CAN – THE LOST TAPES

3CD BOX SET OF UNRELEASED MATERIAL
RELEASE DATE: 18 JUNE 2012

IRMIN SCHMIDT & JONO PODMORE PRESENT
THE MUSIC OF CAN – 26 MAY

ATP I’ll BE YOUR MIRROR CURATED BY MOGWAI

Irmin Schmidt & Jono Podmore have announced they will be appearing at the Mogwai curated ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror festival on Saturday 26 May with The Music Of Can: Unreleased Music & Discussion, where they will be playing tracks from The Lost Tapes and revealing the stories behind the tracks that had been locked away for so long.

Says Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite: “I can honestly say that there isn’t another band who sound like Can. Their music was of a future that we haven’t yet arrived at. Influencing people with their ambition more than just music we’re incredibly lucky to have found even more of their music to wonder at. God bless Can.”

Can – The Lost Tapes, the long awaited box set of unreleased studio, soundtrack and live material, is released on Mute on 18 June 2012. Described by The Wire as a “… treasurable hoard… there’s material here that’s easily the equal of Tago Mago, Future Days et al”, the box set will be released in a limited edition 3CD 10” box with a 28-page booklet.

The Lost Tapes, was curated by Irmin Schmidt and Daniel Miller, compiled by Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore, and edited by Jono Podmore.

When the legendary Can studio in Weilerswist was sold to the German Rock N Pop Museum, they bought everything, including the army mattresses that covered the walls for sound protection, and relocated it to Gronau.

Whilst dismantling the studio, master tapes were found and stored in the Spoon archive. With barely legible labeling, no one was sure what was on these until Irmin Schmidt and long time collaborator Jono Podmore started to go through over 30 hours of music.

What they found was years of archived material, not outtakes, but rather tracks which had been shelved for a variety of reasons – soundtracks to films that were never released and tracks that didn’t make it onto the final versions of albums due to space.

Irmin Schmidt explains “Obviously the tapes weren’t really lost, but were left in the cupboards of the studio archives for so long everybody just forgot about them. Everybody except Hildegard, who watches over Can and its work like the dragon over the gold of the Nibelungen and doesn’t allow forgetting.”

The final cut of tracks, dating from 1968-1977, features studio material recorded at Schloss Nörvenich and Can Studio, Weilerswist with the Can line up of Holger Czukay on bass, Michael Karoli on guitars, Jaki Liebezeit on drums and Irmin Schmidt on keyboards, and on most tracks, vocals from Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki.

Can was formed by ex-student of Stockhausen Irmin Schmidt, who, fired by the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa abandoned his career in classic music to form a group which could utilise and transcend all boundaries of ethnic, electronic experimental and modern classical music.

Can’s influence is well known and far-reaching and the impact they made on music is felt today as keenly as it ever has been. They themselves have always been impossible to classify and reflecting this, the scope of artists who in recent years have cited Can as a major influence is varied from John Lydon to Radiohead, The Fall to Portishead.

CAN THE LOST TAPES TRACKLISTING
CD 1
Millionenspiel / Waiting For The Streetcar / Evening All Day / Deadly Doris / Graublau / When Darkness Comes / Blind Mirror Surf / Oscura Primavera /
Bubble Rap

CD2
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Whore / True Story / The Agreement / Midnight Sky / Desert / Spoon (Live) / Dead Pigeon Suite / Abra Cada Braxas / A
Swan Is Born / The Loop

CD3
Godzilla Fragment / On The Way To Mother Sky / Midnight Men / Networks Of Foam / Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light / Barnacles / E.F.S. 108 /
Private Nocturnal / Alice / Mushroom (Live) / One More Saturday Night (Live)