[7] Music and Musicians wrote that Canaxis 5 is the result of a collaboration between Rolf Dammers and Holger Czukay, a latter of whom was raised from Stockhausen traditions and worked with found sounds and musique concrète, and experimenting with "tape segments and multiple editing" based on the concepts of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, "credited with its invention in Paris during the late 40s.

It was inadvertently credited as a completely different ethnic Vietnamese song, "Hò Mái Nhì", when the album was initially released.

He wrote: "It features Roland Dammers and Can's Holger Czukay playing with loops, electronics, and field-recordings of Vietnamese peasant-songs – which could have been very interesting but, through self-indulgence, isn't.

"[10] In his review for AllMusic, Ted Mills described the music as "a hybrid of ambient soundspaces, musicological sampling, and a sort of Steve Reich-like loop system.

"[9] Can biographers Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt deemed Canaxis 5 to be "one of the great crossover works of the sixties, an electroacoustic tape piece created in do-it-yourself circumstances."