I'll admit I smoked pot back in 1975. A lot. Okay, I was probably high for about the entire year. I lived in bohemian squalor in a beat-up, old, two-story house out on the south shore of Long Island, about a block away from where the ferry left for Davis Park beach community on Fire Island. Employment was sporadic and even when found, paid low.
My housemates and I spent most evenings upstairs, smoking pot and listening to music. It may have been the pot that attracted us to weird music, or it may have just been our own weirdo tastes. We listened to the usual 70s prog rock (Yes, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant), to psychedelic rock (Gong, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd), to the outright bizarre (Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa), and even to jazz (On the Corner-era Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sun Ra) and minimalism (Terry Riley and Harry Partch). Our house was the place on Long Island where a lot of young men and women would go to get high and have their minds blown by weird music.
But there was no band more bizarre sounding to us than the German band Can. There was no else who sounded anything like them at the time. Whenever we played their 1971 album Tago Mago, we got so many questions about who that band was, and we had to repeat the answer over and over again to our stoned-out house guests so many times, that I remember we eventually put a sign up next to the turntable stating "The Otherworldly Sounds You're Hearing Right Now Are Can" every time the record was on.
But there was no band more bizarre sounding to us than the German band Can. There was no else who sounded anything like them at the time. Whenever we played their 1971 album Tago Mago, we got so many questions about who that band was, and we had to repeat the answer over and over again to our stoned-out house guests so many times, that I remember we eventually put a sign up next to the turntable stating "The Otherworldly Sounds You're Hearing Right Now Are Can" every time the record was on.
Can featured the experimental musicians Holger Czukay on bass and Jaki Liebezeit on drums, both students of the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In their hands, Can was a rock band that could double as its own orchestra. They spliced and edited the music until it seethed like some singular, massive organism. Hours of amoebic jams laid to tape suddenly turned muscular and fluid, with chaotic guitars, throbbing bass lines, and churning rhythms arising and fading back into the mix.
In 1970, their singer, Malcolm Mooney, quit the band. As legend goes, Damo Suzuki was busking around Europe at the time and one night Czukay and Liebezeit happened to stumble past him on the street and asked him to join their band on the spot. Suzuki obliged and spent the next three years with Can, recording a series of seminal albums that redefined psychedelic rock. Suzuki's hybridized and idiosyncratic blend of English, Japanese, and whatever else he wanted pushed Can to a higher plane of rock experimentalism, leading them from the foundational LP Tago Mago to Ege Bamyasi and 1973's Future Days, before he disappeared from music altogether.
But a decade later, Suzuki returned with a curious mission: Go from town to town and improvise in nightly psychedelic rituals with bands he’d never met. For the next four decades, hundreds of musicians have entered the Damo Suzuki network, an ever-evolving crew of “Sound Carriers” who surrender to his improvisational impulse. What these concerts lack in consistent membership they make up for in their ascent into the wild unknown, where mistakes facilitate magic and mysteries prompt discovery.
Last year, Suzuki announced his first U.S. tour in over 10 years, including stops in Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A., Austin, New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, and more. Suzuki was to play with a different group of local musicians in each city. Unfortunately, visa problems prevented him from reaching these shores and he had to cancel the entire tour.
The good news is that the visa issues have apparently been worked out.and Suzuki is expected to finally complete his tour this year, including a performance at, yes, the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee this March. Who the Sound Carriers will be for the Big Ears set is still anyone's guess, but given the high caliber of musicians performing at the festival and their tendency toward the experimental and the avant garde, it may well be the crowning achievement of this year's tour, if not of Suzuki's long Sound Carriers project. I mean, can you even imagine Patty Smith, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Mark Ribot, or Meredith Monk jumping into a jam session like this one?
In 1970, their singer, Malcolm Mooney, quit the band. As legend goes, Damo Suzuki was busking around Europe at the time and one night Czukay and Liebezeit happened to stumble past him on the street and asked him to join their band on the spot. Suzuki obliged and spent the next three years with Can, recording a series of seminal albums that redefined psychedelic rock. Suzuki's hybridized and idiosyncratic blend of English, Japanese, and whatever else he wanted pushed Can to a higher plane of rock experimentalism, leading them from the foundational LP Tago Mago to Ege Bamyasi and 1973's Future Days, before he disappeared from music altogether.
But a decade later, Suzuki returned with a curious mission: Go from town to town and improvise in nightly psychedelic rituals with bands he’d never met. For the next four decades, hundreds of musicians have entered the Damo Suzuki network, an ever-evolving crew of “Sound Carriers” who surrender to his improvisational impulse. What these concerts lack in consistent membership they make up for in their ascent into the wild unknown, where mistakes facilitate magic and mysteries prompt discovery.
Last year, Suzuki announced his first U.S. tour in over 10 years, including stops in Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A., Austin, New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, and more. Suzuki was to play with a different group of local musicians in each city. Unfortunately, visa problems prevented him from reaching these shores and he had to cancel the entire tour.
The good news is that the visa issues have apparently been worked out.and Suzuki is expected to finally complete his tour this year, including a performance at, yes, the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee this March. Who the Sound Carriers will be for the Big Ears set is still anyone's guess, but given the high caliber of musicians performing at the festival and their tendency toward the experimental and the avant garde, it may well be the crowning achievement of this year's tour, if not of Suzuki's long Sound Carriers project. I mean, can you even imagine Patty Smith, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Mark Ribot, or Meredith Monk jumping into a jam session like this one?
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