Some exciting news from Mute: they are to release Can: The Lost Tapes on June 18th. A box set compiling unreleased, new Can material – album outtakes, soundtrack work and live recordings – it was curated by Can’s Irmin Schmidt and Mute’s Daniel Miller and compiled by Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore.
The music for The Lost Tapes was discovered by accident, after the German Rock N Pop museum bought Can’s studio in Weilerswist. While the studio was being taken apart for relocation to Gronau a set of badly labeled master tapes were found, which were only sorted through when Schmidt and Podmore began to sift through them.
The music on the tapes turned out to be archive material that had never been released, either outtakes from albums or soundtrack material. So unlike a lot of deluxe box sets, this one actually promises something brand new and as yet unheard.
Said Schmidt of the material they found: “Obviously the tapes weren’t really lost, but were left in the cupboards of the studio archives for so long everybody just forgot about them. Everybody except Hildegard, who watches over Can and its work like the dragon over the gold of the Nibelungen and doesn’t allow forgetting.”
The tracks that made the final cut of the box set date from the period 1968-77, and feature material recorded at Can’s studio in Weilerswist and Schloss Norvenich. You can listen to the first track, ‘Millionenspiel’, below.
The release of The Lost Tapes follows on from Mute’s reissue of Can’s classic Tago Mago album last year, on its 40th anniversary.
