In 2017, Oli Heffernan stepped onto a stage in Dundee to play bass for Damo Suzuki — the mercurial former frontman of Can, whose presence alone could dissolve the boundary between preparation and instinct. The backing group was assembled for that night only: Griff (Interrobang / Regular Fries), Harry (Chumbawamba), and E-Da (Boredoms). There was no rehearsal, no roadmap. Just a single instruction from Suzuki: start soft.
What followed wasn’t a performance in any conventional sense, but a process unfolding in real time. Like all of Suzuki’s work, the music emerged through improvisation — tense, searching, and alive with possibility. Rather than moving through songs, the players tuned into something collective and unstable, a current that shifted as quickly as it formed. Grooves surfaced, stretched, collapsed, and reconfigured, each musician listening as much as they were playing.
For Heffernan, a longtime admirer of Can’s expansive, hypnotic language, the experience carried a quiet sense of inevitability — as if he’d stepped, however briefly, inside the very machinery that shaped that sound.
Thankfully, the set was captured in full. Listening back now, it reveals not just the chemistry of a single night, but the underlying principle that defined Suzuki’s approach: that music could be built from nothing, anywhere, with anyone, if the conditions were right.
Following Suzuki’s passing in 2024, the recording takes on additional weight. It stands as a fragment of something fundamentally unrepeatable, a document of presence, risk, and the strange, fleeting alchemy he could summon wherever he went.
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