Somehow, impossibly, it felt as if Damo Suzuki couldn’t die. Too constantly changing, too fluid and intimately connected as a feature of the alternative music world, too irrevocably wedded to the present — it felt as if obstacles would simply flow through him.
But on Feb. 9, at the age of 74, he finally succumbed to cancer after a 10-year struggle.
Suzuki’s place in music history was set in stone by the 3½ albums he made with German “krautrock” pioneers Can — appearing on many tracks from 1970’s “Soundtracks,” followed by the groundbreaking “Tago Mago” (1971) and “Ege Bamyasi” (1972), and ending in 1973 with the more ambient and equally marvelous “Future Days.” But if Suzuki stood for anything as a musician, it was the opposite of being “set in stone.”
Growing up in Kanagawa Prefecture in the 1950s, the young Damo lost his architect father at the age of 5 to the same cancer that he himself battled repeatedly throughout his life. Encouraged to play music from a young age, he quickly picked up on the sounds of Tamla Motown, before being knocked sideways by the experience of hearing The Kinks. At 18, he left Japan for the tremulous atmosphere of 1968 Europe, alternating between rural communes, busking around the continent and the British Isles, and short visits to jail (hippy longhairs playing what must have seemed like utterly deranged music in the streets bothered authorities of the era).
A stint on the rock musical “Hair” in Munich proved frustratingly routine for Suzuki’s itinerant artistic instincts. When the members of Can chanced upon one of his streetside “happenings,” he jumped at the chance to step into the vacancy left by their previous singer, Malcolm Mooney.
The legendary status of that run of Can albums he made alongside Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt and Jaki Liebezeit can distract from the fluid way those four albums (especially the latter trio) came about. Emerging from hour after hour of jam sessions at their studio in the city of Cologne, day after day, they were finally cut and stitched together into something like discrete songs by Czukay.
Listening to live recordings from that time gives a clearer picture of Can’s process at work, with fragments of familiar songs emerging and then sinking away into the flow. The members’ five very different backgrounds and influences created a unique alchemy, at once cosmic, expansive, alien and strangely intimate. In that sense, the live stage was a place where the songs that Czukay had found inside those miles of tape could return to the spontaneous ecstasy of their birth. It was perhaps Suzuki whose life and music most completely embodied that restless spirit of the moment.
When asked in interviews about his favorite moments with Can, Suzuki would typically cite the moment he left, or perhaps the moment he joined, and it was that constant need to move on to the next thing that characterized his life and music. After finishing “Future Days,” he left music for several years in favor of spiritual pursuits, joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses until eventually deciding that his relationship with the divine could no longer be caged by the strictures of religion. In particular, when the cancer he had inherited from his father first emerged at the age of 33, his treatment under the Witnesses’ strict rules on blood transfusions left him in a weakened state for a year after his recovery.
He emerged in the mid-1980s with his passion for music reinvigorated, in a music world radically changed, in no small part, thanks to the influence of those records he’d made with Can: Post-punk legends The Fall paid tribute with their 1985 song “I Am Damo Suzuki,” while an upcoming generation of artists like Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, the Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses drew inspiration. Following his old bandmates’ dissolution at the end of the ’70s, a new generation of artists had also brought Cologne’s experimental music tradition into the post-punk era, and Damo joined the band Dunkelziffer for a couple of albums.
He was never cut out to be a member of a band, though, and he soon moved on again, eventually embarking on what amounted to a decades-long constant world tour, playing with different musicians every night — in the form of Damo Suzuki’s Network, which he would later describe as “sound carriers.” For a man so uncompromisingly devoted to the ever-changing now, this was perhaps his platonic ideal form, and maybe paradoxically the closest thing to settling down he could ever do while remaining faithful to the spirit that drove him.
It’s strange, in a way, to keep coming back to those early Can albums — those now-ancient, heavily edited documents of a moment that Suzuki himself had long moved on from personally. He never released records of the music he and his network made (although he was generally happy for his sound carriers to put them out themselves if they wanted). Even his vocal style, mixing multiple languages and made-up words in what he sometimes called “the language of the Stone Age,” made for a kind of music that refused to be tied down to the earthly rigor of meaning and was impossible to repeat in subsequent performances.
But enough of that spontaneity shines through, especially on the expansive canvas of “Tago Mago,” that Czukay’s edits really serve to focus the listener in on the still dizzying cosmos of possibilities the music explores. Those routes for discovery remain wide open in the recordings more than 50 years later, still inspiring contemporary musicians on their own journeys to outer and inner space.
Using the term “krautrock” to describe that ’70s generation of German music was always a reductive one, made more so for the fact that Suzuki wasn’t even German. However, it recognized the music’s otherness from the existing Anglo American rock tradition, and those records helped free thousands of artists from the strictures of that tradition, influencing the subsequent development of punk and post-punk, elements of hip-hop, electronic music, post-rock and beyond. When The Clash sang “No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones” in 1977, Suzuki and Can had already gone so far beyond that model for rock music that they didn’t even need to acknowledge it.
For all the significance of his achievements, though, Suzuki followed a path outside the big stories of pop and rock culture. Profoundly political in his own way, he shied away from any sort of rock star persona, even as the legend of his past grew. Rather, the freeform structure of the music he made with the sound carriers functioned as an antidote of sorts to the violence he saw in the figure of a charismatic leader, dictating wisdom to their followers.
Unique and utterly idiosyncratic, he nonetheless lived in a state of constant connection and communication with others. The music that colors so many of our lives would have been a poorer thing without him.
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