{"id":10462,"date":"2026-04-23T17:11:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T17:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/irmin-schmidts-requiem-reviewed-the-can-explorers-elegiac-hymn-to-nature-154362\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T17:11:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T17:11:21","slug":"irmin-schmidts-requiem-reviewed-the-can-explorers-elegiac-hymn-to-nature-154362","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/irmin-schmidts-requiem-reviewed-the-can-explorers-elegiac-hymn-to-nature-154362\/","title":{"rendered":"Irmin Schmidt\u2019s Requiem reviewed: the Can explorer\u2019s elegiac hymn to nature"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Les Rossignols is \u2018the Nightingales\u2019, the name testament to the close presence of nature\u2019s 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\u2019s disappearing from his private pocket of this planet.<\/p>\n

Consisting of two tracks or movements, Requiem is made up of field recordings \u2013\u00a0mainly birdsong, trickling streams and downpours \u2013 interwoven with a sound array mostly derived from Schmidt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s previous solo releases, 5 Klavierst\u00fccke 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 \u2013\u00a0John Cage. In the 1960s Schmidt conducted the West German premiere of Cage\u2019s Atlas Eclipticalis<\/em> and performed his piano work Winter Music<\/em>. In Cage\u2019s best-known works after his notorious 4\u201933\u201d non-musical provocation, the strings and keys of a conventional piano have various objects attached to them, muting or distorting their familiar sound. Thus \u2018prepared\u2019, the piano becomes a percussion instrument, a noise generator.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The twittering meadow that opens Requiem\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Irmin Schmidt\u2019s Requiem reviewed: the Can explorer\u2019s elegiac hymn to nature<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,5942,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album","category-can","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}