Irmin Schmidt

Don Van Vliet – the late singer-composer-provocateur known as Captain Beefheart – was recovering from the deepest nadir of his musical life, two mid-Seventies albums of straight-line rock and sugar-rhyme ballads, when he hit another: the 36-year exile of his comeback shot, Bat Chain Puller (Vaulternative). Read More

A month shy of his 75th birthday, German keyboardist Irmin Schmidt is old enough to have lived through World War II. Read More

It's hard to tell now whether the term "krautrockoriginally concocted by the British music weeklies as a catch-all for the experimentally-minded bands coming out of Germany in the beards-and-bellbottoms era —was intended derisively or not, regardless of it's political incorrectness. But after German band Faust used the appellation for a song title in 1973, it started to transcend its origins, and over the decades it has become a generic tag for the post-psychedelic sonic storms stirred up by the likes of Amon Duul II , Guru Guru , Faust , Ash Ra Tempel and Can , as well as their more electronically minded cousins, Tangerine Dream , Kraftwerk , et al—music that has been incalculably influential to every generation of rockers to come along since. But while classic albums by the aforementioned artists have been comfortably ensconced in the krautrock canon for some forty years now, the books may have to be reopened in order to accomodate the arrival of The Lost Tapes , three CDs' worth of recently unearthed, previously unheard, archival Can material that seems sure to blow more than a few fans' minds. Read More

Arriving on June 18th, 2012, is the long awaited release of the ultra influential Can 's The Lost Tapes featuring tracks from 1968-1977, in a three CD box set. Read More

We spoke with Irmin Schmidt about the discovery of The Lost Tapes, the future of music production, and the formation of CAN. Read More

It's an awful nice feeling when people in the music industry treat me like I'm a legitimate journalist. Read More

Can plan to reenter society's psyche with The Lost Tapes. Read More

The Lost Tapes; the long awaited box set of unreleased studio, soundtrack and live material. Read More