The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

When we arrive at Mute Song, the publishing house of Mute Records, down a tiny back street in bustling Hammersmith, lunch is being prepared for Kumo, aka the experimental dance artist, pop musician and string arranger Jono Podmore, and Irmin Schmidt. Irmin is avuncular and genial but always quick to irascibly dismiss anything he disagrees with. A founding member of Can - arguably Germany’s most influential group after Kraftwerk - Irmin is more than balanced out, however, by his musical partner and, it turns out, son-in-law. The pair are almost yin and yang, and perhaps that’s why they’ve been able to work so profitably together.

Out of all of the German post-war experimental rock and pop bands, Can were the most forward-looking, innovative and influential. Jaki Liebezeit’s stuttering funk rhythms can be heard right through Gang of Four and Wire to the Happy Mondays and beyond to groups like Liars and LCD Soundsystem. The Cologne-based band grew out of the core of Schmidt (keyboards) and Holger Czukay (bass), both students of classical music, as well as Liebezeit and beatnik guitarist Michael Karoli. As Schmidt puts it: “I wanted to bring together musicians who came from every new music which had appeared in the 20th Century, and that was jazz and rock as well as the new classical music.”

As a rag-tag bunch of intellectuals and radicals, they wanted to fuse everything from the use of tape loops, with world music, jazz, funk and rock and the emergence of electronic music. But it was the arrival of Irmin’s friend Malcolm Mooney who really galvanised Can into following a more definably rock direction. There followed a series of albums including Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Soon Over Babaluma, which sent shockwaves through the creative music industry, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today.

Jono himself has spent the last 20 years bridging the gap between the worlds of pop and the avant-garde admirably, being a string arranger, remixer and producer for the likes of The Shamen, Jamiroquai, Jhelisa and Ian McCulloch. Feeling this weight of history, innovation and technical precision I start panicking that my dictaphone isn’t going to work. I blurt out: “I’m sorry about this, I’m not a fervent adherent of Luddism - I just like to be able to see something going round, otherwise I worry that it’s not working.” Jono, a fantastically tall, gregarious Scouser with close-cropped ginger hair and pale green eyes immediately turns to Pa-in-law: “Do you know this word ‘luddism’? The Luddites were artisans who used to break mechanised looms because they felt threatened by the industrial revolution.”

This clash between primitivism and modernism will reveal itself to be the theme of the afternoon. There is some talk of how there was a similar movement in Holland where irate textile workers would fling their wooden shoes or sabots into mechanised looms, breaking them and earning the name ‘saboteurs’. It prompts a question: have they ever broken a piece of musical equipment on purpose while recording? “Not really, but some of the noises I have produced have come from totally overloading the amps with an organ sound so the noise is completely destroyed,” replies Schmidt.

Jono: “I used to be really, really violent with my guitar just to find out what would happen. I used to get an electric drill and drill it while I was playing just to see what would happen. I once used the headstock of my guitar to stoke a coal fire.”

Schmidt warms to the question and adds: “Back in the early days I was playing a lot of Cage [John, avant-garde US composer] and I also had an old piano which I used to treat the sound with different effects. One day I discovered that I could open the lid and play the strings with an old Remington shaver. I might as well have taken a chainsaw to it. When I played the grand piano with the razor the strings snapped and came flying out of the piano. It was a very violent performance.”

It would be easy to presume that growing up in Germany in the late forties and growing up in Liverpool in the seventies would be remarkably different but the pair, or Jono at least, are keen to draw comparisons: “Well, the similarities would be one of running around on bomb sites. Liverpool in the sixties hadn’t been rebuilt, but the differences were one of economics. Even working class Liverpool was in a better state financially than Dortmund.”

Bringing up the subject of the Second World War to a German of Irmin Schmidt’s generation - the first to be born since the Nazi’s lost power - can provoke a wild diversity of responses. Even in Can, Schmidt admits that there are those like Holger Czukay who are furious when asked about the effect the war had on their music. For Schmidt, however, things are different and he talks of how his generation had to reject everything their parents stood for and create their own musical heritage from the ground up: “All my life this has been a very strong influence. I grew up in the ruins of Dortmund - not only the physical ruins, but the financial ruins and the cultural ruins as well. In the 12 years that Hitler was in power he destroyed German culture entirely. You could not just rebuild it like that: it was not there.”

When asked about the influence of American culture on the new German sound - that of jazz, avant-garde, neo-classical and rock’n’roll - the pair simultaneously say “tabula rasa” (basically a clean slate) before Irmin adds: “That is why American culture had such a big influence on German culture - you had to take from outside. From scratch. You took everything you could. We took so much more from America than we did from Britain or anywhere else. Jimi Hendrix, Pharoah Sanders, Captain Beefheart, Coltrane… these were the most important artists.”

With the threat of violence against instruments, violence against looms, and the violence of history heavy in the air, it is time to ask Jono about the other passion in his life: karate. Is it, I wonder, similar in any kind of useful way to playing music? “Oh, absolutely,” the black belt replies. “The whole point of how you play a musical instrument is that you repeat forms until they become like second nature, and then you build on top of that. And that’s how you progress. When you see someone doing a piano recital and they’re in a state where they hardly even seem to be thinking about it… well, that’s exactly the same as when you watch someone do martial arts. The Zen essence of it is: if you are ever in any sort of trouble, then you just use it without thinking. There is no conscious thought about it.”

The pair met when Jono was drafted in to work on Irmin’s adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s novel Gormenghast into opera form. Both found that they had each other’s mischievous sense of rule-book-abandonment when it came to what was and wasn’t possible (Schmidt’s original idea was to have the orchestra “submerged” under water). This led to the duo working on a debut album together, Masters of Confusion, which built on the framework of recordings made during the performance of the opera. “It worked out very well,” says Schmidt dryly of the time. “He married my daughter.”

It worked out in other ways as well: Jono stayed on in Germany to become the Professor of Popular Music at Cologne University. Now the odd couple are on the eve of releasing a new album, Axolotl Eyes on Mute, which is a complete u-turn from their previous work: it’s a studio-based work that takes in jazz, hip hop, techno, lounge, as well as various other musical forms.

The album is named after an animal that is found in Central America. It has a lot of peculiar qualities, according to Jono: “It’s the only animal that we know about that can spend its entire life in the juvenile form.”

“Like many guitarists,” quips Irmin.

Jono continues: “If you take it out of water it loses its gills and becomes a salamander. Many types of axolotl spend their entire lives in caves and go blind.”

“Like many sound engineers.”

The album art (a naked couple coloured hite with body paint hidden behind giant homemade axolotl masks) makes the perfect counterbalance to the music. The music is very new but it also draws on very ancient roots. And isn’t this the source of some of the great music of the 20th Century and beyond? The clash between primitivism and modernism. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is the battle between ancient African mask making and the future seen through the cubist filter. Jazz was the explosion of Afro-American rhythms colliding with ultra-modern ideas about composition/improvisation. Irmin nods in agreement as Jono says: “We’re absolutely happy to take that on board. The most brutal and fundamental gestures we can make as musicians are such a fundamental part of our cannon, you know.”

Irmin laughs. “The piano as it is now - the grand - would never have been constructed in the 19th Century if it weren’t for many furious composers playing them so hard that they would destroy their instruments! The destructive gesture can also be one of creativity.”

It’s not often that you get two people in the same room, one of whom who was there at the boom of the pop explosion, via the means of the cheaply available guitar amplifier, and the other who was there at the final of pop’s great booms, via the means of the cheaply available sampler and sequencer. Does it not make either of them sad that there will never be a Next Big Thing? That every sound you would like to make is now pretty much easy to process?

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently with the focus on one or two big things,” says Jono. “The first is that I think that Western pop culture is really slowing down and one of the reasons is that ‘naughty’ internet. All styles of music are available at all times to pretty much everyone who has a computer. It means you don’t get the specialisation you need for there to be breakthroughs. For example, if you look at the difference between Chaucerian English and Shakespearian English, they’re only a few hundred years apart but they are totally different languages. But look at Shakespeare and modern day and we’re almost there. The reason it has slowed down is because the printing press standardised everything and I’m a bit afraid that the internet is doing exactly the same thing with music. The other side of the coin is that our culture may be drawing to a decadent halt, but there is really interesting stuff going on elsewhere like Beijing and Shanghai, where there aren’t as many people observing.”

The pair have been finding inspiration a little further afield than that. Part of the palette of sounds used to make up the track ‘Umbilicus Clear’ are recordings of minute ‘soundwaves’ caused through minute amounts of radiation, dust and other celestial debris, which were picked up by the NASA probe to Jupiter and Titan, Cassini. And the recording’s lightning storms in outer space are exactly as frightening as you would expect them to be. Jono agrees that some of them are particularly bracing: “There is one called the bow shock of Jupiter which is amazing. When you have a large body moving through space you have a gigantic radio wave warp in gravity which causes disruption when it hits something travelling in the other direction. So I put all of these noises onto my sampler and effectively built up a groove out of what I was treating as a musical event. But the layers that went on after that weren’t supposed to be like, ‘Hey dude, let’s make some music about space.’”

The pair laugh uproariously before Jono becomes serious again. “It was more like: we have this piece of material,” he adds. “Is it interesting to start with? Yes it is.”