The legendary Damo Suzuki may have passed in 2024, but his spirit roars on in a new live double LP issued by a formidable team of labels: We, Here, And Now!, Cardinal Fuzz, Echodelick, Feeding Tube, and Birdman Sound.
For the uninitiated: Suzuki was the Japanese vocalist who became the voice of Can from 1970 to 1973, after being plucked off the streets of Munich mid-busking and thrown straight onto the stage. In those few short years, he helped shape the band’s most iconic albums (Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi, Future Days) with a vocal style that was improvised, multilingual (or entirely wordless), and aimed more at conjuring moods than delivering lyrics. His brief tenure altered the course of Krautrock and experimental rock forever.
After leaving Can, Suzuki eventually returned with his Network, a nomadic project built on “instant composing”: improvising with local musicians (“sound carriers”), city by city. He carried that ethos until the very end.
This new release, recorded live in 2012 at Ottawa’s Dominion Tavern, captures Suzuki in full flight with The Band Whose Name Is a Symbol (TBWNIAS), the Canadian psych collective we’ve covered before, known for sprawling, scorched-earth jams that blur the lines between kraut, free rock, heavy psych, and noise. In short: a perfect match.
The record sprawls across Sides A through E, each side clocking twenty-plus minutes of ecstatic chaos. But to break it down track by track would miss the point. This is music to be experienced, not dissected. It’s furious, free-form rock at its most alive.
Suzuki’s underground legend will outlast us all, and surely more tapes and documents of his wild journeys will surface in years to come. For now, we’re lucky to have this monument of sound with TBWNIAS, a cosmic collision worth every minute.
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