Irmin Schmidt’s Requiem reviewed: the Can explorer’s elegiac hymn to nature

Towards the end of his time in Can, Irmin Schmidt purchased a plot of land near Roussillon in south-eastern France as a rural retreat. During the 1980s when he was pursuing a career making solo albums, composing film and television soundtracks, and his wife Hildegard Schmidt was running the Spoon label to continue the legacy of Can and its members’ post-breakup careers, the couple had a house built on the property. Strange, sprawling and nestling in the vineyard landscape of the Luberon like a brutalist Minoan palace, Les Rossignols has been their home ever since.

Les Rossignols is ‘the Nightingales’, the name testament to the close presence of nature’s song in this pastoralia. But as he approaches his ninth decade, Schmidt has become increasingly aware of what is being lost to the climate emergency. Requiem is his instrumental meditation on what’s disappearing from his private pocket of this planet.

Consisting of two tracks or movements, Requiem is made up of field recordings – mainly birdsong, trickling streams and downpours – interwoven with a sound array mostly derived from Schmidt’s prepared piano. This approach marks a return to his pre-Can years, as a composer and conductor intimately connected to the post-war avant-garde. Schmidt studied under arch modernists Stockhausen, Ligeti, Berio, Pousseur and others at Darmstadt, where the course of experimental music for the coming decades was both set and disputed. Rebelling against the strictures of some of these composers drove Schmidt to seek out other more fluid forms of music and ways of creating and performing it, resulting in the formation of Can in 1968.

With all the other original members of Can now passed away (with the exception of early vocalist Malcolm Mooney), Schmidt endures in his French bolthole, spending the past few years overseeing the controlled release of archival Can material such as the revelatory Live Bootleg series. Schmidt’s previous solo releases, 5 Klavierstücke and Nocturne, featured contemplative solo piano works. His own music-making has taken a turn that reconnects him with the most anarchic artist of his early life – John Cage. In the 1960s Schmidt conducted the West German premiere of Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis and performed his piano work Winter Music. In Cage’s best-known works after his notorious 4’33” non-musical provocation, the strings and keys of a conventional piano have various objects attached to them, muting or distorting their familiar sound. Thus ‘prepared’, the piano becomes a percussion instrument, a noise generator.

Requiem marks a dignified, deeply considered late period for Schmidt, who has previously composed playful trans-European pop with Bruno Spoerri on Toy Planet, electro-noir film soundtracks and an opera based on Mervyn Peake’s phantasmagoric Titus Groan books. Beginning with the sounds of a nightingale chorus outside his house, his Requiem is watery and wistful, soaked with rainfall that grows from a gentle patter to a proper soaking.

In classical music, a requiem is a memorial to the dead. For Schmidt, this music with its contemplative mood edged out by menacing, pressurised elements, is a warning about the existential threat of the collapse of nature. Spending so long in one place among his patch of forest, meadow and lake, Schmidt has become acutely attuned to climate change, the disappearing insects and bird life (detectible via the changed acoustic space) and even the way the smell of a field changes when the natural order is disrupted.

The twittering meadow that opens Requiem’s first track is overtaken midway by a mysterious, repetitive sound that Schmidt refuses to elaborate on, a slow gurgling monotonous pulse that could be some infernal waterpump grinding the moisture out of the soil. Eventually the sparse piano line returns along with the trickling water. On the second track the treated piano comes to the fore. Schmidt’s delicate percussive work is outstanding, combining a gossamer light touch with occasional sharp jabs and flicks. Deep, monotonous notes like a wheezing grandfather clock tick away the doomsday minutes. The rain here is a torrent, suggesting monsoon conditions creeping over southern Europe.

We return to birdsong at the end, in a drenched and drowned world. Whether you choose to hold the eco themes in mind or simply revel in its textures, Requiem is a gripping listen, a powerful late work from a veteran who has weathered more storms than most.