Alan Vega - Insurrection [2LP]

Insurrection is a lost album by Alan Vega, eleven tracks taken from the archives almost thirty years after their recording, and it arrives as a transmission at the right time.

Vega co-founded Suicide with Martin Rev in 1970, and their 1977 debut album redefined what two people and a cheap keyboard could do to an audience. His solo work was always the sonic half of a practice that included visual art, and by the late 1980s he was immersed in experimentation alongside Liz Lamere, the collaborator who remained with him until her death in 2016. These recordings date from 1997 and 1998, cut between Mutator and 2007, when Vega dealt with a New York full of violence and moral rot, still carrying fear of the post-Gulf War, and preparing for a terrorist attack on American soil that he foresaw years before it occurred. Lamere and Jared Artaud dug up the tapes and co-produced the result.

Sewer opens the album at its most abrasive, with corroded electronic tones and Vega growling through the gloom. Invasion and Genocide hit like bulletins from a collapsing city, Cyanide Soul spans over six minutes of pure hypnotic terror, and Mercy is where the light penetrates, the hope that Vega never completely gave up.

Vega spent decades recording far more than he released. The archives, it turns out, were worth opening.