Mute and Spoon Records have announced the first in a series of long-awaited live album releases, Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975 – out on vinyl, CD and digitally on 28 May 2021.
As touched on in an earlier piece published in Folk Radio (more below), Can’s output was prolific; they seemed to tour endlessly with the time between tours spent jamming for hours on end in their own Inner Space studios in Köln. So even after all the albums and the recently discovered material such as the legendary Lost Tapes, there is still music to discover and surprise even the most ardent fan.
The new album documents, in five parts, Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975, demonstrating an important and formidable element of the Can story: their live performance. Listen to an excerpt below:
The Can Live series has taken the best of the bootlegged recordings and, overseen by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer Rene Tinner, run them through the wringer of 21st-century technology to bring you these vital historical documents in the best quality versions possible.
When Schmidt received a knighthood from the French Government for his work in art and culture, Helen Gregory wrote a great piece for Folk Radio that also paid tribute to the band’s guitarist, Michael Karoli. In this, she recalled seeing them two years prior to this concert at the (long since demolished) Liverpool Stadium in March 1973 where she also met them all backstage before they played – read it here.
Founded in the late ‘60s and disbanded just over a decade later, Can’s unprecedented and bold marriage of hypnotic grooves and avant-garde instrumental textures has made them one of the most important and innovative of all time,and these albums reveal a totally different perspective to the band. You may hear familiar themes, riffs and motifs popping up and rippling through these jams,but they are often fleetingly recognised faces in a swirling crowd. At other points, you will hear music that didn’t make it onto the official album canon. In these recordings Can go to even more extreme ranges than with their studio work: from mellow, ambient drift-rock to the white-dwarf sonic-meltdown moments they used to nickname ‘Godzillas’. And even as they adapt and chase the rhythm from minute to minute, you can hear the extraordinary musical telepathy its members shared.
Pre-order the album: https://mute.ffm.to/can75