Alan Vega – Mutator

Mutator is a long lost album from the late Suicide founder and artist Alan Vega who passed away in 2016. Whilst Suicide will always be his best know creative outlet Vega was a prolific artist in many mediums, something he maintained until his death at the age of 78. His prolific career, both with Suicide and as a solo artist, led to material accumulating in what became known as the Vega Vault. Mutator‘s release follows the album’s discovery by his longtime collaborator Liz Lamere and his close friend and confidante Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots) in 2019, the duo mixed and produced the raw songs into the first chapter in a series of posthumous albums.
 
Alan Vega was a pioneer in the worlds of synth-punk, post-punk, art rock, industrial and even pop music, and Mutator is no exception. Originally recorded between 1995 and 1996 during a particularly prolific period Vega’s life the project found itself unintentionally sidelined and forgotten as Vega had moved on, leaving Mutator unfinished. Whether the album matches Vega’s original vision is something that we will never know, but as this is completed by two of his closest confidants there is no one who knew Vega, or his work, better. The end product is a reflection of the world Vega inhabited at that time of life, both in the ever shifting music scene in NYC and in the city’s own unique 24 hour soundtrack.

Like all of the works of Alan Vega, whether solo or with Suicide, this is not music designed to have any kind of mass appeal, Vega created because he needed to create. As with pretty much everything he recorded this is an idiosyncratic and unique soundtrack, Mutator will not create any new converts with it’s experimental soundscape, hip hop beats are interwoven eccentrically with the stripped back simplicity of Suicide and a stark post punk outlook. Dark, claustrophobic and at times impenetrable, whilst this is an important part of Vega’s legacy Mutator is very much an album for the completists amongst his established fans.

Mutator will be released on the 23rd April and you can pre-order the album via Sacred Bones Records here