Damo Suzuki at The Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen

Damo Suzuki at The Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen

13 August, 2009
by: Sween

Creeping past the lushites and faddy-flappers who recline vaingloriously in the stylish surrounds of the Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen's bar, I peel back a black curtain and walk into the last three minutes of Bo Ningen's warm up set - they're in mid-sustained-finale-thrashing, dropkicking their guitars and each other into each other and their guitars. It's like the end of a metal epic. Forever.

Drum Eyes, who are also providing backing for Damo Suzuki tonight, are less frantic than Bo Ningen but all the more enormous. Their punishing drone hops down from misty 1970s mountains via swathing bass riffs, abused synths and two – count them – powerhouse drummers. I never know quite what to say about this kind of colossal sound – I suppose Drum Eyes tend toward gruelling repetition of phrases to tombstone effect, rather than sea-shifting textures. They open with more nuanced songs, but these are soon swallowed up by ten-minute poundfests.

Damo Suzuki should need no introduction; but this is exemplary if the name doesn't ring an avant-garde bell. He's been frequenting tiny venues across Europe and America since his return to music in 1983, bringing his inimitable trilingual/unlingual improvisational lyrics and psychotic delivery to new ears, and seeing him in the flesh promises to be a bit special. He greets the crowd humbly, a genial silver-haired gent (albeit a scraggly one); but it's all mystic/baffling business from thereon in.

Launching into a stream of words delivered with a tight metric that never really ceases for an hour, Suzuki fluidly churns from feathery whisper to monstrous bellow; sometimes lingering, sometimes hysterical; feeding on the swell of the music. Drum Eyes' backing is hypnotic in its subtlety. Opening with an inconspicuous beat, the isolated, inscrutable vocals that this psych-Yoda emits draw me further and further in.

Suddenly, what seems hours later, I resurface only to be shell-shocked by the abrupt presence of flesh-trembling bass, dominating percussive clamour, and spasmodic arcane janglings which whirl around this ageing hippy jigsaw. It's as if this small, aging man undergoes some sort of apotheosis to emerge a musical Gandalf, returning from the furthest reaches of the solipsistic mind, spilling over with bewildering treasures of invention.

Finding myself stumbling toward Old Street at midnight, I wonder whether I've been to a gig, or learnt cosmic truths by aural osmosis. Probably both.

Damo Suzuki and Now have an album called The London Evening News out at the moment on Tri Recordings.

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Sween