OFF: Damo Suzuki, Acid Mothers Gong

[Nick Medford]

On Sun, 26 Oct 2003 14:56:27 -0500, Alastair <alastair_sumner at HOTMAIL.COM>
wrote:

>Hi,
>I saw Damo Suzuki's Network on Friday night at the Borderline in London.
>Both times that I have seen him, with totally different musicians, he has
>been absolutely superb. It's incredible to watch the musicians bounce off
>each other while improvising to create unique peaks in the music. At one
>stage the guitarist started playing a really off-the-wall sounding riff.
>Mike Howlett on bass seemed to struggle to get into it for a minute, but
>eventually found his feet and pulled off an absolutely blindingly intense
>tune. Apparently Damo doesn't record in the studio anymore. Everything is
>based around creating a unique live atmosphere through improvisation with
>hand-picked musicians. And it works. Everyone danced and Damo looked happy
>as Larry at the end.

Thanks for that Ali- I saw Damo and co. a few days before this, when they
played at the Royal Festival Hall on the same bill as the Incredible String
Band and Acid Mothers Gong (the latter being an amalgam of Daevid Allen,
Gilli Smyth, Didier Malherbe, and the U of E's Josh Pollock with the
fabulous furry AMT gang).

The ISB opened up and at the risk of upsetting any fans out there, I
thought they were dreadful. All I'd previously heard was "The Hangman's
Beautiful Daughter", which I remember quite liking for its elliptical
strangeness, but although the current band apparently plays "only the early
stuff", it didn't sound anything like that. They're good musicians, no
doubt about that, but most of the material was teeth-grindingly twee, hippy-
dippy sing-song stuff, and one song about having a "paintbox in your mind"
might as well have been by Neil of the Young Ones, so close was it to
pastiche. I don't know how "authentic" this ISB line-up is, in terms of
original members- I know Mike Heron is an original member but not sure
about any of the others, and Robin Williamson was conspicuous by his
absence.

Next up- Damo and the Switch Doctors, featuring Mike Howlett on bass, a
keyboard player whose name I forget, Steve Cassidy (of Here and Now) on
drums, and a guitarist called Steve Higgins (who looked to me like the
guitarist (name unknown to me) who played with Here and Now in the late 80s
when Steffe wasn't around, but whether it's actually the same guy, I don't
know). Damo is much shorter than I'd imagined. He still has an impressive
vocal range and can switch from a croon to a shriek in short order. His
lyrics are almost always indecipherable, but it probably doesn't matter, as
his voice is more like a lead instrument for the improvisations than
anything else. Anyway I thought the band got better as they went on- Mike
Howlett is a wonderful bassist of course, but the guitarist and
(especially) the drummer really could have let rip more. The overall sound
was, as someone else commented, "Can-lite". I enjoyed it, but... well, the
drumming was actually quite weak, which can be a real problem for this kind
of spacey jamming- the incredible skill of Jaki Liebezeit was such a key
part of the Can sound. And the guitarist kept playing these choppy New Wave-
style rhythm parts when he could have been shooting for the stars. Still,
on form and at a more intimate venue (like the one where Ali saw them
maybe), this band could probably be quite special.

And so to the headliners- Acid Mothers Gong, who were sensationally good.
No songs as such, just a rising and falling maelstrom of
guitar'n'electronics held together by a quite brilliant rhythm section, who
didn't look like the regular AMT guys to me- whoever the drummer was, he's
one of the best I've ever seen. They played maybe 5 pieces in their
allotted 90 minutes and the only thing I recognised was AMT's "Baby Pink
Lemonade", although this was a very short version by Acid Mothers
standards, probably under 10 minutes. And there was a tiny snippet of
Gong's "Thought for Naught" somewhere in there too. Otherwise no Gong
material at all and clearly much of what we were hearing was totally
spontaneous. The sound: mix all your favourite swooshes, howls, twitters,
etc, with massive sheets of pure noise, add in a frantically soloing
virtuoso guitarist (Kawabata Makoto) and the hypnotic drone of Daevid's
glissando guitar, and underpin with the aforementioned rhythm section.
Didier added some nice Eastern-inflected reeds and Gilli did her space
whisper thing and one spoken-word piece. Josh Pollock seemed at a loss as
to how to contribute, rarely doing anything with his guitar and instead
spending much of the gig adding to the "strange noises" ensemble by means
of vocalisations through a megaphone. Considering his incendiary playing
with the U of E, this was a bit of waste, but playing alongside Makoto must
be daunting, and the megaphone sounds were actually quite effective at
times. The sheer number of musicians on stage meant that the depth and
complexity of the sound was consistently interesting- despite the free-form
nature of the performance, things never drifted too much, and it was
certainly never boring. The overall sound really was "Acid Mothers Gong"-
imagine your favourite sinuous Radio Gnome-era jam crossed with the
unrelenting psychedelic frenzy of a typical AMT performance- truly the best
of both worlds I thought- Daevid's gliss guitar and chanted vocals giving
the AMT sound that extra dimension.

This was intense, challenging stuff and not everyone enjoyed it- judging
from comments overheard in the bar afterwards, some of the older Gong
freaks were miffed and bemused by the lack of recognisable songs, and
indeed a number of people walked out. Personally I thought it was great to
see Daevid doing something new and exciting, expecially something that
worked so well. In interviews, he's expressed the view that the reformed
Gong have been living off the old material for rather too long now, and
it's a relief to see one old (over 70 I think?!) stager who's not afraid to
try something new.

Nick