Like a snowstorm under a glass ball In the fall of 2003, Martin Rev's sixth solo album was released on the American indie label File 13 Records. After Rev had already broken new ground in 2002 with his musical partner Alan Vega and their joint project Suicide with the album "American Supreme", this new direction also continued in his solo work. If the 2000 work "Strangeworld" still sounded like an abstract composite of all of Martin Rev's musical worlds of influence detached from time, contemporary influences also seem to become audible on the album "To Live" released three years later. Guitar samples, for example, are used here for the first time. "The sound of "To Live" was actually one that I had been using live on stage for a couple of years. The inspiration didn't come from the 2000s, but probably from a much earlier time, although I couldn't say exactly where. It's also related to the rhythm technology I used," Rev recalls. The feel of this sequence-driven industrial rock, so typical of the late 1990s, seems unusual - at least for a Rev album - and so when the record was released in 2003, reviews were initially very mixed. As in the early 1970s when Suicide were hated and celebrated in equal measure for their novel sound, Rev still polarized with his music 30 years later. But even if those tracks on "To Live" are less characterized by synthesizer drones and minimalist keyboard figures than previous records, all of the album's tracks are still driven by that peculiar formal language that makes Martin Rev's sound so concise and distinctive. Echoing, overlapping rhythm loops interspersed with Rev's sporadic, tender yet menacing spoken word vocals grow into a violent blizzard beneath a glass sphere, where chrome glitter and golden confetti swirl wildly. This is particularly impressively accomplished on the track "Gutter Rock," which seems like an overdriven, hypnotically beguiling piece of lounge exotica. And it's especially this sound of counterpoints between hard drum machine and guitar salvos and the intangibility of Rev's voice, in which you can sometimes hear that mood and insecurity at the beginning of the new millennium, which especially dominated a city like Rev's home New York, which was shaken only two years before by the events of September 11, 2001. Thus, "To Live" is a contradictory and difficult to digest work that occupies a very special place within Martin Rev's body of work as, above all, a child of its time and transition.
01. To live
02. In your arms
03. Black ice
04. Gutter rock
05. Shimmer
06. Painted
07. Places I go
08. Lost in the orbits
09. Jaded
10. Our roads
11. Search for stone
12. Water
13. Stormy
