Can changed my life

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.

CAN: LIVE IN PARIS 1973 - LINER NOTES BY IAN F. MARTIN

On the face of it, the term “krautrock” is a remarkably useless one. Meaning little more than “rock music from Germany”, the reason it’s stuck around for so long probably lies in its very vagueness. Even as the contributions of musicians from America, France, Japan and the UK push the limits of the word “kraut” and the word “rock” is stretched beyond breaking point, the term’s defiant un-seriousness permits borders soft enough (and meaningless enough) to encompass multitudes. The electronic experimentation of Cluster, the extravagant guitar excursions of Amon Düül II and the conceptually refined, synthetic pop of Kraftwerk could all be wrapped up in it — and continue to live there as the artists continued to evolve.

Like many kids of my generation, coming of musical age in the 80s and 90s, I encountered Can and their contemporaries through the echoes and coded references that ran through the British music I had easier access to — Julian Cope (of course), Stereolab (naturally), Damo Suzuki’s ghost haunting The Fall, Jaki Liebezeit’s haunting The Stone Roses. However, it was only after moving to Japan in the early 2000s that the music itself reached me in its uncut form.

The timing was just coincidence: there were lots of reissues appearing in the early 21st Century, so these names I’d only heard of as whispers and legends had started to become more accessible. But it was also helpful timing, letting me hear the music not through the local lens of British critics and artists but in the context of a Japanese underground music scene that was actively engaged in its own ongoing process of absorbing and translating rock music from the West.

One compelling theory suggests the thing that unified many of the diverse acts coming out of Germany in the 1970s is a desire to create a new, future-facing European form for popular music. While we should give treat such sweeping cultural generalisations with the appropriate scepticism, it’s perhaps fair to say that it was music made by the kids who had grown up in the postwar years and had no time for the lingering remnants of the old Germany that still occupied many positions of power. And most importantly in the long run, it’s also music that refuses to live in the shadow of blues-derived Anglo-American rock’n’roll.

Listening to the music of Can while living in an environment surrounded by musicians with a lot of interest but no inherent loyalty to Western musical traditions, trying to figure out their own way forward for rock music — or more accurately in many cases to escape from it — the thing that struck me was that process of trying to create, untethered. So far from the circumstances of postwar Europe, the particular space in which it happened felt less important than that process of breaking down and driving ahead into infinity. The term “kosmische” places the music in the infinite world of outer space, while Can’s name for their own studio, “Inner Space” places the music in man’s equally infinite interior world. When rock tradition is just a set of tools and building blocks to be used, rearranged or discarded, you can travel infinitely in any direction.

Of course most underground musicians are working within plenty of restrictions, either with money, time, technology or all three — and the results they can lay down on tape are limited accordingly. Can may have had time to explore in the studio that would make a contemporary Japanese indie band weep tears of acid envy, but they certainly didn’t have the money and technology to compete with the grandiose visions of their British progressive rock contemporaries. Maybe as a result of this, the expansiveness of their art is paired with a sonic intimacy, especially in their time with Damo Suzuki, that could be the sound of any neighbourhood street corner. Perhaps the closest contemporary to where Can were in 1973 was Miles Davis’ then-recent On the Corner, which was just that: a musical microcosm of street life in a single location, nonetheless touching the infinite through its endless collage of characters and stories.

Listening to Live in Paris, that sense of intimacy comes through powerfully from the start. Suzuki’s vocals practically whisper in my ear barely rising above the restrained rumble and suppressed hubbub of the music. Distant sirens phase in and out, but it feels personal: sounds that only I can hear, through my own personal antenna. When the roar of the audience hits, more than thirty minutes later, it’s an explosive moment, a dramatic camera zoom-out, revealing the cavernous space and hundreds of fellow listeners — were they here all along?

As I mentioned at the beginning, the term “krautrock” is fundamentally un-serious: put simply, it’s a joke. Like many jokes, it works off a juxtaposition between the familiar and a complicating element that turns the result into something absurd or impossible. We all know what rock music is, but rock made by a strait-laced and humourless people like “the Krauts” was a self-evident absurdity to British music critics of the 1970s, so “krautrock” must, by its nature, represent something absurd or impossible.

The dynamics of a joke, juxtaposing the familiar with the outrageous, are also a key way that music can surprise and delight its audience. Jazz musicians like Miles Davis were masters of this craft, pulling standards apart, extrapolating extravagant solos from them, bringing back the familiar elements like punchlines when you’ve almost forgotten where you’d started. A talented Western standup comic or a Japanese rakugo performer could perhaps find a kindred spirit in the performance of a jazz musician.

Can’s earlier releases contain a few songs that more or less sound like the chord changes or dynamic shifts their Anglo-American rock contemporaries might have done, and part of the appeal is in seeing them drag those sounds into places even the more cosmic among their peers would have struggled to imagine. British critics may have coined “krautrock” as a joke, but the joke was on us and we had to appreciate the irony.

On the 1973 concert documented in Live in Paris, Can are able to smoothly and instinctively pull a similar thing off with their own existing music, drawing mainly from the songs from the previous year’s Ege Bamyasi. It’s telling that the album’s track listing resists the temptation to name the songs, because the fragments of what we know from the album are just a small part of what’s going on in these five, long tracks. An extended jam gradually reveals itself in the familiar form of One More Night, or a song you instantly recognise as Spoon loses itself in a drawn-out exploration around a single bass note pursued with heroic determination by Holger Czukay. Throbbing rhythms like industrial machinery share space with Michael Karoli guitar lines that curve gently around some spectral shape that might once have been rock’n’roll. The familiar becomes unfamiliar and the alien begins to feel like home, like your local street corner, like the sound of your own thoughts, like the reverberations of the whole cosmos. These tracks are living things of their own that riff off the originals but are in no way constrained by them.

In a way, hearing Can play with these songs live is like watching them return to the womb, dissolving back into the extended jam sessions that initially birthed them. Personally, it also returns me to that early pleasure of cruising the underground live venues and clubs of Tokyo, watching and experiencing music as process: of seeing in the familiar shapes of the music not its dead, finished product but the possibilities for taking it somewhere different and unexpected.