Neverending Tour

A duet between Shu-ni and Damo? Percussion alone? Psychedelic guitar noise? Damo whispering? Full band grooving? All of it could and did happen, as Damo swooped in and over and under the sonic flux and the band keyed in to his every gesture and sound. He led the ensemble’s instant composition without saying a single word or offering any direction.

In an interview with the writer Steve Hanson for Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 2002, Damo said: “I was not born to write lyrics. My art is nothing to do with technique or text. It is complete energy ... What I do is just imagine. If you see paintings by Joan Miró, my favorite ... you don’t have to know how he painted or what the meaning is. If you see it, you can feel it. You make your own experience.”

Joan Miró painted The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings in 1953, three years after Damo’s birth. I’ve always liked to think there was some astral correspondence, a parallel resonance between the two events. In the painting, the sky is illuminated with an ambiguously tinted field of white, yellow, gray and green hues vibrating with textured lines of pigment. We see an asymmetrical, five-pointed blue star, a recurring image of Miró’s, and another star that appears more spare, skeletal. Dominating the work are two gargantuan figures—or aggregations—that our pareidolia transforms into faces or entities. A large circular form, intensely red, evokes an orb at high temperature, or maybe the Rising Sun of the Japanese flag. We can accept Miró’s description that we are seeing a smile. The entire painting radiates an ecstatic acceptance of reality in all its unpredictable beauty and wonder.

Damo left Japan in 1968, at the age of eighteen, and by the following year was living in London, selling his own abstract paintings near Green Park and in the metro. By his own admission, he was not technically accomplished, but he had a pronounced sense of what he wanted to paint. The sale of these works gave him enough money to move to Germany, where he performed in a production of Hair and busked with a “scat” style of singing on the streets of Munich. It was there that he was discovered one day by the drummer Jaki Liebezeit and the bassist Holger Czukay of the band Can, which would go on to become one of the most influential experimental groups in the history of the rock and roll. Liebezeit and Czukay asked Damo to perform with them that very evening at the Blow Up, and his impromptu tryout must have been auspicious. When vocalist Malcolm Mooney departed the band, Damo was recruited as singer.

“It’s a pity that I don’t paint nowadays,” Damo said to Hanson in the 2002 interview. “I wish to paint again, but I think I’m painting at the moment in a different way … I paint on space and time ... everything is coming out a beautiful thing, ugly thing, light thing, heavy thing, peaceful, madness, cool, freaky, sausages, sushi, fish and chips.…”

After first recording with Can on the 1970 album Soundtracks, a collection of pieces composed for various films—Damo’s contribution perhaps a bit more ornamental than integral, confined by the measure of Liebezeit’s motoric drums—Damo began exploring the musical heritage of his native Japan, letting the transcendent qualities of gagaku court music and Noh plays inform his sonic vocabulary. Seen in restored videos of Can’s gigs in 1971, Damo is a charismatic onstage presence, channeling and focusing the band’s energy as much with his body as with his voice. “Yes, there are moments I’m just losing myself and reaching out to the other world,” he told Hanson. “During our shows, I’m very concentrated. I have contact with somewhere. I even feel that the voices I use are not mine at all.”

In 1971, he returned to the studio to produce Tago Mago, a landmark in Can’s discography, widely considered to be the band’s greatest album. By this point, Damo was a fully realized presence within the band. The album begins as a fairly conventional psychedelic rock production, but then Damo enters gently with the initial lyrics and the band explodes around him in their classic rhythm—dynamic but, at the same time, a flat color field over which events play.

Against the band’s crushing celestial pulse, Damo’s voice whispers cryptic phrases as it moves into focus. The radiance and clarity of his vocalisms provide a center, whether in singsong lyrics, wordless chants or undefinable sounds of pure emotion. Tago Mago is a dark and ecstatic record sustained by heavy grooves that reveal an indebtedness to the voodoo electronic funk of Miles Davis in Agharta or On the Corner, as well as the sonic experiments and techniques of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. A sublime balance is struck between extreme experimentalism on the one hand, and trance-inducing songcraft on the other.

Can returned to the studio for their classic Ege Bamyası in 1972 and then Future Days in 1973. The former shows the band at its most aggressive: Damo shouts and screams, even performing sprechstimme (speak-singing) in a protopunk sneer over hyper-charged drums and menacing drones. By contrast, Future Days is ambient and tranquil, textural. Damo sounds as if he’s absorbed Brazilian Tropicalia, and the band’s groove dips into a Mediterranean pool, warmer and softer.

After Future Days, Damo felt he had reached a kind of apotheosis with Can. He left the band to become a Jehovah’s Witness, and shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with cancer, told that he would probably not survive more than seven years. Working various jobs, he managed to travel extensively, favoring deserts, jungles and mountains—above all, places not peopled with tourists. These voyages also allowed him to hear and absorb the music of many cultures outside of Europe.

In 1983, he returned to music, embarking on what he called the Neverending Tour with the Damo Suzuki Network—a society of revolving musicians, or “sound carriers,” whose mission was to meet and “create information.” It was at one of these sound gatherings, on that wintry day in 2003, that I met Damo.

As sound carrier Mark Spybey once described the Network’s dynamic: “There are no egos involved. Musicians send smoke signals to each other. They respond in kind. Damo selects musicians who have the potential to communicate freely and who are able to respond honestly to each other in the here and now. This also involves a respect for and dynamic communication with the audience.”

As it turned out, Damo lived twenty-five years after his cancer diagnosis, touring on and off with the Network, sometimes taking yearslong breaks to battle recurrences of cancer. But in sickness and in health, his Neverending Tour went on. I’m certain that if asked right now, he’d say that it’s still going on, beyond death. In the 2022 documentary Energy, which explored his life and work, Damo tells us: “If anything exists having limits, for me it is boring. Time is going.… Time is endless. So why don’t I do something endless? ... Why should I calculate, if I make music, when I should stop?”

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Elliott Sharp is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist who leads the projects SysOrk and Terraplane. His compositional strategies encompass fractal geometry, chaos theory, genetic metaphors and new techniques for graphic notation. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art.