Former Can keyboard player Irmin Schmidt will release a new live album, Nocturne, documenting his Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival performance at the end of last year. Nocturne will be released on Mute/Spoon Records as a worldwide edition of 1000 on double white etched vinyl, CD and digitally on May 29, the composer’s 83rd birthday. You can watch a trailer video for the new album below.
Schmidt's appearance at the renowned festival was his first solo piano concert in the UK to date and saw the artist perform the worldwide premiere of two unheard compositions, Nocturne and Yonder as well as the UK premiere of Klavierstück II from 2018’s 5 Klavierstück.
Of his new track Nocturne, Schmidt tells Prog: “The same as one can see faces and animals in the shapes of clouds, one can sometimes – particularly at night between the state of sleep and consciousness - let music structures appear out of the noises that surround you.”
And on Yonder: “Church bells: A sound that has deeply and contradictorily touched me since my childhood. After the war we lived surrounded by ruins, only the church tower was intact and the bells would burst through the ruins every hour of the day. Watching Notre Dame burn on live TV evoked the memory. Three weeks later I started to write Yonder.”
Nocturne can be pre-ordered here.
