Jesus god, it was 112 degrees in the control room, the power flickering like a dying sun, amps humming with the same quiet dread you feel before a coup. There were bodies everywhere — sprawled on couches, slumped over mixers, foaming at the ears with sonic ecstasy. And in the eye of the storm: Damo Suzuki. Howling. Grinning. Speaking in Martian. Conducting the end-times like a peyote-fried general marching an invisible army through the ruins of the 20th century.

What you are holding, assuming you’re not already in a padded cell gnawing on your Bluetooth speaker, is Damo Suzuki & TBWNIS Live at Dominion Tavern, a black wax artifact pulled from the molten core of reality-as-it-should-be. Recorded in Ottawa, that drab frostbitten bureaucratic nightmare of a capital city, where somehow, somehow, THE BAND WHOSE NAME IS A SYMBOL have spent years assembling ritual machinery to rip open the fabric of space and summon sound as god intended it: raw, ugly, beautiful, and alive.

This was not a “gig.” This was a psychic collision. A full-spectrum bloodletting. A freak unit of telepathic Canucks wired into one another like a single bristling nervous system, and into the middle of it walks Damo, eyes blazing, mouth foaming with divine static. The man doesn’t “sing.” He prophesies. He chants in phonemes from dying planets, rides the wave of unhinged rhythm like a bug-eyed shaman in a jet-propelled kayak.

The band? Oh, they’re past names and time signatures. This isn’t jazz. This isn’t rock. This isn’t anything you can stream while slicing tofu in your downtown condo. This is a live wire shoved into the cortex. Think Amon Düül II locked in a burning substation with Sonny Sharrock and a PCP-crazed Terry Riley.

Put out by the warlocks at Cardinal Fuzz (add your record label here!) , outfits who clearly don’t care if you live or die so long as your turntable’s hooked up to a flame-thrower, this LP is a limited pressing. And good thing too, any more and we risk the whole damn civilization toppling into a pit of sacred noise.

Listen loud. Listen altered. Or don’t listen at all.

But if you miss this one, don’t come crying to us when the sky opens and the voice of Damo echoes through your breakfast cereal demanding to know why you failed the ritual.

Damo Suzuki & The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol

Releases

Live at Dominion Tavern

Live 2012