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| Just in time for Valentine's Day, Lydia & Marc present the songs of Suicide at Lee's Palace on February 13th. Get tickets right here. Photo by Helène Cazes |
After the Big Sexy Noise tour Lydia will be reunited with Marc, to perform the Suicide and Alan Vega songs, for the first time in Canada. Watch some recent performance footage below.
Feb 13: Toronto - Lee's Palace
Feb 14: Montreal - La Sala Rossa
Feb 15: Ottawa - Club SAW
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| Raising a glass to Suicide co-founder Alan Vega – born Boruch Alan Bermowitz in Brooklyn – with a few performances and more. |
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| Celebrating the birthday of influential artist/musician Lydia Lunch with her own story, a discussion of no wave and more. |
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| Alan Vega's Insurrection album is out now via In The Red and the Infinite Dreams biography will be published June 18th. |
Here's the scoop...
A new, previously-unreleased album from Alan Vega entitled Insurrection, produced and mixed by Jared Artaud and Liz Lamere has just been released by In The Red Records (you can get it right here). Vega’s name is synonymous with uncompromising creativity, from the late 1950s, through his years playing in Suicide, and all the way up until his death in 2016, Vega was constantly creating. This process inevitably led to a wealth of material that didn’t see the light of day immediately when it was recorded, which came to be known as the Vega Vault. Insurrection is the second in a series of archival releases from the Vault that follows 2021’s lost album, Mutator (Sacred Bones). Insurrection was recorded with his longtime collaborator and wife Liz Lamere and discovered in the Vault in 2022 by both Lamere and Vega’s close friend, producer and confidante Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots). Soon after they mixed and produced the songs into the visionary album that was lurking within the archival ADAT tapes.
Co-producer and mixer of Insurrection, Jared Artaud says: “There is a vast amount of material in the Alan Vega Vault, and continuing to discover new unreleased songs in the archives with Liz Lamere is both shocking and surreal. Half the time I feel like a producer and the other I feel like some kind of archeologist. It was an incredible experience working on Insurrection and continuing to produce, mix, and curate Vega’s music as well as his artwork. Mutator and Insurrection both required a lot of time to dig through the tracks, arrange, and finish them all. There are a number of artistic decisions that go into putting these albums together and my objective with Vega’s material is always to curate and finish the work in a way that Alan would have been proud of. When Alan told me that “I am ending, you’re beginning, I’m passing down the torch to you” I took that very seriously. We made a pact before he died and I am living up to that to this day with maximum loyalty.”
On the new album, Vega's longtime creative ally and Insurrection co-producer Liz Lamere adds: "Insurrection was created circa 1997/98, after Mutator, and prior to Vega’s release of “2007” in 1999. It captures the intense energy of NYC in the 90s rife with crime, killing, hate, fascism, racism, and moral bankruptcy. You can hear the tortured souls floating through this album. Post-Gulf War angst and premonitions of terrorist attacks in our homeland enveloped Alan. The upcoming birth of his son raised further awareness of the state of our world. All these emotions are mirrored in the sounds he magnetized. Yet, true to Vega form, there remains hope and empowerment coursing through the tracks. In the nearly three decades in the studio with Vega, we recorded significantly more material than the seven albums released. Vega’s intention was to experiment with sound which would become the canvas for the poetry that reflected his vision of the universe. Often full sessions would be spent creating a single sound. Because the goal wasn’t to make albums, he had no timeline or constraints and would freely follow new paths uncovered along the way.”
The visual artist, musician, and poet Alan Vega was born in Brooklyn in 1938. He co-founded the massively influential avant-garde band Suicide with Martin Rev in 1970, with whom he performed off and on throughout his life. Suicide’s groundbreaking debut album was included among Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and it was a formative work in the invention of synth-punk, post-punk, art rock, industrial music and is considered one of the most influential albums of all time.
Vega would go on to have a prolific career as a solo artist. His hit song “Jukebox Babe” led to a contract with Elektra Records, who released two albums including the cult classic Saturn Strip, produced by Ric Ocasek. From there, rejecting the commercial machine, he went back to his roots, doing a deep dive into experimenting with sound in the studio. This era resulted in new solo records coming out consistently throughout the next several decades; starting with Deuce Avenue, continuing through Dujang Prang (on Henry Rollins' 2.13.61 imprint), and culminating with his masterpiece It. Vega considered the albums from this period the audio counterpoint to his visual art that reflected the world around him while simultaneously delving into universal themes. It makes his work as relevant today as it was then.
It was during this period that he began working with Liz Lamere, who became his wife and the most crucial collaborator of his solo career. Lamere, along with fellow Vega collaborator Jared Artaud discovered in 2019 the lost Vega album, Mutator, which they co- produced and mixed. The 11 songs on Insurrection showcase the unparalleled vision and uncompromising force from one of the most influential artists of all time.
Lamere and Artaud spearhead the Vega Vault project, which aims to bring rare, unreleased and back catalog work spanning Alan Vega and Suicide’s career to the public for the first time. Lamere says. “After Alan and I worked on the split 10" single for Alan Vega's "Nike Soldier" and The Vacant Lots’ ("Mad Mary Jones" Alternate Mix) followed by the remix of The Vacant Lots "6 AM" track, Alan spent many hours with Jared discussing music, art, philosophy. Knowing there was so much more recorded material in the Vault, Vega believed Jared and I would make a great team producing this music and building his legacy.”
Recently, Jared Artaud co-produced alongside Hedi Slimane the exclusive soundtrack - an extended mix of Suicide's "Girl" - for Celine's Le Palace FW23 runway show, released The Vacant Lots fifth full-length album Interiors, and is currently co-curating a new Alan Vega art exhibition, Cesspool Saints, on view through July 27, 2024 in Paris at Laurent Godin Gallery.
A new biography "Infinite Dreams - The Life of Alan Vega,” co-written by Liz Lamere and Laura Davis-Chanin, with a foreword by Bruce Springsteen, will be published on June 18 by Backbeat Books. Pre-order it right here. and Lamere will be releasing her second solo album, “One Never Knows”, on June 14 via In The Red Records. Watch the video for "Mercy" shot by Douglas Hart along with an audio clip of "Cyanide Soul" following the track listing below.
Alan Vega – Insurrection
Sewer
Invasion
Crash
Cyanide Soul
Murder One
Fireballer Fever
Genocide
Chains
Jet Lord
Mercy
Fireballer Spirit
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| Here's Pete performing his fave covers as Sonic Boom at Toronto's Sonic Boom in 2008 and a couple of more recent interviews. |
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| Suicide's Martin Rev makes a rare Toronto return appearance at The Garrison on Thursday. Get tickets while you can right here. |
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| Sadly, legendary Canadian record man Al Mair, co-founder of Attic Records, has passed away. He'll be greatly missed. |
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| Evidently, Nightclubbing – Danny Garcia's long-awaited film about Max's Kansas City – will be screening soon. Check the trailer. |
Streetwalkin' Mofos
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| Get a copy of Danny Garcia's Streetwalkin' Mofos album feat. Sonny Vincent right here. |
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| Alan Vega After Dark features the Suicide frontman backed by members of Pink Slip Daddy. |
2021 is shaping up to be the year of Alan Vega. Every year should be but, this year is definitely it. The announcement of the opening of the Alan Vega archives, which will be unleashing an untold amount of unreleased material dating back to 1971 via Sacred Bones, the release of Mutator (a lost album from the mid 90’s) which has gained rave reviews, a massive feature in the New York Times…Alan has been celebrated everywhere of late. In The Red is over the moon to participate in this celebration with the release of Alan Vega After Dark - an album that captures a late night rock n’ roll session with Alan backed by Ben Vaughn, Barb Dwyer and Palmyra Delran (all members of the incredible Pink Slip Daddy as well as countless other cool projects). This album serves as a reminder that Alan Vega was an incredible rock n’ roll/blues/rockabilly vocalist. He was one of the best.
Check out "Nothing Left". Pre-order a copy of Alan Vega After Dark using the link below.
I only spoke with Alan Vega once. It was over the phone and the topic of discussion was the 2015 reissue of Cubist Blues, the phenomenally out there album he’d originally released with collaborators Alex Chilton and Ben Vaughn in 1996. I was in a noisy stadium for reasons that no longer matter at all, on a cell phone, but even with all that extra noise considered, Alan was exceptionally difficult to understand. At first at least. He’d suffered a stroke a few years earlier, in 2012, which still had lingering effects on his speech. But even before that, his heavy East Coast accent had sometimes made him hard to decipher, lending his voice the character of “a cab driver describing fine art,” Vaughn says. If you weren’t from New York—specifically Alan’s New York, an older version of Gotham that may have died with him on July 16th, 2016, when he passed on his sleep—it could be hard to keep up. But after a few minutes, I adjusted to the rhythm. Suddenly, without warning, I found myself able to dance to the peculiar beat of Vega’s jutting back and forth, his Jewish mystic cadence, the kind you hear in gasps and yelps on the transgressively savagely conceptual records he made in the late ‘70s with Martin Rev as Suicide, or the solo records he made starting in the 80s and continuing through to his final studio album "IT" finished in early 2015 and released posthumously in 2017, collages of machoismo-powered rockabilly, space cadet hard rock, renegade cowboy soul, and neon-drenched pop art Americana. You acclimate and then boom: You’re immersed in the “one-man subculture,” to borrow Vaughn’s description, of Alan Vega.
Though his relationship to the mainstream was flirtatious but never a fully committed one, Vega’s sub rosa influence on a disparate but extensive list of punks, new wavers, industrial deconstructionists, garage rockers, and pop stars is clear. His admirers included Ric Ocasek of the Cars, a frequent collaborator, and Bruce Springsteen, whose 1982 album Nebraska, particularly the creeping song “State Trooper,” explored the same haunted backroads Vega sang about. “The bravery and passion he showed throughout his career was deeply influential to me,” Springsteen noted on his Facebook page, memorializing Vega. “There was simply no one else remotely like him.”
Years before, the stroke had slowed Vega down, but he’d recovered and continued making music, often remotely, vocalizing over pre-recorded tracks by electronic musicians. He wanted a different feel for this project, wanted “to feel connected,” Vaughn says, to the musicians in the room, the way it had worked when they made Cubist Blues with Chilton, a music industry rebel in his own right. That record had taken two frenzied, off-the-cuff nights, this album required only one. “We got better at it,” Vaughn says with a chuckle, his velvet voice—the one I’ve so often heard on his essential and always joyous radio program and podcast The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn —underserved by my cellular telephone (once again).
Vega was obsessed with the enormity of any given moment, and to that end, he insisted the band be assembled with absolutely no preparation. They would be responsible for creating, ears tuned to each other and Vega’s incantations, a spontaneous space for his magical recitations. “It’s the only way I’ve ever worked with him,” Vaughn says. “We would start playing, and Alan would wait a little bit,” drawing in a notepad the entire time, working on his “zillions of sketches” — potential self-portraits, though he’d be loathe to indulge you asking if they were — or reading his copy of the New York Post. Eventually he’d rise to the microphone. “Some of the stuff he comes up with, it’s really unbelievable,” Vaughn says, citing the elementally profound lyrics for “River of No Shame,” delivered for the first time as the band churned on. “The animals are hunting, the animals are hunting/Making a break for the river/Making a break for the river/The river of no shame,” Vega riffs, over a motorik groove that’s somehow equal parts Neu! and John Lee Hooker.
Vega didn’t consider the marketplace at all, never considered what would become of his art after he made it, living like the embodiment of what visionary director David Lynch would describe as “the art life.” For Vega creating was the sacred act. Creations? He could take them or leave them. “Liz, Alan’s wife, has told me that when he would finish a painting, he’d immediately paint over the canvas — she’d have to snatch them away from him,” Vaughn says.
Luckily, Vaughn and company have been able to do something like that with Alan Vega After Dark, a set of songs that exist fully in their genesis, realized and recorded one night in New York City. They snatched one away from Alan, so we can pore over it. Listening to it, Vega’s words sometimes slip past me, like they did early in our single phone call. Wait, what was that he just said? It might have been the secret of the world! But I have the luxury of knowing that even as I can return to the LP over and over again, I’ll never hear the same thing twice. “Alan was writing from the future,” Vaughn says. I think back to 2015 when, during my interview for Aquarium Drunkard, Vega swatted away my inquiries about where his visions originated: “I don’t know where it comes from. People ask, ‘Why?’...There is no why. Who gives a shit? It’s not supposed to be why. It’s supposed to be the world. The mystery.”
You can pre-order a copy of Alan Vega After Dark directly from In The Red right here.
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| Check out a mini-mix assembled from Jon Savage's alternative electronica comp, Do You Have The Force? right here. |
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| Check out Jacqueline Castel's video for "Nike Soldier" off the posthumous Alan Vega album Mutator out April 23rd. |
