No Oxygen On Mars

"No Oxygen On Mars" is the catalog's 2010 entry, and it sounds like little before it: layers of psydub, psychill and synthwave. The mid-century idiom is gone. What remains of the band's voice is a vocal line in an invented language, singing syllables that belong to no dictionary.

The title does the talking. Five words, a plain fact about a planet, and then not another word for the rest of the recording. Like "Sirens Of Sarurn" three decades earlier, the story is carried entirely by sound.

The recording also carries human vocal passages, and that is the story behind it. By the 2000s the band was losing its hold on a generation that had grown up with synthetic performers everywhere. Machine acts filled every stage from Earth to Mars, and The Atomic Songbirds, the ones who started it, were respected elders in a crowd. Frankie Evanz answered by doing what Frank had done quietly in the 1940s when the band needed a texture it did not have: she brought in a human singer. He performed as Aradaxus. No one ever learned his real name, and the band never gave it. This is the first release to carry the credit.

A voice needs air. On a world with no oxygen there is no breath, no speech, and no song, and the recording answers that condition in kind: it withholds language. The vocal is in a language no one speaks, over a planet where no one breathes. Whatever the syllables mean, they mean it the way the sirens of "Sirens Of Sarurn" did, by pull rather than statement.

It lands late in The Human-Like Age, when the catalog's machines had spent decades perfecting human speech. Setting language aside at that point reads as a choice, the same one the 1978 vocalise made, renewed in an electronic idiom.