Post by Fuggle on Jun 25, 2006 9:11:53 GMT -5
Canonization
Influential Krautrockers Can, Recycled
By T.W. Hansen
I don’t dig on hero worship. The breathless dialog of progress leaves little room for applause. I’m not going to puff up some angular Teutonic deity for the sake of being hip. However, late ‘60s Krautrock cornerstone Can require no puffery. They barely require an introduction. What the hell am I doing?
Enjoying their ongoing resurgence as the augurs and influencers of an astonishingly wide variety of modern music, Can are currently having their entire catalog re-mastered and re-released by Mute Records, along with a DVD featuring rare footage of the band. Keyboardist and founding member Irmin Schmidt recently came to America to bask in the lovely California publicity. I conducted an interview by phone to congratulate him on being elected a godfather of everything from ambient electronica to lo-fi indie rock.
For at least a decade, if not longer, it’s been fashionable, maybe even trendy, for up-and-coming artists to namedrop Can as an influence. Do you feel this is legitimate on their part, or merely a shortcut to the perception of legitimacy?
Well, you can ask them! For my feeling, I mean, I got used to it. It’s been 30 years like this, and Can is just—it’s a music which never lost its actuality, its presence…because it has an enormous variety. It’s never one style, and that’s what probably makes it so interesting. I find it oddly legitimate. That’s what a composer dreams of: that it lasts. And if it lasts, oh well, the better. You don’t worry about it.
In the UK, you guys were something of a totem for the ‘70s punk scene. Johnny Rotten even approached you about a job as lead singer.
Yes, that was already after we’d stopped playing concerts. Too late, otherwise he might’ve had a chance.
How different do you think history would be if you’d taken him up on it?
No idea. You know, the basis of this group was spontaneity. It was not having a bandleader who said what kind of music would be played. No composer. We did it all together—a collective spontaneously inventing music, which made it different every time we played. When it’s like that, any musician coming into it changes the whole thing. That was the case when Damo [Suzuki, Can’s second lead singer after Malcolm Mooney left for psychiatric reasons] came into the group. That was the case when Damo left. I don’t know Johnny that well. I know how he sings, but with Can he might’ve been totally different.
As cherished as you are by down ‘n’ dirty indie rock and techno outfits, you do have a valid claim to some very high art, dare we say, elitist territory. You’ve written operas. You and fellow Can founder Holger Czukay both studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, for God’s sake.
I was actually a conductor. I conducted symphony orchestras, I worked at opera houses. As a composer, I was composing serial music. As a pianist, I gave piano recitals from Mozart to Cage. I was one of the first in Europe to perform Cage’s piano work. I came from a classical background in music [as a] composer, conductor and pianist, and my idea [with Can] was because I was not satisfied with the music, what I did and what I composed especially, because I saw that all these elements that made contemporary art music were not all that was new in our time. There was jazz, there was Coltrane, there was African music, there was the rhythm James Brown made, there was Jimi Hendrix, who invented the guitar again…it was like inventing new instruments. Coltrane, Charlie Parker, they really invented their instruments. And this is all part of the new music in our culture and equally as important as the Stockhausen music. I wanted to bring all of it together, not only as a composer, but physically bringing people together, playing jazz, playing rock, and that was the idea of the group. There was Jaki [Liebezeit], one of the best jazz drummers in Europe at the time. There was Holger, who also had a classical background—we studied composition together—and then there was Michael Karoli, who was a real young rock guitarist. I thought, I’ll bring that together, we’ll see what happens. And what happened was Can.
Holger supposedly left the group because he felt you and the others didn’t want to follow him deeper into the avant-garde?
No, no, that’s not true. It was less musical and more personal. Working like we were is incredibly intense. It’s a fragile process, going out and improvising the music from the atmosphere every night, which after 10 years creates a tension that can start to be unbearable. There was tension between Holger and the rest of the group, but he was not the one who was more avant-garde than anybody else. Shortly afterward, the group split. Well, not split, but we never appeared after ’79 onstage.
One last question. Gertrude Stein made the claim that all great art must be annoying. Is she full of shit?
Annoying whom, the audience or the performer? You are saying that art must be annoying?
Well, I personally don’t subscribe to it, but it’s a common opinion when discussing, say, the works of John Cage…
No! I knew them very well. Neither Cage nor Stockhausen intended to annoy people. I mean, there’s a late 19th century, early 20th century thing to frighten the bourgeois, but that’s long ago. That’s boring. Boring old stuff. If you make art, it is not to annoy people. Look, there are works which I highly regard, which are almost never played because they are so difficult to understand, but they were not composed to annoy. It can be something unusual for the public, and maybe they have to make an effort, and maybe they never do, but it’s not to annoy. To provoke intellectually, that’s another thing entirely. Some people, when art forces them to use their brain, they get annoyed, but the intention is not to annoy, it is to make them think. You got me?
Influential Krautrockers Can, Recycled
By T.W. Hansen
I don’t dig on hero worship. The breathless dialog of progress leaves little room for applause. I’m not going to puff up some angular Teutonic deity for the sake of being hip. However, late ‘60s Krautrock cornerstone Can require no puffery. They barely require an introduction. What the hell am I doing?
Enjoying their ongoing resurgence as the augurs and influencers of an astonishingly wide variety of modern music, Can are currently having their entire catalog re-mastered and re-released by Mute Records, along with a DVD featuring rare footage of the band. Keyboardist and founding member Irmin Schmidt recently came to America to bask in the lovely California publicity. I conducted an interview by phone to congratulate him on being elected a godfather of everything from ambient electronica to lo-fi indie rock.
For at least a decade, if not longer, it’s been fashionable, maybe even trendy, for up-and-coming artists to namedrop Can as an influence. Do you feel this is legitimate on their part, or merely a shortcut to the perception of legitimacy?
Well, you can ask them! For my feeling, I mean, I got used to it. It’s been 30 years like this, and Can is just—it’s a music which never lost its actuality, its presence…because it has an enormous variety. It’s never one style, and that’s what probably makes it so interesting. I find it oddly legitimate. That’s what a composer dreams of: that it lasts. And if it lasts, oh well, the better. You don’t worry about it.
In the UK, you guys were something of a totem for the ‘70s punk scene. Johnny Rotten even approached you about a job as lead singer.
Yes, that was already after we’d stopped playing concerts. Too late, otherwise he might’ve had a chance.
How different do you think history would be if you’d taken him up on it?
No idea. You know, the basis of this group was spontaneity. It was not having a bandleader who said what kind of music would be played. No composer. We did it all together—a collective spontaneously inventing music, which made it different every time we played. When it’s like that, any musician coming into it changes the whole thing. That was the case when Damo [Suzuki, Can’s second lead singer after Malcolm Mooney left for psychiatric reasons] came into the group. That was the case when Damo left. I don’t know Johnny that well. I know how he sings, but with Can he might’ve been totally different.
As cherished as you are by down ‘n’ dirty indie rock and techno outfits, you do have a valid claim to some very high art, dare we say, elitist territory. You’ve written operas. You and fellow Can founder Holger Czukay both studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, for God’s sake.
I was actually a conductor. I conducted symphony orchestras, I worked at opera houses. As a composer, I was composing serial music. As a pianist, I gave piano recitals from Mozart to Cage. I was one of the first in Europe to perform Cage’s piano work. I came from a classical background in music [as a] composer, conductor and pianist, and my idea [with Can] was because I was not satisfied with the music, what I did and what I composed especially, because I saw that all these elements that made contemporary art music were not all that was new in our time. There was jazz, there was Coltrane, there was African music, there was the rhythm James Brown made, there was Jimi Hendrix, who invented the guitar again…it was like inventing new instruments. Coltrane, Charlie Parker, they really invented their instruments. And this is all part of the new music in our culture and equally as important as the Stockhausen music. I wanted to bring all of it together, not only as a composer, but physically bringing people together, playing jazz, playing rock, and that was the idea of the group. There was Jaki [Liebezeit], one of the best jazz drummers in Europe at the time. There was Holger, who also had a classical background—we studied composition together—and then there was Michael Karoli, who was a real young rock guitarist. I thought, I’ll bring that together, we’ll see what happens. And what happened was Can.
Holger supposedly left the group because he felt you and the others didn’t want to follow him deeper into the avant-garde?
No, no, that’s not true. It was less musical and more personal. Working like we were is incredibly intense. It’s a fragile process, going out and improvising the music from the atmosphere every night, which after 10 years creates a tension that can start to be unbearable. There was tension between Holger and the rest of the group, but he was not the one who was more avant-garde than anybody else. Shortly afterward, the group split. Well, not split, but we never appeared after ’79 onstage.
One last question. Gertrude Stein made the claim that all great art must be annoying. Is she full of shit?
Annoying whom, the audience or the performer? You are saying that art must be annoying?
Well, I personally don’t subscribe to it, but it’s a common opinion when discussing, say, the works of John Cage…
No! I knew them very well. Neither Cage nor Stockhausen intended to annoy people. I mean, there’s a late 19th century, early 20th century thing to frighten the bourgeois, but that’s long ago. That’s boring. Boring old stuff. If you make art, it is not to annoy people. Look, there are works which I highly regard, which are almost never played because they are so difficult to understand, but they were not composed to annoy. It can be something unusual for the public, and maybe they have to make an effort, and maybe they never do, but it’s not to annoy. To provoke intellectually, that’s another thing entirely. Some people, when art forces them to use their brain, they get annoyed, but the intention is not to annoy, it is to make them think. You got me?