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

Artificial Authentic

некий звук известит людей об апокалипсисе. иудеи верят, что это будет труба шофар, от пронзительных аккордов которой рухнул иерихон. такими же звуками наполняются отношения между людьми: чистая вибрация высоких частот в виде криков, взывающая вторую половину к непринятию каких-либо установок. эмоциональная река смоет нас, оставив фундамент для новых поисков тех, кому можно доверять; чувство пустоты, после лет отданных друг другу, пережив, переплыв, но наткнувшись на стену. я запомню лишь свет. не тот, что в конце конвейера. 

птицефабрики полны случаев: мертвая курица способна бегать и пробовать взлететь, подчиненная автоматизму нервных окончаний. так же, как люди, наткнувшись на непонимание, стараются отыскать в своих действиях «голову», продолжая свой бег друг за другом, без головы. отданные импульсам чувств, словно шагательным рефлексам. 


some sound will notify people of the apocalypse. jews believe that it will be the trumpet of the sofar, from the piercing chords of which jericho collapsed. relationships between people are filled with the same sounds: pure vibration of high frequencies in the form of screams, calling on the other half to reject any attitudes. emotional river will wash us away, leaving the foundation for a new search for those who can be trusted, a feeling of emptiness after years given to each other, having survived, having crossed, but bumped into a wall. I will remember the light only. not the one at the end of the conveyor. 

poultry farms are full of cases: a dead chicken is able to run and try to take off, subject to the automatism of nerve endings. just as people, having stumbled upon a misunderstanding, try to find a "head" in their actions, continuing their run one after another, without a head. surrendered to the impulses of feelings, like walking reflexes.

EI[[E Ǝ]]IƎ - headless chickens run

Polymer

Praze (feat. Mason Bee)

Nuclaps

https://nosdam.bandcamp.com/album/portispatrol-beat-tape
produced summer 2023 @ Burnco 
dog in car photo by Nosdam

Hoan

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