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

Various Artists - This Is Rockabilly Clash

Stumbled across this one a couple of years ago, in my ongoing search for anything and everything related to The Clash.  It's a compendium of Clash tunes reworked by several bands in the rockabilly/psychobilly style.  Here's the lineup of songs and artists:

1. Guns of Brixton - The Honeydippers
2. Career Opportunities - Farrell Bros.
3. Capitol Radio - The Hyperjax
4. Jail Guitar Doors - The Caravans
5. Train In Vain - The Sabrejets
6. Should I Stay Or Should I Go? - Long Tall Texans
7. I'm So Bored With The U.S.A. - XX Cortez
8. Jimmy Jazz - Frantic Flintstones
9. What's My Name? - The Charles Napiers
10. Bank Robber - The Pistoleers
11. Brand New Cadillac - The Accelerators
12. Janie Jones - Farrell Bros.
13. Know Your Rights - The Caravans
14. Guns Of Brixton - Rancho Deluxe

Some tunes here work better than others... but all in all, this is a great group of songs providing an interesting, different take on some familiar music from Strummer, Jones & Co., in a style with which the original band was not unfamiliar with.

No long-winded story from me regarding this one...  Posting this for no reason whatsoever, other than I like it, and thought that some of you might like it as well.  Here's the compilation This Is Rockabilly Clash, released on Raucous Records in the UK on July 11th, 2003.  Enjoy, and let me know what you think about it as well.

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The North Atlantic - Wires In The Walls

The indie band The North Atlantic, comprised of brothers Jason Hendrix on lead vocals and guitar) and drummer Cullen Hendrix, along with their friend Jason Richards on bass, came together while the three were attending Kalamazoo College in Michigan in the late 1990s.  After Cullen's graduation, all three members relocated to San Diego, California to make a go at the music

industry.  Their debut album, the mostly-unheard Buried Under Tundra, was released there on Applep Records in mid-2001.  But the disc did get them a little bit of notice in certain quarters.

The band kept playing and touring in the Southern California area for the next couple of years, recording their sophomore album, Wires In The Walls, during this period and pressing a few hundred copies to sell at their shows.  The group went on hiatus shortly thereafter to allow Jason to go back to school to complete his degree, before reconvening in late 2005.

The North Atlantic's sound has been described as "math rock", an indie variation of '70s progressive rock championed by bands such as King Crimson and minimalist composers from that period like Steve Reich.  One definition I found of it described math rock as being "characterized by complex, atypical rhythmic structures (including irregular stopping and starting), counterpoint, odd time signatures (such as 7/8, 11/8 or 13/8), angular melodies, and extended, often  dissonant chords."  To me, this just sounds like the approach practically every other indie/punk band at the time, like Fugazi, Slint, Black Flag and Broken Social Scene, was taking.  Thus, I never have really "gotten" math rock...  It always seemed to me like the term was unnecessary, and slicing up the alternative/indie music genres/subgenres just a little too thin.

In any event, The North Atlantic had its (very) brief moment in the sun in the mid-2000s.  Shortly after Jason's college graduation and return to the band, The Syndicate, a West Coast radio promotion company, decided to expand into artist management and marketing, and picked up the then-three-year-old album for rerelease on their new label.  Wires In The Walls started getting moderate airplay on independent/alternative stations across the country.

I was living in Massachusetts at the time, and my local go-to station began playing the lead single, "Scientist Girl", fairly often.  Other than the sound and instrumentation featured in the song, what really grabbed me was that the band had the nerve/balls to not only name-check The Clash, but also lift one of their lyrics from the Clash song "Straight To Hell":

I was hooked, and based on this one song, I started looking everywhere in the Boston area for this album, without any luck.

This was also during the time when I would regularly travel three hours down the road with my toddler children to New York City some weekends.  I never spent much time in the Big Apple until I was in my mid-twenties, but from then on I always considered it a fun, "happening" place to be, and I vowed that my kids wouldn't have to wait as long as I did to see the city for themselves.  I would place the three of them in the big stroller, and we would roam all over town - visiting the museums, going to the Central Park Zoo and letting them play in the playgrounds there, browsing through the huge old F.A.O. Schwarz and Toys R Us locations, checking out new places to eat... all sorts of stuff.  I'm happy and proud to say that, now that my kids are teenagers, they KNOW New York.  They no longer have any interest in going to the touristy areas - they have their favorite shops and haunts in Soho and the Flatiron District; they know what subway trains to take to get to Harlem or Union Square; they know how to look at the light posts in Central Park and

know exactly what street they're parallel to; and before both locations closed, they regarded the Benash Delicatessen with disdain, considering The Carnegie (where we went so often, many of the staff knew their names) directly across the street the best deli in Midtown.  So I guess I did that part with them all right.

It was during one of our NYC trips late that summer that I was bound and determined to find that North Atlantic album.  So while we were there, I made a hateful side trip through Times Square (a locale I try very hard to avoid), pushing a loaded stroller through dense

crowds of tourists, in order to visit the old Virgin Megastore right there in the center of the square.  Once inside, I couldn't move around there much with three small children in tow, so I flagged down an employee and told him what I was looking for.  The guy disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with the CD I wanted.  I was in and out of there in less than five minutes!

I was happy to finally own the album... but again, I only bought it for one song.  So I can't say that this disc has been in heavy rotation in my house for the past decade and a half.  But listening to "Scientist Girl" again just recently, I still get the same sort of buzz I got when I first heard it, all those years ago.

And here it is for you all to get buzzed on as well:  Wires In The Walls, the second (and apparently last) release by The North Atlantic, originally released by the band on May 23rd, 2003, and rereleased by We Put Out Records on July 11th, 2006.  Have a listen, and as always, let me know what you think.

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The Fall - Country On The Click (Bootleg Version)

In the aftermath of the infamous April 1998 punch-up at The Fall's Brownies gig in New York, when most of the band (including longtime stalwarts like Steve Hanley and Karl Burns) permanently departed the group, Mark E. Smith and remaining member (and his then-girlfriend) keyboardist Julia Nagle quickly cobbled together some replacement musicians (including bass guitarist Adam Halal, drummer Tom Head and guitarist Neville Wilding) to constitute a 'new' Fall. This hastily assembled lineup

somehow managed to coalesce into a unit, and released two well-received and critically acclaimed albums, 1999's The Marshall Suite and 2000's superb The Unutterable.

But, as usual and true to form, Smith just couldn't leave well enough alone. Due to either real or contrived reasons (some reports suggested that there was a royalty payment dispute among band members, although Halal later denied this), he sacked all of the new members in early 2001, reducing The Fall to just himself and Nagle once again. After another chaotic, haphazard scramble for new members (which was apparently too much for Nagle; she too left the band that spring), another group lineup (consisting of guitarists Ben Pritchard and Ed Blaney, drummer Spencer Birtwistle and bassist Jim Watts) was assembled. I assume that in doing so, Smith hoped he could once again recapture the same sort of creative magic he got just two years earlier, from musicians not fully initiated into the whys and wherefores, the history and mythology of The Mighty Fall. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way, initially.

Although The Unutterable was superior to its predecessor and got outstanding reviews, its sales and chart position were significantly below that of The Marshall Suite. This was probably due to the lack of support from the band's new label; Smith attempted to parlay the success of The Marshall Suite into a better recording deal, and moved from Artful Records to Eagle Records (a division of Universal Music Group) in late 1999/early 2000. But the English label (home to ancient prog-rock groups like Deep Purple, Yes, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer) didn't quite know how to market The Fall, with predictable results.

The result of this was that the band was in dire financial straits in 2001. So while it was necessary to get an album released that year to generate some much-needed revenue for the group, they really didn't have the funds to do a top-notch job of producing it. Feeling that they had been mismanaged and underpromoted, The Fall had left Eagle for Voiceprint Records earlier that year (the latter label had acquired Smith's own Cog Sinister imprint in 1997) - but this label wasn't exactly rolling in money either (Voiceprint's holding company ended up going insolvent a few years later). As a result, the first album with this latest lineup was recorded on the cheap, very quickly in subpar conditions. Ben Pritchard later described the wretchedness of the situation:

"It was a very miserable experience making that album. We were recording it in a studio where there were rats running around. There was a weightlifter's gymnasium above us, you'd be recording a take and suddenly you'd hear BOOM dropping barbells and dumb-bells on the floor and you'd have to stop and start again... I wasn't there a lot of the time they were recording that album. Just cos I couldn't deal with it. Ed Blaney, Jim, Spen, Mark, Steve Lloyd the producer was there. I didn't really know anyone, it was my first time recording and it was a miserable, horrible experience... [It was] rushed. Two or three weeks, it was done. He needed the album out, the group needed the money for it."

The resultant disc, Are You Are Missing Winner (released in November 2001), frankly sucked, in my opinion - full of (mostly) bad songs ill-conceived and poorly executed, recorded with a wildly uneven mix; apparently the album was pushed out the door so fast, there was little time spent properly mastering the tracks. Even Pritchard, who played on it, referred to it as a "horrible album". The critics savaged it, and it was the first Fall album since 1983's Perverted By Language to completely miss the British Top 200 charts. Are You Are Missing Winner was a trainwreck from start to finish.

In serious trouble now, the group responded by touring relentlessly during the latter part of 2001 and the first half of 2002. These shows included an extensive U.S. tour in the fall of 2001, the first in this country by the band since the Brownies debacle nearly four years earlier (I saw them play at the Knitting Factory in New York that November, during their three-night stand at that venue), along with two full-scale European

tours.  This intense series of concerts produced 2G+2, a June 2002 release (on yet another new label, Action Records) consisting mostly of live material culled from their U.S. shows, along with three new studio songs ("New Formation Sermon", "I Wake Up in the City" and "Distilled Mug Art"). This album actually charted in Britain this time; no great heights (#116), but high enough to keep the wolf from the band's door for a bit.

The scheduling of this multitude of shows, one on top of the other, had another more salubrious effect; it transformed this version of The Fall into a cohesive group, with chops honed from dozens of live performances. This group was more than ready for their next challenge; to improve upon their debut studio recording debacle.

The Fall entered Gracieland Studios in Lancashire in December 2002 to begin work on this latest release, sessions helmed once again by longtime band producer Grant Showbiz. After eight weeks of recording and a month of remixing by Showbiz and Watts, promo copies of the new album, titled Country On The Click, were made from the mixing reference discs and forwarded to selected reviewers, with an eye towards an early spring 2003 release date.

However, an unnamed and unidentified individual, for reasons of his/her own, leaked these demo versions onto the Internet shortly before the scheduled release.  As Jim Watts recalled in a post on The Fall Forum about three years ago:

"I found one of the reference CDs in a drawer recently. The leak came from those CDs and if I remember correctly there were only a handful ever made. I think I worked out exactly who leaked the album in the end. I know they meant well but at the time I was just as annoyed as Mark about the leak. I think they thought by getting it out there it reinforced our version versus Mark's but it just made a bad situation worse.

The leak version was pretty much mine and Grant Showbiz's vision. We edited and mixed all the tracks. I followed Grant's lead as at that point he was the named producer of the album and I thought we had Mark's blessing. I really wanted the album to be a lot more solid than [Are You Are] Missing Winner musically and sonically. I slept on the engineers drafty living room floor for 5 days while we were mixing in London."

The unauthorized release of these album tracks enraged Smith; just as Watts mentioned above, Mark saw it as a power move by the producer to subvert his "artistic vision" of what he wanted the release to sound like:

"Mark heard that CD and was really unhappy with it. I totally understand why, me and Grant had painstakingly gone through every single utterance of Mark's from the tapes then edited the vocals very heavily. Obviously after all my effort I was quite upset too. We fell out and Mark took the album into Dingo's studio and they worked on it."

In his rage, Smith commandeered the basic album tracks from Showbiz and, as Watts mentioned, took them to Simon 'Dingo' Archer's 6dB Studios in Salford (Mark's hometown), whereupon he proceeded to remix and partially re-record the disc (Archer's bass-playing skills were utilized in the new recordings of four songs, including "Green Eyed Loco Man" and "Mad Mock Goth"). These efforts took up most of the summer (during which The Fall made another swing through the U.S., to make up for a planned late 2002 tour that fell through). At the end of this, Smith used his remastered

tracks to re-sequence the entire album, and renamed it The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country On The Click). The disc was released in England in October 2003.

The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country On The Click) was greeted with near-ecstatic reviews by the critics. A few examples of the praise for this album:

"If The Fall... have not just released their best record in a decade, they have certainly released a more consistent and accessible one, just in time for the tail-end of the post-punk renaissance."

"This is the sound, throughout, of a remarkable institution doing all the things they do best and sounding as alive as they ever have."

"Great by Smith's standards. Practically genius by everybody else's."

"It's brilliant."

Smith completely disowned the leaked version of this album, and as time has passed, this initial mix has faded into the background, obscured and buried beneath the torrent of praise the released version engendered. But that isn't to say that the Showbiz/Watts version is without merit. There are significant differences in the music featured on both versions, but in my opinion not enough to sway one's overall preference from one to another. I think BOTH versions are superb. And in that, I completely agree with Watts' assessment:

"I 100% support the released version as the definitive album... But I suppose more than enough time has passed now for the leaked version to be accepted for what it is without stealing the official version's thunder now."

And here it is, for you all to listen to and accept for yourself: the bootleg version of Country On The Click, the alternate mix of The Real New Fall LP, released under shady circumstances onto the Internet in early 2003. Enjoy, and as always let me know what you think.

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The Fall - (We Wish You A) Protein Christmas EP (plus a bonus Fall Christmas song)

I'm jazzed about this posting - it lets me combine my whole Christmas schtick with the rabid fandom I have for my favorite band, The Fall.

Here's The Fall's EP (We Wish You A) Protein Christmas, released by Action Records in 2003. Only one song on this CD, the title cut, has anything to do with Christmas. The other three songs are taken from the Country On The Click sessions from earlier that year ("Mad Mock Goth" would later appear on 2004's stopgap LP Interim). Here's the lineup:

1.  (We Wish You A) Protein Christmas 3:32
2.  (We Are) Mod Mock Goth 4:44
3.  (Birtwistle's) Girl In Shop 3:54
4.  Recovery Kit 2 # 4:04

Here you are:

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And as a special addition to this posting, I'm including The Fall's song "Christmastide", included on the bonus disc added to select editions of 1997's Levitate. I personally consider this one to be the best Fall holiday song - not that they have that many to begin with (although "Protein Christmas" isn't bad either). Enjoy.

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