Before their time

>> NYC electro legends Suicide stay lively

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

While Kraftwerk rode the rails with their cheeky German electropop, fellow pioneers Suicide scared New York’s art elite and unnerved CBGB’s punks, Alan Vega’s inhuman howls mustering menace with Martin Rev’s machine-made beats and keyboard drones. Rev was a jazz pianist, born in the Bronx, while Brooklyn’s Vega was a sculptor scraping up a few bucks to eat his daily Blimpie and maintain his art space, Project of Living Artists, where the pair met and subsequently began their life as Suicide. Two legendary albums and loads of latter-day accolades from noisemeisters, Britpoppers, DJs and electro-punks alike (they’ve had Thurston Moore and Nick Cave as guest DJs, need I say more?) have led to a 30-year career, albeit on-and-off, Suicide and solo. Now, for Casa del Popolo’s second birthday, the deadly duo make their long-awaited live return to Montreal. The Mirror spoke to Rev about his gear, his politics and his shades.

Mirror: The tech buffs and music historians may be disappointed, but I assume you’re using new gear.
Martin Rev: Oh, sure. Basically, the approach is the same but I’m always rummaging. It’s like found art, you find the machines then you find the music in the machines. I’ll use almost anything but it’s gotta be slight and small for the stage.

M: So you’re still keeping it minimal?
MR: Yeah. Suicide was the most minimal of anybody, just one musician, one singer. The sound guys would just stare at the setup for an hour at soundcheck because they’d never seen anything like it. The music was dictating it but we also had to take the stuff to the gigs ourselves, and we didn’t have vans or roadies, so we really created this thing out of necessity. I think that’s part of why hip hop was so valid, because it became very minimal out of necessity too.

M: I’ve often read that the ’80s synthpop bands were riding on your coattails, but making it big while you remained obscure. Did that really piss you off?
MR: The synth wave didn’t piss me off at all. I noticed that some clubs in New York didn’t want local bands, they only hired synth-punk groups from England who would get bigger audiences, but that’s just the way it was. I didn’t see their music as a Suicide influence, same with punk and techno and all the stuff they say came from us. Sometimes I do hear our signature, like in Soft Cell and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, so if as many bands were influenced by us as critics say, that’s cool.

United States of Suicide

M: What do you make of the continuing distrust of electronic music in North America, the U.S. in particular?
MR: The States is more conservative now than it’s ever been, music business-wise, art-wise. Regular rock ’n’ roll that used to be subversive is now accepted as part of the culture but electronics is an open frontier. When any new art or medium presents another way, it means you have to change to understand it and that always runs tangential to culture, especially in America. It’s not something that you can market and blow up into megabucks, but a lot of people are getting music and making their own stuff with the Internet instead of the big, blown-up industries. That’s what’s happening quietly in the background, all over. Maybe it also spells the future. It spells another way of looking at the politics here, meaning we really do have to deal with humanity and the environment, all the stuff that they’re trying to hold back. If we do have a future-and right now it’s in doubt-it’s going to be electronic, but there’s gonna have to be some growth on the part of major societies that are just looking for war. It can’t be a future where you press a button and blow up a country just because you have high-tech. The environment is gonna come and tell everybody, “You’re ready to blow up the planet? Here’s how it’s gonna blow you up.”

M: Okay, seriously now-what’s with the shades?
MR: Uh, I don’t know, I just always wore ’em. When I found my first pair of shades, I just loved the colours and the way they looked, so I wore ’em on the street and when I got on stage I’d wear ’em too. It just gives you a certain amount of privacy and distance and quiet when you don’t wanna totally have stuff in your face. Other than that, I guess it’s just a hobby of mine. :

With the Unireverse and les Georges Leningrad at la Sala Rossa on Saturday, Sept. 7, 9pm, $18–20

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