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

Stereolab - Solar Throw-Away 7"

Stereolab's 2006 double-A side tour single, sold at only a handful of venues in Europe and North America during the band's extremely brief series of concerts in the early part of that year.

By the time of this release, it already seemed as though the band was making plans to wind down from its long career. The death of Mary Hansen in late 2002 and its aftermath (which

included the recording of the group's Hansen tribute album Margerine Eclipse, released in 2004) seemed to sap a lot of drive and energy out of Stereolab, and understandably so. That's not to say that the group's creative juices had run dry - there was still plenty of good music to come from them, including the Fab Four Suture collection later in 2006 and Chemical Chords in mid-2008. But it should be noted that around the same period as

the 2006 tour came two "best of" compilation releases, the three-disc Oscillions From The Anti-Sun retrospective in late 2005 and Serene Velocity (featuring highlights from their years with the Elektra label) in late 2006. Putting a series of comps out in such a short period of time isn't exactly a move made by a band planning on hanging around for very long . . .

But even with the time left allotted to them, Stereolab didn't rest on its laurels. Up until the very end (marked by 2010's Not Music, released more than a year after the band announced it was going on permanent hiatus), the group continued refining and experimenting with its signature sound. This record provided here is no exception.

So, for your enjoyment, here's a hard-to-find Stereolab rarity, the Solar Throw-Away 7", released on their label Duophonic on March 1st, 2006. 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(s) ASAP:

Send Email

Uilab - Fires EP

Here's another one of Stereolab's many collaborations during their long band history, this time with New York City-based post-rock instrumental group Ui.   UI, founded in 1990, was known for its frequent use of two bass guitars in their sample-heavy, electronica/dub music, along with other uncommon instruments such as the banjo, tuba and timpani.  These guys (Sasha Frere-Jones (now a writer with The New Yorker), Clem Waldmann and Wilbo Wright) were active for well over a decade, releasing three LPs and numerous singles and EPs before breaking up in 2004.

This particular EP was recorded at Southern Studios, London in the summer of 1996, while Ui was on a European tour with Stereolab serving as their opening act.  However, the label didn't get around to mixing and releasing the EP until well over a year later, in late October 1997.  This EP features, among other songs, an excellent cover of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire", off of his 1975 Another Green World album, along with three radical remixes of the same song.

I don't have any long-winded story related to this disc, other than I recall grabbing this at the old Virgin Megastore in Grapevine, Texas shortly after it was released.  I was just listening to it the other day, and thought that others might like to have a listen to it as well.  Sometimes, brevity is best!

So, here you are - Uilab's Fires EP, released in February 1998 on Duophonic Records (Stereolab's privately owned label).  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 ASAP:

Send Email

Stereolab - Rose, My Rocket-Brain! EP

Here's a three-song EP by Stereolab, made available on a 3" CD at shows during their 2004 Margerine Eclipse tour. I got mine at their show at DC's 9:30 Club that year - great show, by the way. To the best of my knowledge, these songs haven't been released on any subsequent Stereolab compilation. And since the band called it quits a year ago, I don't expect to see this released on anything anytime soon.

All three songs are superb, especially the last, "University Microfilms International". I like the first one too (apparently, there was an error on the CD label, as the names of the first two songs, "Rose, My Rocket-Brain! (Rose, le cerveau électronique de ma fusée!)" and "Banana Monster ne répond plus" were transposed in error - "Rose" is first). Listen closely to the lyrics of "Rose" - I love how Stereolab inserts pointed political commentary into their songs!

Here ya go - enjoy:

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

Send Email

Turn On - Turn On

A one-off side project featuring Tim Gane and Andy Ramsey from Stereolab and Sean O'Hagen of the High Llamas, released in 1997 on Duophonic Records (Stereolab's label). Instead of a meld between the sound of the two bands, this record sounds totally like a Stereolab instrumental album, circa 1992-93 (think The Groop Played "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music" or Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements). But that's not a knock on the music - it's actually a pretty good album, and a required listen for devoted Stereolab fans.

This album got no airplay or support whatsoever when it came out - I found it almost by accident in a bin at the old Virgin Megastore in Grapevine, TX. But it was a fortunate find. Here - have a listen, and 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:

Send Email