8.5.12

Coming up for air after a busy end of the semester...

An interview with the keyboardist of one of my favorite bands, Can:

Did you rehearse before you committed your music to tape?
Rehearsing would be the wrong term for it. We repeated things, but every repetition was sort of creating the piece again. It was never in the final state. Everything that you hear on a record is a moment in a process where we said, "OK, we should stop it now," but it could've gone on. It was never, by playing it again, the same piece.

Had you performed some of these pieces for a live audience before recording them?
When we came on stage, we very often didn't even know what we were gonna play, so we invented. Something that had very consistent conceived ideas, we kept in mind while working in the studio. And it went the other way round. We played things live that we released, but it very often happened that people asked for "Spoon" [a Top 10 single in Germany] and we played it, but they didn't recognize it, and they kept asking for it!

I am, of course, delighted at the idea of playing a hit song that no one can recognize as the hit.

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