THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Live In Paris 1973 — the latest instalment of the acclaimed Can Live series — finds Can in magical form for a performance recorded at L’Olympia in Paris on 12 May 1973. It’s the first volume of the live series to feature recently deceased vocalist Damo Suzuki.
From 1970-’73 the core lineup of Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli and Holger Czukay were joined by Japanese improviser and vocalist Suzuki. They met in a chance encounter while Suzuki was busking in Munich. Several months after this Paris performance, the iconoclastic performer’s wanderlust would take him back on the road.
This new album in the series allows us to witness the band at a particularly important stage of their career, hot on the heels of two of their most acclaimed albums — Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi — with the latter feeding into the Paris performance. The LP was uncovered and pieced together from recordings within the Spoon Records vaults and those sent in by helpful fans, and brought into the 21st century by Schmidt and producer / engineer René Tinner, who have compiled and edited all the albums in this series.
Founded in the late ’60s and disbanded just over a decade later, Can’s unprecedented and bold marriage of hypnotic grooves and avant-garde instrumental textures has made them one of the most important and innovative bands of all time, and these albums reveal a totally different perspective to the group. You may hear familiar themes, riffs and motifs popping up and rippling through these jams, but they are often fleetingly recognised faces in a swirling crowd. At other points, you will hear music that didn’t make it onto the official album canon.
In these recordings Can go to even more extreme ranges than with their studio work: from mellow, ambient drift-rock to the white-dwarf sonic-meltdown moments they used to nickname ‘Godzillas’. And even as they adapt and chase the rhythm from minute to minute, you can hear the extraordinary musical telepathy its members shared.
The new release follows Can Live in Brighton 1975; Can Live in Stuttgart 1975; and Can Live in Cuxhaven 1976, all of which have earned widespread acclaim.”
