Irmin Schmidt studied music under Stockhausen & Ligeti before going on to conduct numerous orchestras. However, his classical career was put on hold after a trip to New York in 1966 inspired him to form the group Can upon his return. His last two albums have been in collaboration with the British artist Kumo.

I arranged a phone interview with the duo to coincide with the release of their second album together “Axotl Eyes”. I called them up but Kumo seemed a bit confused as to where ALIVE was based….

“Is that based in Finland?”

No, England.

“It’s all same to me.”

You were close, we’re in Huddersfield

“Is that over Leeds/Sheffield way?”

Yes, that’s right

“I know it. I’m from Liverpool and spent most off the 80 s and 90s touring with bands all around Britain.”

Oh, which bands?

“You know, I was just reading an interview with Nick Cave and his answer to just about every question he got asked was ‘Google it, m**********r’.”

Ahhh, so it’s going to be that kind of an interview?

“No, I was in a band in the 80s called the Corn Dollies, doing violin & string arrangements. Later I went on to work with Dorado Records, I engineered and mixed nearly their entire output. When there were gigs to do, I did the front of house sound and of course with my own music, Kumo, constantly.”

What inspired you to name your album after the eyes of Mexican Walking Fish?

“Mexican Walking Fish? That’s a new one to me. I have always found them interesting. A friend of mine in Sheffield used to keep them and I used to feed them once a week, a piece of meat. I find them very beautiful and interesting animals. Early last year, we were making a film to compliment a sound installation we’d created. It’s bundled in with the new album, as a freebie DVD, we made film to go with it. When we were making the film, we filmed a lot of Axolotl and they appeared in the film a lot and became a theme for the work.

Interestingly, when I googled the name “Axolotl Eyes” I found out fascinating things about their eyes. There are sightless ones that live in caves and don’t have eyes as they don’t need eyes because they live in darkness. If you remove the eyes from a sighted Axolotl then you can graft them onto a blind cave Axolotl and they will work on them.”

The cover artwork is very striking! Where’s the image from?

“That’s came when I started discussing that with the cover artist, a friend of mine I’ve known for 30 years, Colin Taylor. He’s a graphic designer and we discussed the idea of the cover for a while. He loved the Axolotl imagery and he didn’t want to be a “Pixel Jockey” in his own words because that’s so many peoples’ jobs these days.

He wanted to do something physical with photography, an analogue approach. He created this concept as having 2 people as Axolotl. They’re permanently juvenile but can become adult salamanders. The idea was they were becoming people instead of salamanders. Also, the boy and the girl thing had echoes in the imagery of the pioneer plaque, the only artefact to make its’ way into outer space”

When did the two of you first meet?

“We met in 1997 on the suggestion of Jazz Summers, the manager and impresario. Irmin was looking for someone to work with on his opera “Gormenghast”. He needed a sound engineer and producer who could read music and record an orchestra. He’d written a score and needed some to produce and programme.”

Has it ever been performed over here?

“The full thing has never been played in Britain. The problem is opera is the most expensive art form on the planet. So to get people to invest is not the easiest approach in the world, most people want bums on seats and Mozart. The original commission for “Gormenghast” was performed in Germany and then we were lucky to have it perform at all, but it did a second run in Saarbrücken & Luxembourg. Geographically it’s moving gradually North.”

Sounds like you should get in touch with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, sounds like there kind of thing. What was the next step with your collaboration after that?

“The next step was the music that we wrote together that ended up on the album “Masters of Confusion”. Shortly after the first run, Irmin was involved in the 30th anniversary of Can and we did the Can Solo Projects tour. Irmin & I developed a solo project which then developed into the album “Masters of Confusion”. Which was the live show expanded.

That was the creation of the double act. Then we did quite a substantial series of gigs. We were playing gigs with that material up until 2005. From that point onward, we’ve been working on this album”

How big a tour are you lining up for this album?

“We’ve played one gig already on a boat on the river Rhine in Colne. The opening act was the Pope. The boat that we played on was the boat that they’d used to ferry his holiness up and down the river when he became pope.”.

What about UK dates?

We’ll definitely be playing at least in London, and we have an agent who is working on putting a tour together for after the release of the album. We’ll be looking for some sort of promotional tour after that. It’s just a question of when”

Do you travel alone or bring the family?

“The family come along. There’s Irmin and myself and our live sound engineer Rene (who also worked on later Can). Then there’s Irmin’s wife Hildegard and my wife Sandra who are the management of our work and the Can Back-catalogue and Spoon Records, so we bring along the grand-daughter as well.”

After an acclaimed reissue campaign, I had to ask if there were any more Can releases planned for the future? Kumo passed me on to Irmin for the final word

“Possibly, there is still quite a lot of live recordings and radio and television all over Europe and maybe we get the rights to release, maybe there is some more live recordings to put out. That’s possible but it probably won’t be this year, maybe next year. This year the whole industry is in a strange state and we have to figure out the situation and how”

Interview by Ned Netherwood
Thanks to Rob @ Sonic PR