Concert : Martin Rev + Lary 7

The Bourse de Commerce and New York-based label Blank Forms present a concert by electro post-punk icon Martin Rev. The evening opens with an experimental performance of Lary 7, who, in his first European set in ten years, presents an improvisation created using an array of analog machines he has built and modified himself.

Program

9 pm – Doors open
9:30 pm – Lary 7
10:10 pm – (dj)
10:30 pm – Martin Rev

Bar open throughout the evening. Access until 11 pm.

Martin Rev grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, surrounded by musician parents and doo-wop singers performing on street corners. Drawn to jazz from an early age, he studied with pianist Lennie Tristano and played in New York clubs, an education that shaped an approach to composition he describes as deeply visual.

In 1970, at the Project of Living Artists, an alternative space in Greenwich Village, he met Alan Vega (1936–2016), an artist who was then creating light sculptures using light bulbs and neon tubes. Together they formed the duo Suicide. As punk began to emerge across New York, the group performed at CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and numerous clubs that have since disappeared. Synthesizers, drum machines, and distortion stripped rock instrumentation down to a radical, minimalist electronic form, driven by Alan Vega’s vocals. Their music, which they were among the first to describe as “punk,” anticipated no wave and certain forms of electronic music.

Alongside his work with Suicide, Martin Rev began developing a solo body of work in 1980, bringing together minimal electronics, distorted rhythms, and synthetic melodies. His music thrives on contrasts: arpeggiated patterns, washes of sound, stark percussion, and melodic fragments that emerge and fade away. Beneath the dense keyboards and restless machine rhythms lies the enduring influence of the doo-wop and R&B of his childhood. Even in his most abrasive and saturated compositions, a melodic core comes to the surface, echoed by his deep, delicate voice.

With a video installation by Divine Enfant.