Every time I listen back to Mars I think of a great quote that came up in a conversation with Keiji Haino about rock music: there are four vibrations, Haino said, Joy Division, The Raincoats, The Only Ones and Mars. When asked what vibration he was he replied, Mars only. Which only goes to underline just how iconoclastic and individual Mars’ contribution to rock music was and how influential their legacy continues to be. Live At Artists Space may well function as the ultimate document of Mars’ martial re-think of rock form (was there ever a more appropriately named group?). Released as the first volume in what looks to be an on-going series of archival sides curated by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley under the Negative Glam banner, this staggering LP documents both sets in their entirety from the legendary Artists Space event that took place in NYC in May, 1978, with Brian Eno in attendance. After a run of shows from Communists, Terminal, Gynecologists, Theoretical Girls, Daily Life, Tone Death, Contortions and DNA, Mars shared the final night’s bill with Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. They played two sets, both of which replicate the exact same set list and each of which was recorded by a separate audience member, the first on a portable cassette recorder with three mics and the second using a binaural dummy. The results are staggering: this is Mars at an absolute apex of aggressively a-formal, rhythmically boggling peak, with guitars that sound like air raid sirens atop total refusenik rhythms. Despite the doubling up of the tracks the feel is radically different across both sets, as they grip the strings a little harder and fall into hypnotic rhythmic barrages. This feels a lot more like Year Zero than anything that came out of British Punk and it represents one of the most radical reformulations of the basic tenets of rock-as-rock to escape the 1970s, its effects still being felt in the work of everyone from Sonic Youth through Fushitsusha and in many ways Live At Artists Space is the monster their back catalogue has always been crying out for. Edition of 500 copies, a major release, highly recommended!