Irmin Schmidt returns with Requiem on Mute and Spoon

Irmin Schmidt has released Requiem, a new album built around prepared and unprepared piano paired with field recordings made in the environment surrounding his home in Southern France. The record is out now on vinyl, CD and digitally through Mute / Future Days Music (Spoon).

Title: Requiem
Artist: Irmin Schmidt
Genres: Avant-garde, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music
Label: Future Days, Mute Records
Description: Irmin Schmidt's Requiem, prepared piano and Southern France field recordings, out now on Mute and Future Days Music (Spoon).

Featured image: © Katrin Vierkant

The album is organised in two sections. Schmidt’s starting point was a nightingale he heard singing in his garden, which he felt compelled to record. From there he accumulated further sounds: water, birds, frogs, and other elements of his immediate surroundings. The piano passages were played spontaneously against these recordings. Some of the improvisations were later edited with René Tinner, a long-time collaborator, in a method Schmidt traces back to Can’s working practice.

Schmidt describes the record as a meditation on remembrance, loss and commemoration. He frames the process as a dialogue with the natural sounds around him; the combination of piano and environment produces a liminal space, with the listener positioned inside it.

Schmidt, born on 29 May 1937 in Berlin, will turn 89 in 2026. He studied composition, piano, conducting and music ethnology, and his teachers included Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. Between 1962 and 1969 he conducted several orchestras, often performing his own compositions, and he began writing for film and theatre during the same period. In 1968 he co-founded Can in Cologne together with Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli and Jaki Liebezeit, playing keyboards with the group until 1979 and taking part in subsequent reunions. Outside Can, he has released numerous solo albums and has written the opera Gormenghast, with a libretto by Duncan Fallowell based on Mervyn Peake‘s Gormenghast Trilogy; it premiered at the Opernhaus Wuppertal on 15 November 1998 and was recently performed at the Linz Opera in Austria.

In 2018, Faber Social published Can, All Gates Open, a two-part book whose first section is a biography of Can written by Rob Young and whose second section, Can Kiosk, is a collage of diary entries and interviews edited and written by Schmidt. Requiem follows 5 Klavierstücke (2018), a piano work also using prepared and unprepared piano, and Nocturne (2020), a live album documenting his performance at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

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