MouseOnMars

VOODOO HOODOO RECORDINGS - 7

Download, Tracklisting & Interview: http://bit.ly/137C7pC

Groove Podcast 04 - Mouse On Mars

Mouse On Mars' favourites of their 21 years band history

Mouse On Mars 21. anniversary MOMCAST

Album: AAI
Thrill Jockey, 2021
Thrill 537

Mouse on Mars, the Berlin-based duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, approach electronic music with an inexhaustible curiosity and unparalleled ingenuity. Operating in their unique orbit within dance music’s nebulous echosystem, the duo’s hyper-detailed productions are inventive, groundbreaking but always possessing a signature joyful experimentation. A genre-less embrace of cutting-edge technologies have ensured that each Mouse on Mars release sounds strikingly modern, a fact made more remarkable when one reflects on the duo’s 25 years of making music. New album AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) takes Toma and Werner’s fascination with technology and undogmatic exploration a quantum leap further. Collaborating with writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, a collective of computer programmers and longtime Mouse On Mars collaborator/percussionist Dodo NKishi, the duo explores artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool, summoning their most explicitly science-fiction work to date.

AAI compiles some of the most immediate and gripping music in Mouse on Mars’ extensive catalogue. Emerging from a primordial ooze of rolling bass and skittering electronics, hypnotic polyrhythms and pulsing synthesizers propel the listener across the record’s expanse. Hidden in the duo’s hyper-detailed productions is a kind of meta-narrative. Working with AI tech collective Birds on Mars and former Soundcloud programmers Rany Keddo and Derek Tingle, the duo collaborated on the creation of bespoke software capable of modelling speech. What appears to be Louis Chude-Sokei narrating through the story is in fact the AI speaking. Text and voice from Chude-Sokei and DJ/producer and programmer Yağmur Uçkunkaya (DJ Rayne) were fed into the software as a model, allowing Toma and Werner to control parameters like speed or mood, thereby creating a kind of speech instrument they could control and play as they would a synthesizer. The album’s narrative is quite literally mirrored in the music - the sound of an artificial intelligence growing, learning and speaking. Artwork was provided by the inventor of the computer graphics language Processing, Casey Reas, a further exploration of technology’s application in the context of art.

In Chude-Sokei’s text, as machine learning advances, robots begin to develop language, conscience, empathy - “anarchic” and unpredictable qualities. Drawing parallels between the evolution of human and machine, AAI uses technology as a lens to examine deep philosophical questions. The question of how we use technology and world resources feels particularly poignant and timely as we head into 2021. AAI posits that we must embrace AI and technology as a collaborator to break out of our current cultural and moral stagnation, and to ensure our survival as a species. As Werner explains: “AI is capable of developing qualities that we attach to humans, like empathy, imperfection and distraction, which are a big part of creativity. We need to get past the old paranoia that fears machines as the other, as competitors who will do things faster or better, because that just keeps us stuck in our selfishness, fear and xenophobia. Machines can open up new concepts of life, and expand our definitions of being human.“
https://www.thrilljockey.com/products/aai

New Definitions

DJ Set by Jan St. Werner & Andi Toma for Kosmostage 2015
Lie down and get busy.

Dj Set @Radialsystem July 2015

fluXpad demo track by Mouse on Mars

More info about Fluxpad:
Website: mominstruments.com/fluxpad/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mominstruments/

MoM - Liquidrop

fluXpad demo track by Gajek

https://soundcloud.com/gajek
https://www.facebook.com/matti.gajek/
http://gajek.net/

More info about Fluxpad:
Website: mominstruments.com/fluxpad/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mominstruments/

Gajek - Can Hole

fluXpad demo track by Dj Elephant Power

https://soundcloud.com/djelephantpower
http://www.djelephantpower.com/
https://twitter.com/djelephantpower

More info about Fluxpad:
Website: mominstruments.com/fluxpad/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mominstruments/

Dj Elephant Power - Draw Fader

The period leading up to the release of Parastrophics was one of uncharacteristic silence for Mouse On Mars. Their 10th studio album was 5 years in the making - and the record, for all its deftness and dizzying unpredictability, was notable for the resulting sense of gravitas. WOW is the exact opposite, a spontaneous reaction to all those hours of studio labour, created from scratch in a matter of weeks, and released just 9 months after its predecessor.

You can almost feel the tension being released. WOW is an exuberant, immediate and club-orientated counterpoint to Parastrophics, with Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma aiming their considerable technical finesse firmly in the direction of the dancefloor. There are no prizes for guessing the 303 delights that a track called “ACD” might have to offer; others, like “DOG”, “HYM” and the closing “SUN” deliver serious bass punch and genuine hands-in-the-air euphoria alongside Mouse On Mars’s trademark twists and turns.

The vocal presence tying the whole mini-album together is Dao Anh Khanh, whom the band met during their tour of Asia 2010. Dao is a performer and sculptor from Vietnam, who invented a fantasy language which the band recorded together with him in an arcane Hanoi studio. Further contributions come from the Argentinian girl punk band Las Kellies and Eric D. Clarke. Thrown together, these disparate elements come together to make a whole which is epic, abstract, intense and ridiculous at the same time. WOW is Mouse on Mars' bass theatre.

The record also makes much use of the wretchup, an iphone app which was invented by Mouse on Mars during preparations for their orchestral work Paeanumnion. The band went on to use wretchup effects on Parastrophics and on stage during their 2012 album tour – now they plan to make it available, via itunes, around the time of the release of WOW.

Mouse On Mars - PUN /// Monkeytown Records 2012

Mouse On Mars - ESO /// Monkeytown Records 2012

Mouse On Mars - ACD /// Monkeytown Records 2012

Mouse On Mars - APE /// Monkeytown Records 2012

Over the course of eleven albums - not to mention an avalanche of side projects, remixes and collaborations - Jan St Werner and Andi Toma of Mouse on Mars established themselves as two of the most inventive and unpredictable artists in electronic music.