transforming it into an art center. Recording took three months to complete, with sessions often lasting up to 16 hours a day. Czukay would edit the long, disorganized jams into structured songs. He used only two two-track tape recorders to capture the sessions. Because of the limits of two-track recording, the group favored the castle's high-ceilinged entrance hall, an architectural reverb chamber, using the natural acoustics and placing the microphones optimally relative to their instruments. Because of the intense reverberation, Czukay took advantage of the sonic bleed and limited the band to three microphones, shared between vocalist Damo Suzuki and drummer Jaki Liebezeit. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt experimented with sine-wave generators and oscillators in place of typical synthesizers on "Aumgn." Tago Mago was the first Can album to be composed of not only regularly recorded music but combined "in-between" recordings, for which Czukay secretly recorded the musicians jamming during pre-production sessions. He also captured in-between recordings of the shouts of a child who mistakenly entered the room during recording as well as the howling of Vohwinkel's dog. According to Czukay,