Ian McP Posted February 11, 2024 Posted February 11, 2024 Damo Suzuki, Legendary Can Vocalist, Dies at 74 https://pitchfork.com/news/damo-suzuki-legendary-can-vocalist-dies-at-74/ < The Japanese musician performed and recorded with the German krautrock band for a short but important period in the early 1970s By Matthew Strauss February 10, 2024 Damo Suzuki, the Japanese musician who spent a handful of memorable years as the lead singer of Can, died yesterday (February 9) at the age of 74. Can’s label, Spoon Records, did not disclose a cause of death in its announcement, but Suzuki had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2014. “His boundless creative energy has touched so many over the whole world, not just with Can, but also with his all continents spanning Network Tour,” the label wrote. “Damo’s kind soul and cheeky smile will be forever missed.” Born Kenji Suzuki in Kobe, Japan, the musician found his way to Germany by the late 1960s, joining Can after bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit spotted him busking outside of a Munich cafe. Can had released just one album, 1969’s Monster Movie, with original vocalist Malcolm Mooney before Suzuki joined for some work on 1970’s Soundtracks. The group’s first full album with Suzuki was 1971’s Tago Mago, and the vocalist truly made his mark on 1972’s Ege Bamyasi, featuring “Vitamin C” and “Spoon.” Suzuki made just one more LP with the krautrock band, Future Days, before departing in 1973. After leaving Can, Suzuki became a Jehovah’s Witness and spent about a decade away from music entirely. When he returned to music, he played shows globally with different local musicians, referring to the tours as Damo Suzuki’s Network. He recorded numerous Network and solo releases over the ensuing decades. With co-author Paul Woods, Suzuki released the memoir I Am Damo Suzuki in 2019. The musician was also the subject of director Michelle Heighway’s 2022 documentary Energy. > https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/11/damo-suzuki-cans-free-floating-vocalist-gave-us-some-of-the-1970s-most-exotic-rock-music < A 1971 TV clip from the long-running German series Beat Club shows guitarist Michael Karoli, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt – all in luminous psychedelic colour – methodically coalescing around the abstract groove of the song Paperhouse. After about a minute of jazzy extemporisation, the camera cuts suddenly to the extraordinary figure of Suzuki, stick-thin with cascading hair and naked to the waist. He sings in blank verse with no rhyme scheme, often hard to decipher and gliding freely between soundalike words – but the gentle, reflective longing is unmistakable. Towards the end, you finally catch one line clearly: “You can make everything what you want with the head”. The sense of infinite possibility that suffused Suzuki’s lyrics resonated perfectly with the adventurous spirit of Can – whose genesis in part was through the West German art scene – and his fluid wordplay was at the heart of some of the strangest and most exotic rock of the 1970s. >
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