Can founder Irmin Schmidt had a birthday yesterday. So I guess I should have reviewed his new solo album then. I'm catching up today with this live record, out now digitally on Mute and on vinyl in the summer, and am happy to report that Nocturne (Live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) is hypnotic and still accessible. These are simple performances, in some sense, but also ones that are richly rewarding.
"Klavierstück II" is so sparse that it almost floats away. Here, Schmidt plays piano over some simple samples, and the overall effect is a gentle one, and one which plucks at the imagination with a quiet insistence. The second cut here is "Nocturne" and it uses the sound of raindrops to punctuate sporadic piano-runs. Still, for the joys of those first two cuts on Nocturne (Live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival), it is the final track that made me love this album. "Yonder" unfurls over the course of 22 minutes with a basic chord on the piano hit as if it's a bell signalling the end of everything. It's a beat counting out steps to the gallows, there's that much portentous doom here. Elegiac and haunting, precise and yet diffuse, this is a superb example of what can be done with little. Irmin Schmidt offered some thoughts on this piece in the press materials accompanying the record:
"Church bells: A sound that has deeply and contradictorily touched me since my childhood. After the war we lived surrounded by ruins, only the church tower was intact and the bells would burst through the ruins every hour of the day. Watching Notre Dame burn on live TV evoked the memory. Three weeks later I started to write 'Yonder'."
I think Nocturne (Live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) is a tremendously affecting record, and one which doesn't beat a listener over the head with complex musicality. The Can member is more intent on letting the empty spaces around the notes and samples do as much heavy lifting as the actual music here does. The overall mood maintained is impressively austere, and wholly enveloping.
Nocturne (Live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) is out now via Mute.
More details on Irmin Schmidt via the official website, or the official Can Facebook page.
[Photo: Brian Slater]