More Mary Hansen (Stereolab) Obscurities

I was in the casino last weekend to play a little poker and make a couple of bets on the NFL playoff games scheduled for that weekend. The place I go has a huge sports book, with multiple giant screens covering a vast back wall, showing every current game (football, college and pro basketball, hockey, etc.) being played at that particular time on various broadcast networks.

As I was walking in to the space to place my bet at one of the automated machines (go Kansas City!), I was jolted when I suddenly heard Stereolab's "Lo Boob Oscillator" blasting at top volume all around me. Now, Stereolab isn't generally what you'd expect to hear coming out of a casino's music system... so needless to say, I was momentarily confused, as I couldn't immediately place the source. Then I looked up and one of the display screens, and saw it was running the following commercial for Hotels.com:

I couldn't believe it - a huge corporation choosing to set their ad to a tune by a band that I'll wager the vast majority of Middle American viewers had never heard of, and one of my favorite songs of all time, as I've related in a previous posting here! Now, I'm not overly superstitious... but I took that out-of-the-blue Stereolab encounter as a good omen... as it turned out to be. I not only won my football bet that night, but also came away with a solid win at the hold 'em tables.

As I've detailed time and again here, I adore Stereolab, and over the years have managed to gather up pretty much all of their recorded output as a group (or "Groop", if you will), both albums and singles, along with many of the band collaborations and individual member side projects. In the past, I've posted a couple of these harder-to-find releases here earlier, including the Rose, My Rocket-Brain! tour EP from 2004 and the Eaten Horizons Or The Electrocution Of Rock art-house release from 2007.

I was ecstatic when they reformed in 2019 after a ten-year hiatus, and went running like a bastard to their show at Boston's Royale back in September of that year, a couple of months before COVID hit (damn, hard to believe that show was THAT long ago...). The concert was superb, and even with the long break, they didn't seem to have missed a beat (and yes, they played "Lo Boob Oscillator"). But seeing the group up on stage that night once again made me wistful for the presence of Mary Hansen, their late percussionist, keyboardist and background vocalist, who died in 2002. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mary brought an ineffable quality to Stereolab's music:

Hansen's voice was the perfect complement to Sadier's; their singing styles and vocal range were very similar . . . but different enough to add nuance and color to many of the band's songs.

So, in the wake of a previous request for these items from an intrepid blog visitor, I thought I'd post a few more releases I have that feature Mary's work.

• Europa 51 - Abstractions

Over the years, Stereolab's drummer Andy Ramsay has been the catalyst behind an number of the band's experimental singles/EPs, offshoots and collaborations, Either with his bandmates or working independently, Ramsay has appeared on, written for or arranged releases with artists as diverse as The High Llamas, Ui, Wire, The Charlatans, Add N to (X), and many, many more. In the past, I've featured some of his work here on this blog. But this release was probably his most eclectic.

Named after Roberto Rossellini's early '50s Italian film starring Ingrid Bergman, Europa 51’s lone album, Abstractions, is the work of Ramsay and fellow Stereolab member Simon Johns, also featuring Mary Hansen, High Llamas members Dominic Murcott and John Bennett, jazz bass player Simon Thorpe and classical harpist Celine Saout. The album was a hybrid project that combined styles like lounge, jazz, bluegrass, and folk. While this album sounds somewhat like Stereolab from time to time, in many ways it goes far beyond anything The Groop had ever done - unfortunately, with somewhat uneven results. Mary's vocals are featured on tracks 4 through 7 ("Voyeurism", "Three Steps In The Sun", "Golden Age Of Gameshows" and "Free Range Corona"), and are lovely as always. But be sure to check out the entire album - it may not all be to your taste, but you will definitely find sounds that pique your interest.

• Splitting the Atom - Splitting The Atom EP:

Another Ramsay one-off, a short-lived project with Stereolab's sound engineer Simon Holliday and Peter Kember, a.k.a. Sonic Boom (Spaceman 3, Spectrum, etc.). Only 2,500 copies of this EP were pressed for release on black vinyl, making it one of the rarest Stereolab-related discs. Mary Hansen added vocals to one track here.

Trivia: "Monkey Brain" (vinyl pops and all) was later used as the soundtrack to a short film/digital video called "four" by Man and Martin, described as "four whole minutes of pulsating thought muesli, ultra-violet and ultra-compact bulletproof adventures for ages four years and above" (Man and Martin is graphic designer, sculptor and AppleMacintosh convert Andy Martin). "four" premiered at the onedotzero2 digital film festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in May 1998. Here it is, if you'd like to see it:

• Various Artists - Spooky Sounds Of Now:

An ostensibly Halloween-themed compilation CD - plus a very cool comic collection in book form ("Spooky Tales", subtitled 'Spirit Summoning Stories', edited by Mark Baines) - all housed in a lidded box. In addition to inclusions from alternative heavy hitters such as Jad Fair, Yo La Tengo and The High Llamas, this release also includes a short track by Blips, "Blip^/Blip~", featuring Stereolab's Tim Gane and Mary along with Sonic Boom once again. It sounds a lot like what was released on the Turn On side project, also released that year - hard to tell if it was an outtake from that session or not. No matter - it's a pretty good tune.

Here's the full track list:

1. Dymaxion - The Haunted Radio
2. Blips - Blip^/Blip~
3. Jad Fair & Jason Willett - Werewolf of London Town
4. Two Dollar Guitar - The Lonliest Monk
5. Herald - It's Under The Waltzers
6. Kooljerk - Mailor Jeune
7. Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Scooby Don't
8. Cylinder - Red Moss
9. Pink Kross - Spooky Dooky
10. Mystery Dick - Screambirds
11. Amplifier - Cat Whisker
12. The Yummy Fur - Saturday Night Mo-Mo
13. Dick Johnson - Vertigo
14. Angel Corpus Christi - Clown Sex
15. Project Dark - Full Length Mirror
16. G. Mack - Red Moss [Frame Trigger]
17. the Dramatics - Hallucination of a Deranged Mind [Inspired by Coffin Joe]
18. Yo La Tengo - 3D
19. Supermalprodelica - L'etat De Grace
20. High Llamas - Spool to Spool
21. Will Prentice - Singing Floorboards

• Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording:

In June of 1977, England's Anglia Television aired a documentary called 'Alternative 3' on its weekly Science Report program. The episode was presented as a factual expose, in that the show's investigators had found evidence that life on Earth was soon to be doomed to extinction from global warming, and the two superpowers of that time (Russia and the United States) had been secretly working together for decades to terraform and eventually

colonize the Moon and Mars with selected superior humans - leaving the rest of us here on this planet to die off when the inevitable end came. The show detailed what appeared to be a global 'brain drain', with scientists, engineers and other highly skilled technicians and thinkers from all over the world seemingly disappearing or dying - but, in the course of the program's investigation, finding that they all had been recruited for the interplanetary program, and sequestered at a secret base to work on it. 'Alternative 3' was filled with interviews with authoritative personnel and film footage showing the level and scope of work on this secret plan up to the present day.

Within minutes of its airing, network and government phone lines were inundated with thousands of calls from jolted viewers, demanding more information on this all-too-real effort. Needless to say, 'Alternative 3' was all just a big hoax, a spoof of similarly styled conspiracy documentaries from that period. It was originally planned to air on April 1st (April Fool's Day) of that year, in order to drive that point home, but due to production issues was not broadcast until June 20.

Needless to say, it freaked a whole lot of people out, in the same manner that Orson Welles' radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds caused mass hysteria almost forty years earlier. Although Anglia Television and the show's producers freely and readily admitted that it was fake, the basic points and premises of 'Alternative 3' live on to this day in various forms in other global cabal/UFO/extraterrestrial conspiracy theories.

The score for the 1977 broadcast was composed by no less than Brian Eno, who subsequently released a portion of it on his 1978 album Music For Films. And in 2001, a collective of musicians (including Stereolab, Add N to (X), Richard Thomas and others, all recording under the Alternative 3 moniker) recorded and released an 'alternative' version of the film score, allegedly for a feature film on the hoax that was scheduled for release that same year (I didn't find any evidence that this movie was ever produced or released, however).

This album is promoted on the label's website as "Super fried electronic madness. Long lost sessions mostly recorded at the Centre of Sound in London plus some dubs done at the ‘labs studio, stretched and twisted into dense and filmic slices of electronica." Can't really argue with any of that description!

 

So here for your listening pleasure is a smorgasbord of Stereolab's Mary Hansen-related ephemera:

• Europa 51 - Abstractions, released by London-based experimental music label Lo Recordings in 2003;
• Splitting the Atom - Splitting The Atom EP, put out on Stereolab's own Duophonic Super 45s label in 1997;
• The Spooky Sounds Of Now compilation, launched by Scottish independent label Vesuvius Records, also in 1997; and
• Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording, another Lo Recordings release, put out on April 30th, 2001

Have a listen and once again contemplate and revel in the artistry of the late, lamented vocalist, who left this world way too soon - you are still missed, Mary, by multitudes of music fans.

And as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

• Europa 51 - Abstractions: Send Email
• Splitting The Atom - Spiltting The Atom EP: Send Email
• Various Artists - Spooky Sounds Of Now: Send Email
• Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording: Send Email

Schema - Schema EP

Another quickie "thank you" post in the wake of this blog's 500,000th visitor yesterday...

In my Mary Hansen (Stereolab) post from about five years ago, I mentioned that a couple of years prior to her untimely death in a London road accident, Mary was involved in a one-off collaboration with members of the Seattle alt-rock group Hovercraft in a collective called Schema, whose sole release was an obscure five-song EP.

To save you the trouble of searching it out for yourselves, here it is for your enjoyment - the Schema EP, recorded and remixed in Seattle in 1999, and released on indie label 5 Rue Christine Records on October 3rd, 2000. All of the songs on this disc are great, with my personal favorite being "Far From Where We Began", featuring Mary's voice prominently:

Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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Mary Hansen - Hybird EP

I should have been a Stereolab fan long before I actually became one, but for some reason the band and I never connected up.  They had long been on the periphery of my consciousness, but it took years for the connection between us to be made.

Oddly enough, I had the opportunity to be into Stereolab from nearly the very beginning. The band made their first U.S. appearance in the fall of 1992, with a week of shows in selected clubs on the East Coast. After their debut gig at the Knitting Factory in New York and a follow-on performance at the legendary Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, Stereolab travelled to the Nation's Capital for a show at the 9:30 Club on the evening of Sunday, October 25th. That afternoon, however, the band had scheduled an in-store performance at Vinyl Ink Records (now long defunct) in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, playing stuff off of their debut LP Peng!

I was actually in the store that very afternoon, a couple of hours earlier, trolling for CDs to replace some that had recently been stolen out of my car while it was parked overnight in my 'secure' apartment garage in Arlington (those thieving bastards took some great stuff - early import copies of stuff like The Fall's Dragnet and The Smiths' Hatful of Hollow - things that ended up taking years to replace). I messed around at Vinyl Ink for about an hour or so, but couldn't find anything I was looking for. I noticed the flyers around the store announcing the Stereolab gig, and I know I walked by the open area of the store where they would be playing several times during my visit that day (the mikes and cords were already set up). But I had no idea who the band was at the time, and didn't know a thing about their music. Plus, I didn't feel like hanging around Silver Spring all day . . . so I bolted. In hindsight, I made a big mistake.

It was years later that I began getting into the band. While on my grad school internship up in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the summer of 1996, I went to a show at TT The Bear's Place in Central Square that featured three bands, including the headliner The Kelley Deal 6000.  I enjoyed the music so much that over that night and the next day, I acquired the latest releases of all three, including The Laurels and Trona. Although at the time I didn't like Trona's album as much as I hoped I would, one song on it stood out - "Wow And Flutter", which I soon discovered was a cover version of a Stereolab song. After this revelation, I quickly ran out to find the source of the original - 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet, which I tracked down at the old HMV store in Brattle Square, near Harvard University.

With the first listen, I became an instant fan. Songs like "International Coloring Contest", "Ping Pong" and "Fiery Yellow" helped carry me through that summer. It was the music itself that first drew me in; It took me a little while to fully comprehend the Gallic-inflected, politically-charged lyrics of French-born lead singer Laetitia Sadier.  But I was jazzed enough about this band that I immediately set out to acquire their back catalogue.

The first of their past albums that I purchased was their most recent one (for that time), Emperor Tomato Ketchup, released in April 1996. I couldn't have picked a better one to stoke my Stereolab fandom - Emperor Tomato Ketchup was the first album where the band began to expand its musical horizons and move away from the "drone" rock that had been the hallmark of their earlier albums. On this album, Stereolab ventured into the realms of hard rock ("The Noise Of Carpet"), hip-hop ("Metronomic Underground"), funk ("Spark Plug") and dance music ("Emperor Tomato Ketchup"), while still retaining the group's unique sound and flair. I thought practically every song on this album was fantastic, but it was through the ones that became my particular favorites ("Cybele's Reverie" and "Les Yper Sound") that I first became more completely aware of the vocal byplay between Sadier and backing vocalist Mary Hansen.

Mary Hansen was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1966, one of eight children of a member of the Australian parliament and his wife, a former opera singer. Mary's early life was fairly uneventful; she graduated from high school at 17, and for a while worked at a bank and other businesses in and around the Brisbane area. Tiring of her routine life in Australia, Mary moved to London, England in 1988, where she began dabbling on the fringes of the local music scene there.  She soon became a backing singer for local indie rock artists The Wolfhounds (one of their songs was included on the celebrated and influential NME C86 cassette compilation in 1986).

At a show in 1989, The Wolfhounds opened for the band McCarthy, at the time a big name in English indie rock. Hansen met McCarthy guitarist and band founder Tim Gane at the gig, and they quickly became friends. Gane broke up McCarthy soon after that aforementioned gig, and with his girlfriend Sadier and transplanted Kiwi musician Martin Kean (briefly a member of New Zealand's The Chills) began working on a new project that quickly evolved into Stereolab. Gane didn't forget his new friend, though. He invited Mary to join the new band just before the band's first recordings; by the time Stereolab's first LP, Peng!, was released in April 1992, Mary was a full-fledged member, playing guitar and keyboards and contributing backup vocals.

Hansen's voice was the perfect complement to Sadier's; their singing styles and vocal range were very similar . . . but different enough to add nuance and color to many of the band's songs. Those two songs I mentioned above, "Cybele's Reverie" and "Les Yper Sound", were the ones that first hooked me on the depth and quality of their intertwined voicess. But as the years passed and my Stereolab fandom (and collection) grew, I found many more examples of this byplay that I fell in love with: "Sadistic" and "Lo Boob Oscillator" from Refried Ectoplasm, "Miss Modular" and "Refractions In The Plastic Pulse" off of Dots & Loops; "Captain Easychord" from Sound-Dust. By the early 2000s, Hansen and Sadier had all but perfected their unique 'sing-song' style of vocal counterpoint and harmony that helped establish Stereolab as one of the best, most influential bands of the era. As far as I was concerned, "The Groop" had never put out a bad song, and I looked forward to each new release every year or so.

Stereolab released Sound-Dust in late 2001, and in 2002 they began preparing for their next album by building their own studio in France. There was a little band friction over that summer, as Gane and Sadier ended their long romantic relationship. But they elected to remain together as band mates, and keep Stereolab going as an operating concern. As a lead-up to commencing recording of their next album in their new home, in October their label released ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions, a compilation of the band's live recordings over the years on the BBC. At the end of that year, the group was preparing to leave London and relocate to Bordeaux for their next recording session. All in all, things were looking pretty positive for the band.

On the afternoon of December 9th, 2002, Mary Hansen was killed when a truck backed into her while she was riding her bicycle near London's Finsbury Square.

At that time, I was reading a lot of online news, regularly reviewing major domestic and international Internet sources like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, SkyNews and Reuters. I came across the news of Mary's death while browsing the December 10th version of BBC News, and I was just . . . stunned. It seemed unreal, and unfathomable. I never knew much about her private life or personality - all of the members of Stereolab were enigmas in that regard, offering up few personal details in their music and interviews. But Mary's loss was a significant blow to me. What I knew of her, I knew through her music . . . and now the source of that music was no more, gone in an instant. It was hard to wrap my head around it. The jolt I received from her death was just as great as the one I received less than two weeks later, when the sudden death of The Clash's Joe Strummer made international headlines.

Stereolab was just as stunned as their fans were; the band went on a long hiatus as its members grieved for their lost friend. But near the end of 2003, Stereolab began to regroup, and by that fall had released their first post-Hansen recording, the Instant 0 In The Universe EP. The band continued releasing albums and EPs up until their breakup in late 2009. I quite enjoyed all of these releases, including long-players like 2004's Margerine Eclipse (essentially a Hansen tribute album) and 2008's Chemical Chords, and I attended a couple of the band's tours during that time. But as good as the music continued to be, there always seemed to be something . . . missing from late-period Stereolab in terms of their musical approach - and that missing piece was the small but essential contribution Mary Hansen made to each and every recording.

Hansen had a very active musical life outside of Stereolab, recording vocals on releases by Mouse On Mars and The High Llamas, and teaming up with members of Seattle band Hovercraft to form the space-rock collective Schema (which released an EP in 2000).  But very little of Hansen's own music was available until 2005, over two years after her passing, when her friends gathered up the few recordings she had made on her own and released them on the EP Hybird. The disc (featuring Hansen's own artwork) contains three songs that she completed before her death, plus a fourth previously unfinished track that was completed by her old Stereolab bandmate Andy Ramsey. The music is infused with the signature 'Stereolab sound', but filtered through Hansen's own musical esthetic. The best track, in my opinion, is "Twenty Feet Behind", a gentle, swirling wash of organ, xylophone and drums, suffused with Mary's signature "Ah-ahs" . . . beautiful.

But I'll let you hear the rest for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Here, for your listening pleasure, is the only solo release by Stereolab's Mary Hansen, the Hybird EP, released posthumously on Horizontal Records on February 18th, 2005. Have a listen, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link ASAP:  

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