Minami Deutsch and Damo Suzuki - Live at Roadburn

Modern day Krautrock acolytes, Minami Deutsch from Tokyo played a 23 minute set with Can legend, Damo Suzuki at last year’s Roadburn Festival, and someone had the presence of mind to record it straight from the mixing desk. Roadburn is a Dutch festival of experimental rock with a heavy disposition. Also with a nod to the obscure. Straight from the outset, Suzuki uses his voice as a kind of unhinged distraction, psycho-babbling his way into a musical rotor, a whirlpool of repetitive psych which recalls his days with Can. Unlike the more detached psych hypnotics of Moon Duo, for instance, this iteration of the sound is altogether more visceral, a bloodletting sound which builds to almost devastating climax rather than pulling down through the gears and petering out.

Whoever conceived of this collaboration, it was a shrewd project. For Damo Suzuki, it must have been like a testimonial of the Can sound played by a group whose focus is more on the primordial days of krautrock, with locked-in rhythms and lead breaks that waft vaguely against said rhythms. Suzuki could be madly reciting Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Experience for all I could make out, but then that’s hardly the point. Voice in this context is another free-wheeling vehicle of contributory noise. Suzuki refers to groups he fronts these days as ‘sound carriers’, catalysts for expressive freedom.

A spellbinding partnership.