A.C. Marias "one of our girls has gone missing" album

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as a bonus i included her cover of "Vicious" which was originally the bside of the "one of our girls has gone missing" single.
you'll also find her two singles "Time Was" and "Just Talk" on the album up for download here.







"Angela Conway (Marias is her Catholic middle name) made her first recordings in the company of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, sometime in 1978. She maintained working links with the Wire duo into the '80's, releasing a seven inch single called 'Drop' on their Dome label, and forming with them the semi-legendary P'O, who explored an experimental approach to melody on their 'Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Attention' album of 1984.

Described by the chanteuse as "music to disappear to", the first AC Marias single 'Just Talk', a collaboration between Angela and Bruce, appeared on Mute in September 1986. She described herself enigmatically as an "ex-babysitter, ex-girl, ex-traitor, on a mission to subvert the cretinous, moronic message of today's music," a statement she partially de-coded in a Melody Maker interview: "Ex-traitor I thought was quite funny, cos there's no such thing. Betrayal, whether it's personal or political, sticks with you always. The ex-babysitter has two meanings: looking after somebody els''s kids, obviously, but it's also spy slang for heavies who look after the defector in the safe house. I used to read that kind of John Le Carré spy fiction. I like the jargon. It's intriguing."

Duality was a notion constantly explored in her work. "I like the fact that there's this undercurrent of something not quite right underneath the beauty," she said of her music. "Strange noises underneath all the dreamy sounds."

The next AC Marias release was the single 'Time Was', a cover of a little known Canned Heat track, on which Angela was ably assisted by Barry Adamson, Bruce Gilbert and Rowland S Howard. "This one lets all the ghosts run wild," enthused Sounds. "Ms. Marias sings the lyric with a choirgirl's unblemished tranquility while all around Bruce Gilbert and Rowland S Howard spread a terrible wailing wall of slide guitars." "Everything I do is ambiguous, but simple," considered Conway. "It's not cryptic or precious."

Still she continued to engage and enthral. Whilst maintaining a parallel career as a video director, Angela set about creating an album in which to spread out her net of intrigue. On 'One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)' she and Bruce created a world of aural shadows and light, flickering mysteries that conveyed the stealth and intent of the true subversive. "Disappearance can be quite a powerful thing," Conway said of the title track, and later single. "To not be present can be more powerful than actually being present and proclaiming your identity as 'woman'. That can be quite rigid, which is why people often say they don't want to be categorised, because it can be confining." Similarly, with the suggestive washes of music, she was achieving more without stating the obvious: "It can defeat the object, if you just blast something out. That can become just as familiar and bland as anything." Sounds' album reviewed concurred: "These dreams are ultimately more terrifying since their ambient gentility conceals faceless fears, and terrors which have no name."

A final single, 'One Of Our Girls Has Gone Missing' followed in February 1990, and was an instant Single Of The Week in Melody Maker, whose Simon Reynolds enthused: "'One Of Our Girls' is thinnest air, at once sumptuous and austere: the kind of rarefied and confounding experience we'd ceased hoping from pop these days." It was coupled with a playful rework of Lou Reed's 'Vicious', assisted by The Mute Drivers. After which, leaving listeners with the "She's gone!" end refrain of the A-side playing out in their heads, AC Marias disappeared from view."