ABOUT FILMMUSIC
When CAN started in Summer 1968 becoming a music group we had immediately to do a filmscore or letīs better say - we had to deliver a ready recorded film music for a young German film director.As far I can remember the director was called Peter Schneider and the picture listened to the name of Agilock & Blubbo.I must look up our CAN archive as there should be still sleeping an interesting piece of music on which I played a Chopin piano piece on bass.This alone sounds weird enough and I ask myself today how did I do that .In the following time CAN made quite many soundtracks just in terms to survive,as making our livings by our record sales and live concerts was just out of sight. Interesting was the way how CAN was recording such a soundtrack..Most important of all : only one person had seen the picture and was speaking to the director about what he wanted.Irmin Schmidt was generally in charge of that just by his experience .He told us something about the movie and described the scenes in his own words to us and this created such a fantasy world in our heads that it was not too difficult for us to create some really good tracks for the filmworld.Ten years ago I have made my first filmmusic for a video musical called 'Krieg der Toene' by Michael Meert, where I played also one of the 2 mainroles as an actor.And so I got invited to a film festival in Trento(Italy) to attend to a symposium of film composers,among them : Ennio Morricone.One year later I met him again in Italy - it was just one day before the funeral of his friend Sergio Leone - and he said how lucky he had been with Mr.Leoneīs way of working.Leone told him his ideas and wanted Morricone to compose and record some ideas even before the first pictures was shot.Ennio Morricone insisted on the fact that the music for him became something special,because he hadnīt seen anything on screen before the music was concepted in his main features.A parallel development to CANīs approach in achieving progress I think.
After his tribute speech to his friend we went to have lunch together and he told me that he thought in the beginning of my lecture on the festival in Trento one year ago that I must be totally nuts.No wonder.I told my audience how to make professional musicians unemployed and Mr. Morricone was among the audience which seemed to be pretty delighted about my way of recording musicians and they didnīt even know how and when that happend,so they left the studio a bit confused or may be not.Ennio Morricone continued his criticism about me - we were drinking wonderful Italian red wine while eating he said : 'but when I heard your music of The East is Red and saw the video going along with it I thought : and this man is even right.Film scores as such never had a special influence on my work as a composer.It was more the other way round that my music had mostly a sort of visual character.It is easy for the listener to create his own fantasy film in his mind.And this is why my latest album 'Moving Pictures' is a sort of virtual film music made for non existing films - yet.
The music-picture relation is most important to me.Best thing happens when both,music and picture are independently belonging to their own world,coming together nearly by chance in order to get married for the moment being in the picture and you might ask yourself : why - and how is that possible and what could be the secret behind it.In other words : a movie without that kind of secret is not important to me as a composer.If I get something to laugh or enjoy as a consumer itīs fine with me.Otherwise I switch off my TV and go back to work. Generally speaking my affinity towards video is even bigger because here I get the chance to see that 2 independent wolds of picture and sound get entirely glewed together as if they had never been 2 different things before.Where is the film director who has sense for that kind of mystery ? I like to meet him some day.