TThe German band Can, whose former singer Damo Suzuki has died at the age of 74, was an innovator in many ways, not least because the group featured two of the most original rock vocalists of all time. Their 1969 debut album Monster Movie featured American expatriate Malcolm Mooney’s machine-gun poetic stylings, but their most perfect expression came on 1971. It was Kenji “Damo” Suzuki, a free-spirited Japanese man who appeared on three great studio albums between 1973 and 1973. adventurous spirit.
In a 1971 television clip from the long-running German series Beat Club, guitarist Michael Caroli, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt all play bright psychedelic colors. Matoi is depicted methodically merging around the abstract groove of the song “Paper House.” After about a minute of jazz-style improvisation, the camera suddenly cuts to Suzuki’s unusual appearance: thin, shirtless, with flowing hair. He sings in blank verse, without rhyme, often difficult to decipher, moving freely between similar-sounding words, but his gentle, thoughtful yearning is unmistakable. Toward the end, you can clearly see the sentence, “You can do everything with your mind.” The sense of limitless possibility that fills Suzuki’s lyrics resonates perfectly with Kang’s adventurous spirit, with Kang’s roots partly in the West German art scene and his fluid wordplay dating back to the 1970s. It became the core of rock at its strangest and most exotic. .
If it sounds like he was making it up as he went along, that’s just because he and the band liked it. He arrived in Europe in 1968, drifting from a Swedish commune to the Irish countryside, stopping in France, Germany and England along the way and spending several years busking, painting and playing guitar. Spent. Rob Young chronicled that period in Rob Young. His campaign biography “All Gates Open”. He happened to meet Czukay and Liebezeit when he appeared in a stage production of “Hair” in Munich. Suzuki was doing some kind of impromptu performance on the street, and Kang was looking for a singer to stay at the city club “Blow Up” for four nights. Suzuki asked if they would like to rehearse. When he heard that wasn’t going to happen, the deal was as good as done.
In Suzuki, Kang found a vocalist who is every bit as versatile and unpredictable as them. His abstract lyrics allowed him to slip in and out of longer songs seamlessly during a period when the group was expanding its horizons and working extensively on film soundtracks. Suzuki plays wild, bombastic Can jams like the 14-minute Mother Sky (“Madness is too pure like Mother Sky”) and Hallelwah (“Looking for a brother, yes, it’s me”). He was a mystery solver who swirled inexplicable wisdom through him. But his cheeky and sometimes naive lyrics (often resembling nursery rhymes, like Syd Barrett) miraculously matched Moonshake and his 1971 German hit single “Spoon” (“Oh, Nobody”). It could also be incorporated into a more anthemic pop context, such as “Sitting in my chair when I’m not there.” I want to care”).
The trio’s studio albums that Kang and Suzuki made together, 1971’s Tago Mago, 1972’s Ege Bamiyashi, and 1973’s Future Days, ranged from mystical rock to complex funk.・After fusion, it draws a sharp arc that leads to a drifting multi-layered sound. Some pioneers of ambient music. These records not only represented the creative zenith of the great West German rock scene of the 1970s, but also gradually gained traction in the adventurous independent music community around the world. Perhaps most notable is the adventurous US and UK post-rock scene of the 1990s. The contemporary European electronica movement and the British post-punk group The Fall.
Suzuki stormed out of the 1973 recording sessions, where he was beginning to show more interest in esoteric Christianity than music, and left Can just as abruptly as he had joined. In the decades since, he has often downplayed his years with the group, preferring to explore the creative possibilities of his next project rather than mythologizing his own past. .By willingly being present, he let his actions speak louder than his words. Damo Suzuki’s networka worldwide fellowship of local musicians who jammed with him as he passed through town, spontaneous until the last moment.
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