Following on from the release of Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975 in 2021, Mute and Future Days (the new EU label created by Spoon Records) have announced the second phase of their acclaimed Can Live series. As previously mentioned, 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and producer/engineer Rene Tinner, run them through the wringer of 21st-century technology to bring you these vital historical documents in the best quality versions possible.
Can Live in Paris 1973, is set for release on vinyl, CD and digitally on 23 February 2024 and features a performance recorded at L’Olympia in Paris on 12 May 1973, marking the first of the live series to feature Damo Suzuki on vocals. From 1970-73 the core line up of Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli, and Holger Czukay were joined by Japanese improviser and vocalist Suzuki. They met after a chance encounter while Suzuki was busking in Munich, and several months after the Paris 1973 performance, his wanderlust would take him back on the road.
This new album witnesses the band at a particularly important stage of their career, with two of their most acclaimed albums – Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi, the latter feeding into the Paris performance – recently released.
After it was announced that Schmidt was to receive a knighthood from the French Government for his work in art and culture in 2015, writing for Folk Radio, Helen Gregory shared her recollections of hearing Tago Mago for the first time and meeting the band in 1973 shortly before this live recording was made:
I remember buying the band’s 1971 album Tago Mago pretty much ‘on spec’ after reading the (admittedly hyperbolic) sleeve notes, which name-checked other bands I liked at the time, but it took only seconds from dropping the stylus onto side one, track one, to realise that the music was like nothing else I’d ever heard. Even now, over forty years later, it’s impossible for me to pick out just one favourite track from that album – but I still remember two distinct ‘click’ moments from that first listen. The first is Michael’s lead guitar break at around 5m 45s into side two’s ‘Halleluwah’; the second is in the middle of ‘Bring Me Coffee Or Tea’, the closing track of the album: the combination of Michael’s acoustic guitar and the plaintive murmur of Damo Suzuki nearly reduced me to tears. I can’t really argue with Julian Cope’s description of Tago Mago in his 1995 book Krautrocksampler, that it “sounds only like itself, like no-one before or after”.
From there, I began to delve further into Can’s back catalogue and bought all their official releases from then on, always finding something inspiring and uplifting on each of them, invariably something played by Michael. I was fortunate enough not only to see the band play at the (long since demolished) Liverpool Stadium in March 1973, but also to actually meet them all backstage before they played. Suffice to say, the evening is etched into my memory as one of the best in my life.
Over the years, time and distance hasn’t dulled my love of Can’s music and the coming of the internet has, from time to time, enabled me to add various unofficial recordings to my collection – and my sense of anticipation and pleasure at hearing Michael play has never dulled, be it on a not-great quality live recording made by another fan, or a leaked outtake from a recording session, or an official recording by another artist on which Michael guested. It also has to be said that 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.
I can think of only three albums that I’ve loved unconditionally (uncritically?) from the moment I heard them and Tago Mago was the first – the others being John Martyn’s Solid Air and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and The Upsetters’ Super Ape. Each of the three profoundly affected my own approach to making music, each in its own way – although, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s perhaps the importance of the spaces in music that has struck me most and stayed with me longest. Julian Cope again: “Writers often celebrate the musician with sense enough to leave space in music, but Michael Karoli was one of the very few real masters”. And with that in mind, it’s time for me to leave some space in this vaguely elegaic, very personal, retrospective piece and go and listen to the music of one of the greats: Michael Karoli.
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 bands of all time,and these albums reveal a totally different perspective to the group. 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.
The new release follows Can Live in Brighton 1975 [“Pure dynamite… keep them coming” – MOJO]; Can Live in Stuttgart 1975, [Uncut’s Reissue of the Year, #2 in MOJO’s Reissues of the Year, #7 in The Wire’s Archive Reissues of the Year plus more], and Can Live in Cuxhaven 1976, which again featured heavily in the Reissues of the Year.
Can Live in Paris 1973 is released on double vinyl, 2 x CD and digitally via Mute / Spoon Records on 23 February 2024.
Pre-order the album: https://mute.ffm.to/can-lip73
CAN LIVE IN PARIS 1973 (CAT # FDSPOON66)
Paris 73 Eins (36:27)
Paris 73 Zwei (09:20)
Paris 73 Drei (16:35)
Paris 73 Vier (15:09)
Paris 73 Fünf (13:46)