12. Martin RevStigmata
I love that record. It sounds like he’s singing in the bath. It’s like he’s taken Bach and played it through a kid’s keyboard, and again it sounds so delicate, not fragile as such, but very soft. And he’s quite a soft man, when you watch him play his fingers are creature-like on the keyboard. ‘Te Deum’ is my favourite. I love the theatre of when he plays live and you can’t tell what he’s actually doing because one he’s not taking himself too seriously, it’s where the art comes before the music. It’s abusing music as a format in a way, though he’s not making fun of it out of it. If I’d seen Suicide when they first started, I wonder if he’d been like that then. They did enjoy provoking the audience. I think Martin Rev must bring the gentleness and the sarcasm into their music. When Stigmata came out Factory Floor played a show with him, and I was excited to see him play it, but he didn’t play one track, thats ok though one of my favourite shows anyway. The thing I really like about that record is that it kind of reminds me of horse riding. A lot of the classical music they used to have with show jumping used to sound a bit like that, and I used to watch a lot of show jumping and dressage when I was small. It’s got that upbeatness that kind of classical composition, it sounds very English but he’s come from New York and it doesn’t sound like that. How far do you take the joke, though? Was he having a coffee and decided to make a classical record using string sounds from a synth he brought from Walmart? He made a whole record like that, and it’s one of the best records I’ve ever heard. I don’t really sell his record for him, do I?
