I'm reading a fairly new book about Can, the supernova of a musical group, that never failed to set its mark upon the world; the book is named "All Gates Open: The Story of Can", which consists of two parts, one written by Rob Young and one written by Irmin Schmidt, a member of Can.
https://youtu.be/Gp6oPyQnX60
Can’s own music, which ceased to be produced with any regularity in 1978, has travelled forward into music’s future, inspiriting it and informing it, transforming it and leaving it different. In summer 2016, coasting along the autoroutes of southern France on the way to Irmin Schmidt’s residence to conduct a round of interviews for this book, my car radio starts pumping out Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’, from 2000. It sounds delirious and exhilarating in a speeding vehicle, its ambient breakdowns building to triumphant reappearances of a thumping beat overlaid with a vocal line of enormous positivity: ‘Music’s got me feeling so free …’ As well as its title recalling Can’s ‘One More Night’, there is something of the relentlessness of Can’s most driving grooves, such as ‘Mother Sky’, ‘Halleluwah’ or their own disco hit ‘I Want More’, which has given permission for this type of European dance music to exist, urging the body forward, combining the sense of the feet connecting magnetically to the ground with a vital sense of lift-off, a transformative trip that characterises the very best dance music. It sounds sophisticated in its digital, twenty-first-century urban garb, but the primal pulse underpinning it has energised humans’ ritual and celebratory musics for millennia. Being inside the music is supremely liberating, and there’s no way to escape it. That’s the feeling Can’s best music gives me. And I willingly submit to its paradoxical pleasures.
Irmin attended the Darmstadt courses during a period in which, as he recalls it, Stockhausen was in a phase of ‘absolute dogmatism’. During a session analysing the maestro’s work for three orchestras, Momente, he fought back. ‘He was really like a father figure … I went there because I was totally fascinated and, I mean, I loved his early work – when I heard Gesang der Jünglinge for the first time, that was actually some kind of revelation, an epiphany. But I had really hard discussions with him. I could accept much more than he could. And I remember one time when he rhetorically slapped me away during an analysis of Momente. I could hardly follow it because it was so complicated. And at the end he said, “Tomorrow we will dedicate the last three hours only to questions.” And then he said, “But I only accept intelligent questions.” And he said it in a tone warning you … I mean, it was so discouraging: “You don’t ask God stupid questions.” And you went home and thought, “I cannot ask anything, it will be really stupid.” And so next day I went. There had already been ten or fifteen questions already, and they were all totally uninteresting – “I don’t understand this little detail, and did I understand you right when you mean …” And I said, “Do you think you will get really intelligent questions posed about the work if you act so that everybody thinks, ‘I won’t ask him, it’s not intelligent enough’?” First there was a long silence … And I could see those faces … And he got so furious, and then there was [Helmut] Lachenmann, his favourite student, who then created this totally unapproachable world [laughs] – a real intellectual, even more dogmatic than Stockhausen. And Lachenmann and Stockhausen just stuck me into the ground with this for being the most stupid question.’
Some of the music from the same era:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CprDANYhC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ZY7StaExU&list=PLCc1CdM5OcYyCaMiJaCfakQtpKidR4vtA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOvLziEkQdo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tqROHFi5Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE2lo8HShrk&list=PLF8C6755E36C0E32C
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ond4Wp9nPhM&list=PLzEG2f9QAl8Np-6-4lbJtBpDeJXJG12ZF
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbLBbdQzEeE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USwRGsj837s&list=PL8UfM7ycll7Qx-C14sDB-FSFTPsHCmQlz
That's when Can released their debut album, "Monster Movie":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npc2qyM8jXs&list=PLXxTLXTO6AozAPvS9cwyBwD9x-AV5n9DQ
How can one not love a band whose members are extremely well educated when it comes to music, but do everything to keep things fresh, including not taking themselves in the least seriously? The results are brilliant. It's hard not to hear stuff like their "Anthology" and realise that they were as good as influential. Bands like Portishead, Neu!, U2, and basically all rock and non-rock music since Can first stepped upon the block, recognise them as forefathers.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1c4uez
It's a good book, so far. It's fucking 700 pages long! I hope it holds up, but so far, there's something spellbinding and honest about Rob Young's language that makes me head deeply into the book.