TEENBEAT !

Industrial Sabotage was one of the gems of the American label Random Radar, a label in its own right maybe the only one in the early 80s still putting out consistent work in various progressive fields. Even for such a diverse catalog, Mars Everywhere were quite iconoclastic, creating an album of improvisational music that married the space rock style with electronics. On one hand Mars Everywhere shared a similar inspiration to groups like Gong, Far East Family Band, and Hawkwind while on the other it was electronic masters like Tangerine Dream or Conrad Schnitzler who provided the influence. Ernie Falcone’s change in line up to include drums and bass on a more regular basis altered the sound of the band to bring it closer to the krautrock inspirations of yesteryear. The sound is generally improvisationally based, although the presence of song titles on here that were several years old give witness to an improvisational method with guideposts, an approach that would cause pieces like “Attack of the Giant Squid” to vary from performance to performance. For an early 80s album, Industrial Sabotage seems quite anachronistic, looking back to the early 70s and the dawn of the analog synthesizer for primary inspiration, while not losing a bit of unabashed, groundbreaking experimentation in the process. Perhaps it was the early years of Mars Everywhere that set the stage for the album, what is basically a collection of pieces from various permutations of the line-up (that all include founder Falcone, bassist Greg Yaskovich and multi-instrumentalist Barney Jones), as the move to more rock-oriented song structures did not bring with it any sense of the conventional. There are plenty of effected saxes, wailing guitar solos, scuttling electronics and cosmic space outs to appeal to any fan of psychedelic, experimental rock. (Mike McLatchey)

Mars Everywhere - Attack Of The Giant Squid