Martin Rev is the musical genius behind Suicide, his revolutionary NYC duo with Alan Vega. On their best-known albums, Suicide and Second Album, they stripped things down to severe, menacing synthesizer swells and drum-machine pulsations over which Vega intoned and yelped with nerve-racking, Elvis-oid spasms. Rev’s solo works reveal a more psychedelic sensibility, with Martin Rev, Clouds of Glory, To Live, and Les Nymphes being prime examples of his more densely layered and disorienting compositional approach. With its slashing riffs and timbral power, “Triton,” from 2008’s Les Nymphes, verges on heavy metal, but it bears Rev’s trademark maniacal devotion to repetition, which leads to a kind of pinwheel-eyed awe. It’s only a matter of time before Gaspar Noé uses this in one of his films’ pivotal scenes.
Martin Rev is making his live solo debut Friday, November 14, at the Triple Door, headlining the first night of Hypnotikon II, an event I helped to curate.
