Suicide - Litanies of Self-Destruction

New York, 1977. Not just any city, not just any year. And then: Martin Rev, electronics. Alan Vega, voice. Nothing else. Or almost. The accurate definition is: "New York City blues." Alan Vega's own words. Except there's very little blues left in it (or rock, or jazz, or the avant-garde… take your pick): only the projection of the soul, the fire that blazes, a hand reaching out toward time, unreachable. Everything else is heartbeat, pulse, energy; suicide, yes, but as a reclaiming of life, a return to its source. Not death as rebellion, but extreme rebellion as a scream against the darkness that blinds life.

Suicide are one of the most provocative and influential bands of the entire new wave movement. Their sound, the ideal backdrop for tales of urban anguish and alienation, became a constant point of reference for bands throughout the Eighties, paving the way in particular for generations of synth-pop, industrial, and even techno artists.

It all begins at the start of the Seventies. Alan Vega, a sculptor of light and an avant-garde artist, has a more rock-oriented background, while Martin Rev, a free jazz musician, embodies the punk-wave soul of the group. The two meet in 1971 at the Project, a New York gallery open to all kinds of artistic events, and decide to form a group, choosing the outrageous name Suicide. Their first performances take place on the stage of the Mercer Art Center, one of the temples of the Big Apple's musical intelligentsia. The duo plays spectral, apocalyptic blues, with Rev, buried behind his keyboards, weaving obsessive, alienating riffs, while Vega declaims chilling tales of love and death.

Their proposal, so extreme and impenetrable, meets with skepticism from record labels, until 1977, when Martin Thau, former manager of the New York Dolls and owner of Red Star, decides to sign them, releasing the self-titled album Suicide, with artwork by Timothy Jackson (the word Suicide sprawled across the cover, dripping blood, topped by the label's red star logo). It's one of the cornerstones of new wave, an album that's astonishing for how far ahead of its time it was, but also a testament to the climate of self-destruction that reigned in Manhattan's intellectual circles at the dawn of new wave. "Our music is the sound of New York," Vega once said. While still working within the traditional song format, Suicide carry out a deconstruction of the classic guitar-bass-drums setup, thanks to the endless possibilities offered by Rev's synth. The result is an essay in experimental music, projected into the future yet rooted in the raw rock of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. The analog carpet of Rev's keyboards combines with Vega's psychotic vocals, made up of silences, moans, and reverb, dragging the listener into an inescapable trance.

Seven loose cannons. Seven rituals of self-destruction. Thirty-one minutes and fifteen seconds that the history of music will never be able to shake off. "Frankie Teardrop," the most chilling of all, rests on a minimalism that is both skeletal and monstrous, slowly dragging the voice (that voice, like a freezing whisper) toward dissolution. Frankie is locked inside himself, sealed within his own mystery. The technological age has failed, killing off all solidarity with the world. Frankie may not know any of this, but his act (the murder of his wife and child, followed by his own suicide) is the product of it all. Yet all of this already fades into the background, pushed aside by the "theatrical" turn the track takes, by its "post-industrial dramaturgy," which is also, and above all, an attempt to make sense of existence. At this point, it no longer makes sense to talk about rock. Perhaps it's more accurate to speak of "Total Music." How else to describe the trembling echo of "Che," with its fluorescent organ and that infinitesimal circularity that lets the album culminate in cosmic emptiness? And what to say about the exhausting beauty of "Cheree," a mechanical litany with a human heart? What to say about its sweetness, stained with guilt and the possibility of redemption?

"Total Music," then, which is to say there is no longer any difference between (musical) representation and the thing represented. New York is in here; this is New York. This is reality, and only this. This is the sound of humanity sacrificed on the altar of modernist utopia. And to tell the story of this sacrifice, it's only right to keep the past firmly in mind. Hence the resurgence of rockabilly, but disfigured and deconstructed, driven toward its mechanical apotheosis: "Ghost Rider."

But, in the end, there's nothing mechanical about any of this. There's only a sense of acid frenzy, of layered tension, made of blinding reverb, like Vega's voice, which constantly loses its footing within the structure of the track, battered by filthy feedback, as can also be heard on the following "Rocket USA," almost a tribal dance in constant "devolution." "Johnny," for its part, confirms the band's taste for reinterpreting rockabilly through electronics, though this time packaged up and shipped straight into the future. All that remains is the sensual "Girl," swaying dazedly over a carpet woven from organ flourishes and muffled pulses.

A chilling portrait of post-industrial decay, Suicide also asserts a new language, inexpressive, repetitive and detached, erasing every trace of subjectivity and emotion, leading to an almost catatonic stasis. A pivotal work, one that would lay the groundwork for almost all electronic-based music to come. Without that prototype, however raw and hermetic, Eighties bands like Devo, Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sisters of Mercy, or Nineties bands like Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers (to name just a few), might never have existed, or at least wouldn't have been the same.

With the following Suicide II (1980), however, the New York duo loses some of its edge, shifting toward a cybernetic pop that still carries the urban-nightmare atmosphere but dilutes some of the intensity of their debut. Tracks like "Touch Me," "Dance," and "Harlem," however, remain shining examples of a dehumanizing, suspense-laden sound poetry.

After this second chapter, the two decide to focus mainly on solo projects, also supported by their friend Rick Ocasek, leader of the Cars and an enlightened producer on the "indie" scene.

Vega releases uneven albums, but ones occasionally able to resurrect Suicide's diseased spirit, with tracks like the robotic "Jukebox Baby" (from Alan Vega, 1980), the demonic "Magdalena 82," and the hallucinated indictment of "Viet Vet" (from Collision Drive, 1982), and the chilling "Hammered" and "Life Ain't Life" (from Dujang Prang, 1996). All of this alternating with other artistic projects, such as the photography book "Deuce Avenue War" (1990) and the prose-and-poetry work "Cripple Nation" (1991). Rev's output is less compelling, from his self-titled all-keyboards debut in 1980 to Strangeworld (2000), passing through See Me Ridin' (1996).

The duo reunited for the first time in 1988 for A Way Of Life and again three years later for Why Be Blue, taking part in a handful of tours and opening for Elvis Costello and Clash. Some of these shows turned explosive, like the one captured on a bonus CD included with the debut album, titled "23 Minutes Over Brussels": a recording of a 1978 gig that ended in a riot, with the police stepping in.

After a long absence from the scene, Suicide returned unexpectedly in 2002 with American Supreme. Recorded in New York right after the fateful events of September 11th, and born out of a collaboration with artists Scott King and Matt Worley (better known as Crash), who penned the Failure manifesto included in the booklet, along with Jonathan de Villers, who shot the cover photo, the album digs into American unease with striking expressive force, starting with the crumpled, worn-out Stars and Stripes depicted on the sleeve. And it's Vega-Rev's music itself that stirs up this unease. Once again it's an icy, murky, torn-apart sound: a blend of hip-hop pulses, digital funk, dub and house, rap, injections of techno, metal guitars and obsessive synths. Over this sonic backdrop rises a "messianic" voice, echoing the exploits of Lou Reed, Jim Morrison and Nick Cave.

Don't be fooled by the array of electronic devices driving the metropolitan pulses of "Televised Executions", "Swearin' To The Flag", "American Mean", "Death Machine", nor by the hip-hop of "Wrong Decisions" or the reggae of "Damn Rain Damn Train": Suicide's music isn't meant for dancing. If anything, it's a dance of extinction, a danse macabre on the edge of a nightmare. It's the soundtrack to a corrupt world lying in ruins. The new record doesn't abandon the formula, as avant-garde today as it was 25 years ago, but Rev's sounds are brought up to date: "Misery Train", for instance, sounds like a Röyksopp loop, while elsewhere a hip-hop break creeps in. Their revolutionary genius still lies in the ability to disfigure the classic pop song structure, intro/verse/chorus/verse, and use only the chorus, always the same (as in the groovy "Power Au Go Go"). "Begging for Miracles" is a loop worthy of Chemical Brothers, "Dachau, Disney, Disco" is a cacophony verging on white noise. And the final manifesto of extreme mental and existential confusion is emblematic: "I Don't Know", I don't know. An uncertainty that spreads from New York to the whole world.

Martin Rev then resurfaced in 2003 with the robotic To Live (2003).

On July 16, 2016, singer Alan Vega died at the age of 78, marking the end of the duo.

About five years after the charismatic frontman's death, the vaults of recorded but still unreleased material are opened up, full of takes and edits that will try to capture, after the fact and in a secular, hagiographic way, the soul of a figure fundamental to art-rock. In "The Downtown Book. The New York Art Scene 1974-1984", a book edited by Marvin J. Taylor, Lydia Lunch recalls the central role Suicide played in that programmatic erasure of rock tradition carried out by no wave, a point also raised by Simon Reynolds in "Post-Punk 1978-1984". It all happened almost entirely within a single stretch of neighborhood, the East Village in Manhattan, in a handful of years in which avant-garde rock genres were germinating and fanzines were racing to find ways to pin down certain sounds: punk, post-punk, new wave, no wave.

And this is exactly what resurfaces today, right from the first disturbing sounds of Mutator (2021), an album recorded between 1995 and 1996 by Alan Vega in his private studio in New York: the darkness of a world beyond all boundaries, captured in a metropolitan roar steeped in madness, instability, unease, and the unreconciled sounds of dark, frayed synths, almost drones, that seem to emanate from the subconscious. Vega's musician and archivist is his wife Liz Lamere, who also helped put together these eight tracks, mixed by Jared Artaud (Vacant Lots), with whom Vega had made his final album "IT" (Fader Label, 2017).

We find synth-pop and Kraftwerk-style distortions ("Fist"), dream-pop and Lynchian nightmares ("Samurai"), dark and noise ("Nike Soldier"), industrial and sermons ("Muscles", "Filthy") caught between the profane ("Trinity") and the sacred ("Psalm 68"). These are experiments with sound in terms of its imaginative potential, where synths become noise generators and futuristic intonarumori. The album closes enigmatically with the almost euphoric electronic dystopia of "Breathe".

Mutator is a destabilizing listen, as the New York artist has always accustomed us to, consistent with his body of work and with an idea of totalizing art meant to shake us and to read the darkest omens of the future.

In 2024 a new posthumous chapter under Alan Vega's name was released. Between 1995 and 1998, the New York artist collaborated with as wildly different artists as Alex Chilton, Ric Ocasek, Mika Vainio, while also recording prolifically on his own, to the point of piling up excess material left in the drawers. Overseen by his widow Liz Lamere together with trusted collaborator Jared Artaud, Insurrection (2024) draws from the sessions that immediately followed those of Mutator (2021). While the time frame is more or less the same, the content is at the opposite extreme: the lean, vaguely contemplative nature of the previous work is shattered into the fiercest record of his entire career.

With any chance of mutation gone, all that's left is insurrection.

The first single, "Mercy" fittingly enough, speaks for itself: Suicide's sterile obsessiveness gives way to a furious tribal trance, delivered with the tragic intensity of a Scott Walker beaten bloody on the edge of a sidewalk. On the second, "Cyanide Soul", the hysterical panting of his most iconic tracks is reduced to an otherworldly whisper, perverse and sensual as the taste of a cyanide-laced soul.

Elsewhere, declamation gives way to screaming (the jagged, Michael Gira-style roars of "Sewer"), and restraint to chaos (the catastrophic mayhem of "Fireballer Spirit"). Not that the more elaborate arrangements (the distorted gospel of "Invasion") or the more or less transparent references (the "Doctor Who" theme glimpsed beneath "Crash", "Chains" echoing the Virgin Prunes' "Pagan Love Song") offer much comfort. The only track that might recall his partnership with Martin Rev is, tellingly, titled "Genocide": the single is extinct, the next step will be exterminating the masses. As for the over 9 minutes of "Murder One", it's a "Frankie Teardrop" rehashed by the early Bad Seeds, while in the hermetic instrumental interlude of "Jet Lord" one seems to glimpse the crumpled wreckage of the WTC.

In an America once again teetering on the edge of the abyss, much like the world it has helped shape, these tracks still have the power to give shape to our nightmares. And, perhaps, to spur us into fighting back.

Contributions by Maria Teresa Soldani ("Mutator") and Ossydiana Speri ("Insurrection")

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