Like a live concert with the whole family

Popular music is closely linked to the recording studios in which it was created: The Beatles – unthinkable without the Abbey Road Studios in London. The typical sound of 90s boybands: it came from the Swedish Cheiron Studios. Without the Jamaican sound labs of King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, no Dub.

The CAN studio also played a central role – not only for the music of the band that gave it its name, but also for German and international pop music. The atmosphere, the acoustics, the special technical equipment and the personalities of the performers all played their part in the music that was created here.

In 1971, CAN moved from their rehearsal rooms in Nörvenich Castle to a former movie theater in the community of Weilerswist. They had earned money with commissions for film music and now wanted to create their own creative space.
The band consisted of Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebzeit, Holger Czukay and Michael Karoli. Malcom Mooney Damo Suzuki are the best known of their changing singers. Some of them had studied with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, who had attracted attention at the time with his studio experiments. Now they were turning rock music on its head themselves: They swapped instruments, were influenced by non-European music and always had a tape running during their jams, the parts of which were later remounted.

In order to be able to rehearse day and night, they lined the hall with seagrass mattresses from German army stocks. This provided a shield from the outside world and thus well-meaning neighbors. A nice side effect was the “dry” sound, i.e. little room content on the recordings. Nevertheless, the band also made a point of recording “atmosphere”: The creaking of a chair or the sounds from the garden. Colorful, psychedelic cloths were hung over the mattresses, and you could take a seat on corner seats and couches everywhere.

However, the structure of the “Inner Vision Studio”, as it was initially called, was remarkable: The control room and recording room were not separate. The 8-channel mixing console, on which CAN’s early albums were recorded, was positioned in the middle of the room. This system was also preserved later. Until the mid-1970s, the band’s technical equipment remained modest; there was not much room for correcting mistakes or elaborate miking. In retrospect, the band members summed up that the sound was shaped by both: The special space that the studio offered and the limitations of the technology.

In 1978, after the dissolution of CAN, René Tinner took over the studio. He had previously worked in Weilerswist and, after a brief interlude in another studio, returned with an idea: he wanted to turn the experimental space into a commercial music studio. Things really got going in the now renamed CAN-Studio after the first hit: Joachim Witt took off with “Silberblick”, which was recorded there. He used the proceeds from this production to finance the purchase of the CS-V mixing console, which forms the core of the collection in the rock’n’popmuseum.

This was followed by national and international acts produced by Tinner, who appreciated the unique atmosphere of the room. Tinner’s biggest production was probably Fury in the Slaugtherhouse and Double Marius Müller-Westernhagen. His successful album Hallelujah was created in the CAN studio. As CAN had already recorded their jams, the live feeling of the band was also in the foreground here.

Over the years, the studio had developed into a professional powerhouse: 24-track machines, a Hammond organ, dozens of synthesizers from analog to digital. This highlight of the equipment, on which the studio moved to the rock’n’popmusem in the mid-2000s, can be explored in the basement of the rock’n’popmuseum.