When Alan Vega delivers Suicide’s urban nightmare bulletins and damaged love calls as crowd-baiting provocateur and crooner-from-hell, Martin Rev is the mysterious, huge-shaded figure to his side, extracting anything from tumultuous cacophony to doowop lilt from his battery of synths and drum machines.
After nearly four decades of dogged struggle against often hostile opposition, Suicide now find themselves in a position of feted reverence as both proto-punks and innovators laying the blueprints for synthesised music as we know it.
For most of the 21st century, it’s seemed as if the world has caught up while, paradoxically, the duo have spent more time exercising their solo projects, returning occasionally to reap credit for their immeasurable contribution to today’s musical landscape.
This is an excerpt from an article that appears in the January issue of Clash Magazine. Pick it up in stores from December 3rd.
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Both Vega and Rev started their solo careers in 1980, the former initially indulging his rockabilly fixation to somehow end up with the terrifying onslaught of 2007’s ‘Station’. Meanwhile Rev has charted a similarly-unique and highly-personal furrow, his eight albums often worlds apart from the coruscating backdrops he constructed around his comrade’s vocals, although closer examination reveals a common thread and commitment to moving forward while reflecting his emotions of the time.
‘Stigmata’ is unlike anything Rev has done before, and beyond anything else released this year, as he harnesses his panoramic electronic visions to modern classical forms. Using his synthesised orchestra, Rev has created an immensely-powerful and often beautiful 21st century masterpiece, resonating with soaring melodic flights and delicately ethereal textures enhanced with intricate electronic micro-surgery, while his own voice adds a sepulchral, haunting quality.
With this church-like element and titles like ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Te Deum’, the album has a notably religious theme: a concept established before the tragic passing of Rev’s wife Mari during the final stages of its creation, which gives the high emotional content of the music another poignant, spiritual dimension. Like everything else the two Suicide members seem to do, it may take years for the album’s fearless innovations and eternal emotional resonance to be fully recognised but, as the decade draws to a close, rest assured it will.
Rev’s ever-questing methods of presenting the human voice against his synthesised backdrops have taken an ethereal turn on ‘Stigmata’, adding a haunting dimension to his intricately-arranged synthesised orchestra. Although it may denote a calmer, even more mature direction, the album’s creation spanned what Rev now calls “the most tumultuous time of my life” after his wife, muse and soul mate Mari passed away around eighteen months ago.
Rev can now talk about Mari with simple affection and unreserved admiration, although it was months before he even confided in Alan Vega [“Thankfully, nature provides some clarity”]. The pair met before Suicide formed early in the ’70s then Mari would design flyers and album sleeves, often providing Marty with his inspiration, like the Vivaldi music she recorded off the radio which provided a launch-pad for ‘Stigmata‘.
“It was just the right time. Sometimes you hear something that hits you and you go, ‘That’s exactly where I am now and I should really take off on that’. It was just right at that time. I just started from there listening to other things that related to that kind of search. She was with me most of the time when I recorded the album.
Each album is really starting from scratch again each time. You have an idea of maybe what you’d like to try. You throw it down on the canvas, but it’s not necessarily working right away, so you keep trying and arranging things in different places. It’s like, ‘Okay, this works’ and then you realise about yourself; where you are, where you’re going, what you want at that time. We change our focus and values in periods of months or weeks, certainly years. You realise it in the work, in the process.”
Like everything else Rev has been involved in, ‘Stigmata’ goes against the grain and expectations, a remarkable work which lingers long after it’s over and Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce rightly describes as ‘genius’.
To celebrate its release, Rev played London’s Corsica Studios on November 27th while Neu Galleries will be showing a collection of his ‘abstract instinctive scores’, documenting his music from 1975. Next May, following the success of September’s All Tomorrow’s Parties event in New York where Suicide played their first album (described as the most extreme act out of many participating), they repeat the exercise opening for The Stooges at Hammersmith Apollo.
Suicide will always lurk in the shadows while both Rev and Vega pursue their solo careers. He says the pair recording together again is “always a possibility” but, for the time being, has his remarkable new album to promote and cherish in his own heart.
Words by Kris Needs
