As you get older, social media can become a cavalcade of tributes to the dying heroes of rock, and it's easy to tune it out. The death of Damo Suzuki this year hit me hard, though, partly because he was one of the rare ones I'd actually met and spoken to. More than that, his vast network of sound carriers had included many people I know, so his musical spirit had touched the lives of many people around me in tangible and untangible ways.

I hadn't written for The Japan Times in many years, mainly because I can never be bothered to pitch stories, but I'd interviewed Damo for them in the past and always enjoyed talking to him. Perhaps remembering that, the JT found my email address, possibly under a stack of dusty indie band CD-Rs somewhere, and asked me to write his obituary.

OBITUARY: Damo Suzuki forged a path outside of mainstream pop and rock

Before the sad news of Damo's death, I'd already been writing about Can because of the new live album Live in Paris 1973, released by Mute Records in the UK and with a Japanese edition from Traffic. The Berlin-based writer Wyndham Wallace wrote the official liner notes for Mute, but thanks to Japanese labels' convention of having a local-based writer contribute additional notes to the Japan release, Shoe from Traffic asked me to write an essay of my own about the album. If you buy the album, you can see Wallace's article in English and Japanese, but since mine's only in the Japanese booklet, the label have kindly allowed me to post the English text here.

My last update to this site was three years ago. This is partly because no one really reads blogs anymore, and author websites are only really useful for active authors. This second part is relevant because I do actually have a new book on the way, which means I've also remembered this website exists.

I've also remained active in my other writing work over the past few years, primarily for Ele-king magazine. Some of them are available online, while others were published only in the paper edition, but here's a rundown of what has been published, with links to the articles where possible:

This year was quite a dry one as far as my writing went. I’ve never been much of one for pitching articles to magazines in the first place — I’ve never really got over the nagging sense that writing about music is a stupid thing to do and feel silly begging for money to do it — and increasingly the conversation about music in Japan is one that has little need for my contribution anyway. Instead of worrying about whether my words are helping whatever media outlet it is meet their targets for page views and engagement, it’s far less stressful to retreat from those anxieties and simply write about what I want on my Clear And Refreshing blog.

Writing is work. I mean that in the sense that it's literally my job that pays for the food I eat and the roof over my head, but also in a more abstract sense — even the decision to use an em dash just before this part of the text instead of a colon or semicolon was tiresome and triggered its own mild drizzle of self-loathing. And zoom out to a wider panorama and writing is exhausting; it's where I try to order, make sense of and explain my thoughts about myself and the world, and then once I'm done with it, I stick my name on it like the pompous ass I am and announce, "Here is my wisdom, World: drink deep and rejoice!" Who needs that? No one, and probably not even me. It's tiring. It's work.

Which is fine, because the flip-side of work is play. In any case, a fair amount of my work — the work that gets published with my name on it at least — is really not much more than finding ways of justifying all the playing I do with a patina of intellectual respectability. And I'm extremely lucky that at the end of 2020 I still have work of any kind, and especially that it's the sort that I can do from the safety of my room. So if that new reality of life and work spent shut in a small room didn't really change my work, it had a big effect on my play.