Sacred Bones In the great taxonomy of rock, Alan Vega was kind of like a platypus. ‘What? That can’t exist in nature!’ A Catholic Jew (a combo not known for its over-frequent presence in demographic cross-breaks), a veritable Methuselah when punk broke (he was already forty, though pretended to be a decade younger) and a pioneer of the electronic sound when all around was guitars, one would struggle […]
Alan Vega
Label: Mute Format: CD As acerbic as their recent gigs together, the collaboration of Alan Vega with two-thirds of Pan Sonic shows that the loss of a vowel has not affected the latter’s ability to construct minimal sine-wave beats and blasts, nor the former’s anomic bile against The Man and his system. While the Finns lay down the tearing glitches, chundering basslines and hard stepping thuds of analogue […]
Irregular The Africa Centre, London 2nd July 1998 Having sat throught he absence of promised DJ Holger Hiller – and hence a repeated digi-dub tape instead – the appearance onstage of two-thirds of Pan Sonic presaged the arrival of Alan Vega. Strutting with his customary swagger, and dressed like a heavy-metal Guardian Angel in shades, Vega launched into his set while his collaborators manipulated the sliders, twiddled the […]