Photo: I. Schmidt (by S. Gullick), U. Gutmair (by T. Sterngast; "fake", P. Sanguineti (Sammlung Lenbachhaus München))
Ah, to sit down, listen to music, and be wonderfully silent for a while—does anyone actually do that anymore in 2018? Well, we’re not quite sure, and we can only officially confirm that Irmin Schmidt and Ulrich Gutmair will do two of these three things. After all, there’s a lot to talk about, and that’s exactly the idea behind our »Vorspiel« event. Musicians are presented with music—old and new, their own and that of others, familiar and hitherto unheard. This provides ample opportunity for perspectives, insights, and often even prospects. With Schmidt, we might expect role models like György Ligeti or Karlheinz Stockhausen, his own work with CAN, or other projects to figure centrally, but be prepared for little-known pieces from all decades and genres. And expect Schmidt’s responses to be even more surprising than the music played.
»Irmin Schmidt: Musikgeschichten«Irmin Schmidt played with the best band in the world and hasn’t stopped creating music history ever since. On three evenings at Pop-Kultur, he will share memories from a long life and show films that he himself or his band Can set to music. Alongside screenings of »Mord in Eberswalde« [»Murder in Eberswalde«] and »Deadlock«, Schmidt will speak with moderator Hanna Bächer and with Stephan Wagner, the director of the »Mord in Eberswalde«, about the movie’s soundtrack. Ulrich Gutmair will present the composer with recordings of unfamiliar music, and Schmidt will exchange with the writer Max Dax in a talk moderated by Anne Waak about the recently-published band biography »All Gates Open: The Story of Can« by the British music journalist Rob Young, to which Schmidt contributed the text collage »Can Kiosk« and Dax contributed an oral history together with Robert Defcon. Although Schmidt has written so many music stories already, there’s always another couple to tell—about Can, or Stockhausen, or about murder cases in Brandenburg.