Sleeve notes
Mars
No New York · 1978
Mars formed in New York in the mid-1970s as one of the earliest and most uncompromising groups in what would become the no wave scene, building songs out of deliberately mistuned guitars, shouted or spoken vocals, and rhythms that resisted any conventional sense of groove. The band's music was closer to structured noise than to rock as commonly understood, treating dissonance and atonality not as an effect but as the entire compositional method.
Mars broke up before the end of the 1970s, leaving behind a small body of recorded work, most of it gathered on No New York (1978), the compilation that documented the scene for a wider audience alongside Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and James Chance and the Contortions. Despite the brevity of the band's existence, Mars's uncompromising rejection of conventional harmony and rhythm made it one of the most extreme and influential documents of the no wave scene's earliest phase.
