Cut-ups
The Untouchable Magic of Can
In 1997, I had the good fortune to interview Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt of Can while they were promoting a reissue series on Mute Records. The immediate excuse was the release of a remix album called, appropriately, Sacrilege, and I wrote the encounter up as a feature review for our arts weekly in Boston. But I’d asked them each a series of fundamental questions about their music that didn’t all fit the review, so the following year I published a transcript of the conversations in the psychedelic zine Ptolemaic Terrascope. Both pieces follow.
Originally published by The Boston Phoenix (August 1, 1997)
The German experimental rock group Can, convinced that they heard sounds on their recordings they couldn’t remember playing, once put all their instruments in a room, turned on a tape recorder, and left.
What instruments say to one another in private remains one of the mysteries of Can. Another riddle is why they were a rock band. Formed in the heat of the European student riots of 1968, Can were created for the purpose of spontaneous group action. Two of the founding four members — Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt — were avant-garde classical musicians, students of Karlheinz Stockhausen and admirers of John Cage. Another — Jaki Liebezeit — was a jazz drummer, just back from a stint in Spain, with a collection of forbidden voodoo rhythms gleaned from a Cuban bass player. And the fourth — Michael Karoli — was an astrologer who played electric guitar according to the mathematical relationships of the planets.
Over the next 10 years, Can would change what it could mean to play rock music, through their meticulous yet spontaneous albums, their anarchic live shows, and above all their commitment to ideas. Their albums, a dozen of which have been re-released this decade by Mute, remain broadly influential. Indeed, artists as diverse as Sonic Youth, Brian Eno, and the Orb recently participated in a Can remix compilation, Sacrilege, that’s now available on Mute. But even though Can’s music was experimental, toying with it makes no sense. And to understand why, it’s necessary to explain how Can differed from other bands.