ENGLISH REVIEW
(English translation of the Italian review by the author PlanetClaire)
On Saturday, February 25, 2023 (at 6:00 p.m.) and again on Monday, February 27 (at 3:45 p.m.) the 9th international music film festival SeeYouSound, which takes place in Turin, Italy on a yearly basis, presents an extremely interesting and very beautiful documentary about Irmin Schmidt, the founder of the seminal band CAN.
Started in 1968, Can was a hugely important experimental band that would strongly influence generations of pop and electronic musicians.
Its story took place in Cologne, the cultural capital of West Germany, an avant-garde hub for music, a city with a million inhabitants and more than sixty concert halls, a stimulating musical nightlife, many major orchestras, (symphonic orchestras, ancient music academies, and so on); a city focused on the development of electronic music since Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1950s, and again since the 1990s onward; a metropolis where the public broadcasting station WDR-Westdeutscher Rundfunk is an important cultural engine, which fostered the 1970s German rock music movement.
Understanding the cultural vibrancy of this German big city's music scene help us to appreciate how this experimental and highly innovative band was born and developed.
CAN is currently regarded as the most influential avant-garde band of the second part of the 20th century.
The film focuses on Irmin Schmidt, the only surviving witness to this portentous epic, an immensely talented, and tirelessly creative musician; and the relationship between him and his band, hence the title of the movie, Can and Me.
The film, which reports on the life of the highly cultured composer, begins with silence: "Silence is the most important sound," Irmin Schmidt explains, and then with ambient noises. "The poetry of sound formed me," "Making music is shaping time."
Schmidt was born on May 29, 1937, in Berlin. At fourteen, he sold his electric toy train, and bought a record-player and his first two records: The Unfinished Symphony by Schubert, and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, (1913), which he listened to repeatedly trying to understand it.
He rebelled against his father, an engineer, a supporter of Hitler, who wanted him to be an architect, a surely lucrative profession in postwar reconstruction Germany. The devastation of the war traumatised Irmin's childhood: after fleeing to Austria, he returned to Berlin at age 9, finding a city in rubble, everything was destroyed, the buildings, the culture. Expelled from high school for exposing the teachers with a Nazi past in the school newspaper, Irmin Schmidt pursued music studies at the Conservatory, was a masterful pianist at a young age, then an orchestra conductor, then a student of renowned composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. It is at Stockhausen's three-year electronic music course where Schmidt met Holger Czukay, with whom he would co-found CAN later on.
The transition from classical to experimental music for Schmidt occurred during a trip to New York City in 1965, where he came upon music without genre boundaries: in NYC Schmidt discovered Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, and the funk of James Brown and Sly Stone.
He recruited Holger Czukay, also classically trained; Jaki Liebezeit, an outstanding drummer who came from free-jazz; and Michael Karoli, a brilliant and extraordinarily inventive guitarist.
"As in Physics, -Schmidt says- when different parts are put together, something new is created. Can is not the sum of the four of us, it is something new."
The band was joined in 1970 by vocalist Damo Suzuki, a voice so distinctively seductive that, when the young Japanese left the band three years later, he was not replaced.
The film also tells the story of Irmin's beautiful and pivotal love affair with the girl who later would become his beloved wife: Hildegard and Irmin met at a young age and are still very much in love and hold each other in high esteem. Hildegard used to be CAN's manager and still is the composer's manager.
CAN's music was highly unusual and characterised by hypnotic rhythms, and exceptionally brilliant musicians.
The band released eleven albums, some of which are absolute masterpieces.
After the CAN years, (1968-1979), Irmin Schmidt released 12 solo albums, worked on film music writing about 80 soundtracks for internationally famous directors such as Wim Wenders and other German filmmakers. In 1998 he produced a contemporary opera, with elements of musicals, entitled Gormenghast, a complex gothic fantasy, dedicated to his affectionate mother, who had a beautiful voice, and used to sing opera arias to his little son. In his eighties, he collaborates with electronic club music artists.
He often says that the past doesn't interest him so much, preferring to continually focus on a new project.
About the authors of the documentary
Michael P. Aust is the director who tells us this beautiful story.
A producer with the company TT - Televisor Troika GmbH, which he founded in 1993, and which is dedicated to arthouse cinema; it also focuses on music films, pop videos and video games. Besides, Aust is the artistic director of the Braunschweig Int'l Film Festival; he promotes and follows research and study initiatives on the development of the audience of cultural events. In 2000, he produced 101 Reykjavík, which was also shown in Italy.
Here Aust, in an operation of great cultural value, processes the vast heritage of documents on the band, guarded and curated by Mrs. Hildegard Schmidt, who has always been responsible for the band's management and their record company, Spoon Records. The resulting documentary is very beautiful and enriched with unpublished or rarely seen footage.
Contributing to this documentary is director Kristina Schippling with additional interviews: ’The best interviews,' Aust, whom I interviewed during the festival days, tells me, 'are Kristina's. In addition, Kristina has a keen eye for details and beautiful dramaturgical ideas.’
Kristina Schippling also signed a documentary about the vibrant music scene in the city of Cologne, The Sound of Cologne (2022), dedicated to electronica, underground and dance.
THE SOUND OF COLOGNE by Kristina Schippling
Director Kristina Schippling, Writer Michael P. Aust (concept and idea)
A journey of discovery through Cologne, accompanied by artists such as Irmin Schmidt (CAN), Gregor Schwellenbach, Niobe and Wolfgang Voigt, head of the label Kompakt, immersing into the inextricable interplay amid music, images and architecture.
The Sound Of Cologne presents Cologne from a different, vibrant side. Artists from all over the world have met in Cologne since the 50s and in the following decades up until today, creating together - thanks to the WDR's electronic studio - an artistic scene which became and stayed one of the most influential music scenes in the world.
Music from Cologne is both electronic and experimental and it doesn't matter whether its classified as E-music or U-music. It is urban, usually danceable and mixes the attitude towards life and the sound of a city in an artistic way that creates new, unheard tones and works that send impulses into the music industry.
The documentary explains well why the very city of Cologne was able to exert such a strong attraction on musicians who flocked into the city from all over the world to a place where their music could develop into maturity and success.
We are adding an annex for those readers that want to further get to know CAN:
CAN essential Playlist
Future Days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXX5-p6sUwI
Quantum Physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSxRmU8CofE
Cascade Waltz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5MHIh7t9jE
Recommended CAN albums:
Tago Mago - 1971
Ege Bamyasi - 1972
Future Days - 1973
Soon Over Babaluma - 1974
Landed - 1975
Flow Motion - 1976
CAN solo albums:
Holger Czukay - Cinema
Irmin Schmidt - Electro Violet
Michael Karoli & Polly Eltes - Deluge
Jaki Liebezeit/Phantom Band - Nowhere
1968. Near Cologne. Inside their recording studio Inner Space, music of motionless rhythms is crystallised in seemingly monotonous improvisations. The musical composition moves in linear time and has no urgency to reach an end, and it seems to have had no beginning; it’s a most original sound experience, an exploration of the musicians' inner space that seems to evolve towards the fourth dimension.
We are aware of their unquestionable uniqueness, yet we are active listeners, so we can't help check their guiding choices: James Brown, Velvet Underground (an unfailing reference: who hasn't been seduced by them?), Karlheinz Stockhausen and a touch of psychedelic Miles Davis.
It is the fruit of collective creativity sitting on the circular rhythmic structures of drummer Jaki Liebezeit; the timbres of the modified and electronically manipulated Farfisa keyboard, the Italian prestigious organ, under the fingers of Irmin Schmidt; Michael Karoli's immaculate white Fender Stratocaster guitar; a few effects, echoes and a fuzz. Holger Czuckay is a student of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen too, just like the keyboardist; in addition to playing bass, Czukay takes care of the recording and song structure. He really has very little tools to work with compared to today's digital paraphernalia, capturing sound with only a two-track recorder; Can will use a 16-track multitrack recorder only from the second half of the 1970s; armed with scissors and tape in post-production he cuts, pastes and manipulates the best parts of this sonic transcendence.
Without a doubt, Can is the landmark band of British new wave, often cited by artists such as Japan or Siouxsie & The Banshees.
Jaki Liebezeit -the human drum machine- is the idol of drummers of these bands and several others. He is certainly so for his great admirer Brian Eno, who would invite him to work on his albums and import the Can idea into the Talking Heads' Remain in Light record he produced.
Irmin Schmidt
Director Michael P. Aust
director Kristina Schippling contributes to the film Can and Me
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