Alan Vega
IT

This cannot be considered an album like any other. Alan Vega (1938-2016), along with Martin Rev, wrote one of the fundamental chapters in the history of music and, at the same time, of a certain subculture that still proliferates today, underground, like a virus that has infected the earth and forces those who are infected into a state of ecstasy and hallucinations that reveal to us the true substance of the world around us, as happens in John Carpenter's 'They Live'.

Suicide was something more than an influential band that sparked a kind of revolution in the music world: Suicide was and still is an authentic cult. A post-punk and post-modern cult with true devotees being tortured souls, just as Alan Vega's soul was tormented—a sort of Jesus obsessed with death, suffering, and visions of violent and ritualistic deaths: crucifixion as an act of redemption from all sins. An artist who couldn't see or conceive the state of calmness, what we call peace, and who, by prolonging the life of musical genres like delta blues and gospel through electrostatic shocks (to which he gave new vigor and form), preached his visions with an expressive force and violence unparalleled in the history of music.

According to Liz Lamere, Alan's wife and collaborator, the songs included in this posthumous album titled 'IT', released on Fader last July, almost a year after his death, were written and recorded between 2010 and up until July 2016. It would have been his first album since 2007. Narrating them one by one is pointless: the album, in fact, is not composed of what can be called true songs, but of photographic shots, snapshots of the suburban realities of today's New York City. An album loaded with vital energy and filled with obsessive-compulsive drone and post-industrial sounds that fill the sermons of one of the last true great bluesmen in the history of rock with visual content and images. An album that, according to Liz, fully expresses Alan's powerful life force, a kind of messiah and the spiritual leader of an electric church that protects the marginalized and the suffering, the lonely men, and all those ghosts wandering our streets that we do not see or pretend not to see. Your word is ours, and this has made you immortal. Now rest in peace Boruch Alan Bermowitz.