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Mars, "Live at Artists Space"
While Mars were never the most out there of the No Wave movement (they always had a strong rock’n’roll vibe on the studio recordings) but they certainly weren't the most vital to these ears. Their studio recordings, long available at this stage, offered a window into what the group were doing but the collected works were far too brief, too tame. This LP is the first of two new live recordings of the band and shows them in ferocious form. The idea of them being a weirdo rock band is exploded and forgotten; this is phenomenal music that defies categorization or comprehension.
 
Live at Artists Space documents two sets performed by Mars at the New York venue during the legendary run of concerts by the bulk of the No Wave movement. This was the festival where Brian Eno witnessed these young, angry bands and put together the classic No New York compilation. Listening to Mars’ performance, it is easy to hear why he was so enthused over the whole thing. Mars absolutely tear apart the air with their anti-rock; hard angles and sharp edges forming in the notes and rhythms of the music.
Both the sets included here (one on each side of the record) cover the same 8 songs, two of which were never put to tape in the studio. However, like a jazz quartet they explore different aspects of the pieces with each rendition. A change of inflection, maybe emphasising, de-emphasising or re-emphasising a chord or a vocal causes a massive shift in the tone of the piece. Both versions of "11000 Volts" destroy any previous recordings I have heard and the rendition of "Puerto Rican Ghost" that closes the first set sounds like a vortex which sucks you into the grey void in between the walls of a disused apartment block in a run-down part of town.
Needless to say after that paragraph that the vibes that ooze from this record bring the music of Mars to another place that the clear but, by comparison, dead studio recordings never reached. Live at Artists Space is one of those live albums like Swans’ Public Castration is a Good Idea or Neil Young’s Weld where the artists’ powers were at a zenith and luckily somebody thought to hit record. With another Mars live LP on the way, it begs the question whether Feeding Tube Records have more recordings from this festival because if any of the other bands managed to grab Eno’s attention when Mars sounded as good as this, then they must have been as incendiary.
 
