Sound Carrier: Damo Suzuki, Live in London

It was in the middle of one of these startling performances that avant-garde pioneers Can came across this long-haired, androgynous character "praying to the sun and making loud noises" and recruited him to their "anarchic democracy" on the spot. Damo only stuck around with Can for four years, but his enlistment sparked the band's most fertile creative period - amongst other things, he was responsible for that much-loved, much-sampled refrain in "Vitamin C". Yet soon enough the drifter was on the move again, becoming a Jehovah's Witness, travelling extensively across Africa and Asia and even quitting the music business for a decade before conceiving the unique approach to live performance that he dubs The Network.

The concept of The Network is a simple one: in every town where Damo Suzuki plays a gig, a local band is recruited to perform with him as a "sound carrier". There's no setlist, nor indeed, songs - he's not (officially) released any recorded music for over thirty years. Instead, the performance is entirely improvised, a spontaneous, hour-long jam, with Damo lending his idiosyncratic vocals to whatever that night's band feels like playing. For a man with an unerring desire to do new things and never repeat past glories, it's a set-up that fits his artistic vision like a glove. For the audience it could be, depending on the quality of the "sound carrier", somewhat of a crapshoot.

Luckily, tonight's pick are a formidable force in their own right. Nervous Conditions look like they're about 14, but the music they produce is some of the most exciting this reviewer has heard from a British band in a long time. Their touchpoints are obvious if diverse - This Heat, The Birthday Party, James Chance and the Contortions, The Fall (a band who, coincidentally, once immortalised Damo in song) - but the glorious cacophony they make is theirs and theirs alone. Connor Browne snarls like a straight-edge Mark E. Smith over skronking sax, no-nonsense synths, violin and dual drums, resulting in something that sounds like Sun Ra on a post-punk binge.

After a storming set of their own material, Damo joins them on stage and commences an hour of his trademark vocalisations, which veer between repeated mantras, scat singing and something akin to speaking in tongues. With "sound carriers" with more subtle modus operandi, one could imagine this stream-of-consciousness approach falling flat, but Nervous Conditions' uncompromising, chaotic sound is a perfect match for Damo's intense psychedelic offerings. Despite the heat of the venue and the fact the star of the show was a 67-year-old recovering from a second bout of cancer, one gets the impression everyone involved could have carried on through the night. But as it was, tonight stood as the exhilaratingly potent fusion of the old avant-garde and the new, courtesy of a legend who never stopped looking forward.