Hannah Marcus
Biography
Someone said once about nineties San Francisco that you’d go out for a cappuccino and wake up eleven years later. This is pretty much an internal travelogue of those eleven years. It is a representative collection of material Hannah Marcus wrote and recorded from 1993 to 2004. It’s got lots of interesting guest artists. Lots of ‘sweeping grandeur.” (NY Times).
Four or five years in the middle were spent in LA, and at the last four tunes were recorded back east. But much of the material is psychically situated in 90’s San Francisco: the rent was cheap, the books were real, the S&M was DIY. Meth reigned as devil king in restaurant kitchens, mopey drummers doted on their candyapple Mopars. (I speak here of the late great Tim Mooney.) The phones were dumb, god knows there were no Teslas. But the kids were already appropriating neon signed hobo bars for use as music venues. Some of them are still there. Not the kids, the venues. The kids are gone and replaced by new kids, which is what happens to kids.
In 1990 or so Hannah heard American Music Club playing in a parking lot in broad daylight and struck up a conversation with Mark Eitzel - who was on MDMA at the time - that was a pivotal moment - anyhow - the Demerol demos were produced in 1993 by Mark Kozelek, after he heard her playing upstairs at a laundromat and she heard him in a basement. Hannah loved visiting Mark K at the Cow Hollow motel where he worked at the front desk - he wore bizarrely loud hideous wide ties while on the job.
They made Demerol and River of Darkness together.
Hannah was signed to the German label Normal Records and did a tour of 23 German cities that was a fucking nightmare but also a good time. She recalls being rowed in a boat on the Rhine with a Portishead cassette on the boombox.
The material from Faith Burns was written mostly in Los Angeles at the time of the white Bronco, the 94 earthquake, and a marriage. Hannah lived in Highland Park but San Francisco called and she moved back, lured by a hapless lust, and recorded Black Hole Heaven at Pig’s Head studio on Dore street South of Market there.
Hannah finally returned to New York in the spring of 2001 - what a relief it was that there would be no more earthquakes to worry about…
The last 4 tunes in this compilation were written back in NYC and recorded in Montreal. Some guys from Godspeed You!Black Emperor were listening to “Vampire Snowman” in a tour van and decided to ask Hannah to open for them on a leg of the tour. She was of course blown sideways by the encounter, and the connection turned into an album project recorded in Montreal in 2003 at the legendary old Hotel2Tango. The US dollar was worth so much Canadian money at the time that Hannah’s dog Raymond and she once impuniously bunked together in a room at the Ritz Carlton during a very snowy evening.
And those were the eleven years. The Hotel2Tango has another space now - more solid and less redolent of animal excretions and exhaust fumes - but we still have a bunch of songs we made at that beloved old space in the early 2000s - and that collection will be shared ex post facto.
Love,
Lion Wintersea, with Hannah Marcus
Releases
TEN BONES FROM A VIRGIN GRAVEYARD
Released at last into the wild, this early 2000’s jalopy of dark and loving lit-folk Americana and post-rock musical theatre numbers by unrepentant female singer-songwriter Hannah Marcus features a host of weird and wonderful luminaries and n’er-do wells - including several acknowledged emperors of anarchist caravan Godspeed You! Black Emperor, genius horn player-composer Matana Roberts, and Taliban! Drummer Kevin Shea.
Desert Farmers
Hannah Marcus follows a path seldom traveled since the earliest days of 20th Century punk, NYC –style. On Desert Farmers, she recalls the incantatory power of Patti Smith circa Horses and the mystery and carefully crafted foreboding of Nick Cave’s quieter moments or John Cale’s chillingly austere productions for Nico. Her music is as artful as it is iconoclastic and leaves plenty of room for poetry. Hannah is forward-thinking and fearless, emulating the spirit if not exactly the sound of her progenitors, and on her latest release she’s aided and abetted on much of it by the equally visionary members of Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Together they’ve created an album that’s transfixing and beautiful, startling and disturbing.
The enigmatic cult faves GYBE were already fans of Hannah when they invited her two years ago to open shows for them in Amsterdam and in Germany, where Hannah has long had a following. Touring in tandem led to their recording together; Desert Farmers was recorded and mixed in Montreal at Godspeed’s home base, the Hotel2Tango. Key players included GYBE guitarist Efrim Manuck and bassist Thierry Amar, as well as violinist Jessica Moss of the GYBE offshoot, A Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra.
On its own, Godspeed You! Black Emperor creates eerie, wordless soundscapes; combined with Hannah’s narratives and vocals, the tracks become all the more compelling. It’s haunting, riveting stuff, like a book that might be scaring the hell out of you but that you still can’t put down. There’s definitely a unique literary bent to Hannah’s work; lyrics for two of the tracks were adapted from the writing of another Hannah admirer, and now frequent collaborator, author Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, Purple America).
Referring to the slow, cinematic pace of her material, one critic declared Hannah “the Jim Jarmusch of indie rock.” Time Out magazine said of Hannah: "Many artists aspire to create and populate their own worlds, but Hannah Marcus actually succeeds." All one has to do is listen to the remarkable riff of “Hairdresser in Taos" that Hannah works into a drug fueled road trip with surreal results. Sympathetic playing by Thierry and Efrim (of GYBE) move the performance to a transcendent conclusion that picks up on the work Patti Smith abandoned after Horses. On "Desert Farmer" a simple plucked parched guitar sounds like drops of rain in the sand as Hannah sings "when you got clean you took your loot and sunk it into dragonfruit and now you have become a desert farmer." The guitar part gets more complex as the rain comes down and when the contrabass comes in the listener can feel the desert coming into full bloom.
Black Hole Heaven
"The landlord’s son is a drunken bum and he weed whacks weed whacks all the time. Once he got so bombed that he took out his scythe and he chopped down all the Birds Of Paradise behind Lot 309 He went wild... "
Lot 309 (track 1)
So begins the beautiful bittersweet Black Hole Heaven. For her forth album Hannah Marcus takes us on a Kafka-esque cook's tour of the new western front, from the psychotropical artist haunts of San Francisco and Los Angeles to the fluorescent sunsets of Los Alamos. It is an epic tale of love and chemicals. "I wanted to make a big 70’s rock concept album when I started" explains Hannah. "But then things went awry. I got divorced, and began staying up way too late at night." The net effect is a woman bouncing between the gods and he cockroaches, waxing turmoil with the wonder of it all. Some artists make albums that are a collection of snappy numbers to tap your toe to-- Hannah Marcus writes songs that will inhabit you.
Alone in her apartment she began recording songs on an ADAT - the basic tracks for "Los Alamos", "Crimson Bird", and the revivified "Osiris In Pieces", the humble yet hopeful "Tired Swan" and the wonderfully resigned "Darling How Are You". She gave them to Tim Mooney who was very excited about continuing with the project and encouraged her to go back in the studio. Tim co-produced the record, bringing in such musicians as guitar effects master Michael Belfer (Tuxedomoon, Black Lab), DJ Ill Media (from Most Chill Slackmob) and Joe Goldring returned to play and work on the mixes, (especially "Osiris In Pieces"). The album emerged like a lotus from the muck.
Hannah Marcus is a reporter back from the edge and Black Hole Heaven is her intra-galactic war chronicle of the heart - dark to be sure - but infused with lucid wonder and humor that transcends mere irony. Imagine that.