A listening room, not a reunion
On Tuesday, April 17, 2012, Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore brought Can’s archive into Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan. The program was titled The Music of Can: An Evening of Unreleased Music and Discussion. Schmidt, Can’s co-founder and keyboardist, and Podmore, the composer-producer who had worked closely with him for years, played material from the forthcoming The Lost Tapes, spoke about it and answered questions. Can’s official news archive records the event as a presentation, while Mute’s announcement identifies the venue, date and format.
That wording is important. This was not a Can reunion and it was not advertised as a conventional concert. Other Music’s April 12 bulletin called it a listening party and discussion; Time Out New York described Schmidt and Podmore as playing samples from a three-disc package. The music had been made decades earlier, but the event’s subject was more than remembrance. It was the work of turning a disorderly tape archive into a public record.
For Can, that distinction goes to the heart of the music. The group’s classic recordings can feel spontaneous and meticulously shaped at once: Jaki Liebezeit’s pulse holds while Michael Karoli’s guitar, Holger Czukay’s bass and tape work, Schmidt’s keyboards and the voices of Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki keep changing the frame. The albums rarely sound like demonstrations of studio craft, yet studio craft is embedded in their form. A room devoted to listening and explanation was therefore an unusually appropriate way to introduce unheard Can.
What “lost” meant
Mute announced The Lost Tapes as a three-CD set due in the United States on June 19, 2012, with a European release one day earlier. It was to combine previously unreleased studio recordings, live performances and soundtrack work. The selected material dated from 1968 through 1977, spanning the core instrumental lineup of Czukay, Karoli, Liebezeit and Schmidt and including vocals from Mooney and Suzuki on most tracks. Pitchfork’s contemporary news report independently summarized the same dates, personnel and formats.
The title suggested disappearance, but the official account was less romantic and more revealing. Can’s studio at Weilerswist had been sold to the German Rock N Pop Museum and dismantled for relocation to Gronau. During that process, master tapes with barely legible labels were gathered into the Spoon archive. Schmidt and Podmore then worked through more than 30 hours of music. Some pieces were connected to films that were never released; others had been left off albums because of space or other practical decisions. “Lost,” in this case, meant uncatalogued, difficult to identify and absent from the released canon—not miraculously recovered from outside the band’s custody.
The division of labor also matters. Schmidt and Mute founder Daniel Miller curated the release; Schmidt and Podmore compiled it; Podmore edited it. Those are not interchangeable credits. Curation determines the boundaries of the project, compilation chooses and orders the usable music, and editing shapes the audio that listeners finally hear. The New York appearance placed one original member beside the person doing much of the present-day technical and structural work. It made the archive’s chain of custody visible.
Podmore was not a commentator recruited for a one-off launch. Working as Kumo, he had joined Schmidt’s orbit in 1997 during the making of the opera Gormenghast and later created 5.1 surround mixes for the Can DVD. Spoon Records’ account of their collaboration establishes that longer history. His role on The Lost Tapes joined familiarity with the catalog to enough distance to make difficult choices about recordings made before he entered the story.
The archive as a map of Can’s method
The temptation with any box of unreleased music is to treat quantity as proof of value. Can’s archive asks a better question: what can unfinished, alternate or displaced music explain about the records already known? Even Mute’s insistence that these were not merely outtakes could not erase the range of the material. The set drew together complete pieces, film cues, live recordings and music related to ideas that surfaced elsewhere. Its significance lay not in pretending that every reel contained a missing masterpiece, but in exposing routes that the released albums had concealed.
The surviving musicians’ accounts make that process concrete. In The Quietus’s oral history, Liebezeit explains that the early group recorded together in stereo before it had multitrack equipment. He also described working from an initial idea without written arrangements and using the group’s own studio to keep recording without the clock imposed by a commercial facility. Long performances could then be edited: strong passages from different takes were assembled, and continuity of groove remained the test.
Schmidt’s account adds an important correction to the image of Czukay as a solitary tape magician. Czukay had the technical skill to execute edits, but Schmidt said that he, Czukay and Karoli decided the architecture of long pieces together. Liebezeit, though less interested in sitting through the tapes, could reject an edit if it broke rhythmic continuity. Composition therefore continued after performance. The cut was not simply repair work; it could determine scale, sequence and momentum.
That background explains why Podmore’s credit as editor carries unusual weight. Sound On Sound’s detailed project interview reported that the Weilerswist store contained nearly 300 quarter-inch reels and that the relocation forced the archive to be confronted. The tapes were cleaned and transferred as 48kHz, 24-bit digital files. Podmore edited in Pro Tools but avoided crossfades and plug-ins, using period analog equipment when processing was necessary. His tools were contemporary; his restrictions were designed to respect the abrupt physical logic of tape.
The same interview describes five pieces assembled as new collages from unreleased film music, including opener “Millionenspiel” and “Midnight Men.” That detail complicates the easy idea that an archival release merely reproduces intact objects. Some selections survived as performances; others required a new structure. The set was not a hypothetical Can album hidden since the 1970s. It was a 2012 edition of historical recordings, and its honesty depended on clear credits for the people making those later decisions.
Why New York was the right frame
Can’s influence is often summarized through descendants: post-punk bands, electronic producers, experimental rock groups and rhythm-led improvisers. Lists of names can be useful, but they can also turn a working method into a prestige badge. The Le Poisson Rouge format offered something more exact. Instead of staging younger musicians to reproduce the catalog, it asked an audience to listen to source material and consider how the group made form from duration.
That is also why the choice of “Millionenspiel” as the first publicly promoted track made sense. Mute presented it as the set’s opener, a doorway rather than a greatest hit. The evening shifted attention away from the familiar sequence of Monster Movie, Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days and toward the mass of decisions surrounding those records. What was played? What was kept? What did an edit discover that the original performance did not declare on its own?
The preview also left important judgments open. Label language treated the collection as something more purposeful than a set of rejected takes, but an audience would still have to distinguish self-contained pieces from sketches, soundtrack fragments and alternate routes. That uncertainty was not a flaw in the New York event’s premise. It was precisely what made a discussion valuable: a finished album asserts its identity, while an archive requires context for why a performance was preserved and how it relates to work already released.
On April 18, the morning after Schmidt and Podmore’s presentation, The Lost Tapes was still a forthcoming record. But the event had already established the most useful way to hear it. The collection was neither a reunion nor a recovered final statement from Can. It was a guided passage through the group’s surplus: performances, cues and partial pathways that had outlived their original purposes. Bringing those tapes to New York made the past audible without pretending that the act of selection belonged to the past.