[7] Soon after the release of Can's previous record, Flow Motion, Michael Karoli set out on a trip to central and east Africa for a couple of weeks, traveling through the Congo, Zaïre, and Kenya".

[9] In 1997, Karoli told a journalist: "When you visit a nightclub in Africa where a good highlife band is playing, you feel like a carrot chucked into a boiling soup.

The studio's sound engineer, Manfred Schunke, converted it into "Artificial Head Stereo, essaying a 3D effect that"s hard to appreciate at four decades' distance".

The reverse of the album sleeve, in the initial LP pressing, featured the original four members of Can plus Rosko Gee, arranged in a pentagram formation around a mandala.

And Can's solo doodles over regular rhythms always make me think of a one year-old scrawling on a piece of graph paper… Unfortunately what ["Fly by Night"] entails is someone doing a weak impression of Kevin Ayers and being moreover so embarrassed by the thing that he’s had to sellotape a wad of Kleenex over his mouth whilst doing it… It's a turkey.

He praised "Don't Say No", with its "controlled fury" reminding him of earlier Can, and favored side-two tracks, "Animal Waves" and "Fly by Night".

In conclusion, Mason generally felt there was a "tired, somewhat dispirited vibe to the whole album that makes it an unsatisfying send-off to Can's career".

[4] (The New) Rolling Stone Album Guide, published in 2004, enjoyed the "curious disco experiments" on Saw Delight, highlighting a long instrumental jam "Animal Waves" and Czukay's experiments with a shortwave receiver, but concluded that the album had a noticeable smell of "desperation for crossover success", and thought it didn't suit Can.