If you know anything about classic no-wave, you know Mars. Short-lived and commercially inaccessible, the band’s biggest claims to fame have always been their presence on Brian Eno’s seminal 1978 compilation documenting the formation of the no-wave scene, No New York, alongside The Contortions, DNA, and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, and, because of their fragmented recording output, a small handful of posthumous career-spanning compilations that amount to about a half-hour of collected studio material. Their enduring influence on the post-punk and avant-garde movements (as well as their long-standing prominence as a monumental performance powerhouse during CBGB punk era) has been in many ways inarguable for decades, but little concrete, commercially-available evidence exists to support the claims. The point is that knowing Mars has always meant not knowing much.
Over the last few years, though, the band’s bassist Mark Cunningham has been doing everything in his power to change that. After an archival project that began with the releases of two standalone live performances on Feeding Tube Records, Live at Artists Space and Live at Irving Plaza, Cunningham has culled from his collection of live cassettes enough material for a new trilogy of releases documenting Mars’s evolution as a live band.
The project began last year with the release of Mars Archives Volume One: China to Mars, and now Feeding Tube has scheduled the release of their latest collection, Mars Archives Volume Two: 11000 Volts to Tunnel, for October 14 in an edition of 500 LPs. According to Feeding Tube, recordings for the second volume were taken from live sets at CBGB and Max’s in 1978, around the time Mars was “in its first fully-matured form” and had just begun recording studio material, making it a potentially indispensable chronicle of the formative years of the no-wave movement.
Pre-orders for 11000 Volts to Tunnel are currently available at the Feeding Tube store.
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