Can & Irmin Schmidt

Köln

Biography

Holger Czukay sat in the Inner Space studio—a former cinema with zero acoustic treatment—and hacked up session tapes with a razor blade. Can didn't write songs. They jammed for hours until the tape caught something usable, and then Schmidt and Czukay edited that chaos into rhythmic structures that felt like they were coming from a pulsar. Irmin Schmidt brought the high-art baggage, having studied under Stockhausen, but he used those avant-garde muscles to anchor the band's most primal instincts. By the mid-70s, the friction that made them dangerous started to leak out. After Damo Suzuki left to become a Jehovah's Witness, the band tried to navigate a world that was actually starting to pay attention to them. They moved from the claustrophobic, tape-saturated brilliance of the early 70s into cleaner, slicker productions like Landed and Flow Motion. Some of that later shit is just aimless disco-adjacent noodling that lacks the teeth of their early sessions, but Schmidt’s obsession with soundtrack work kept his individual output tethered to a cinematic scale even when the band lost the plot.

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