IRMIN SCHMIDT
NEW ALBUMS
IRMIN SCHMIDT
Can explorer’s elegiac, ambient hymn to nature.
By Rob Young
Watery and wistful: Irmin Schmidt contemplates a drowning world
ROBIN MADDOCK
Requiem SPOON/MUTE
8/10
TOWARDS the end of his time in Can, Irmin Schmidt purchased a plot of land near Roussillon in south-eastern France as a rural retreat. In the 1980s, when he was making solo albums and composing film and television soundtracks, and his wife Hildegard Schmidt was running the Spoon label to continue the legacy of Can and its members’ post-breakup careers, the couple had a house built on the property. Strange, sprawling and nestling in the vineyard landscape of the Luberon like a brutalist Minoan palace, Les Rossignols has been their home ever since.
Les Rossignols is “the Nightingales”, the name a testament to the presence of nature’s song in this pastoralia. But as he approaches his 10th decade, Schmidt has become increasingly aware of what is being lost to the climate emergency. Requiem is his instrumental meditation on what’s disappearing from his private pocket of this planet.