What do you see? (commisioned by visual thoughts webshop)

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

https://luvlite.fanlink.tv/LL016

The collaboration of Austrian Producer/DJ Megablast and Cuban Singer/Percussionist Eribertho Cruz started back in 2019 releasing the summer hit „Vamos“, including the stunning remix by Pulsinger & Irl (among others), which is played around the world by headliners such as Solomun, Dixon, Seth Troxler, Adam Port and Butch to name a few. Their second production „La Isla“ features Flip Philipp of the famous Vienna Symphony Orchestra playing the marimba. Additional remixes by Landikhan, Nickodemus, PAAX (Tulum), Pulsinger & Irl and Sasson (FR).

Credits:
Music by Megablast; Lyrics by Eribertho Cruz
Cover Artwork by Philipp Steinkellner
LL016 Mastered by George Deligiannis

La Isla (Pulsinger & Irl Dub)

LA ISLA (Pulsinger & Irl Dub)

Get it

LA ISLA (Pulsinger & Irl Dub) - Megablast feat. Eribertho Cruz

Der Mann - Ein Wort

An audio walk by Johanna Steindorf

2015

www.johannasteindorf.de

In this audio tour, participants accompany a female protagonist through a park area at dusk. She embodies the spirit of fictitious and real women who claimed their freedom to wander, thus challenging the restrictions and conventions of their culture and time. The audio piece mixes narrative, text excerpts, music and field recordings.

References: 
Rachel Bowlby (1992) “Walking, women & Writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse”
Anke Gleber (1999) “The Art of Taking a Walk”
Andra McCartney (2001) “Soundwalking at Night”
Sylvia Plath (1982) “The unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”
Griselda Pollock (1988) “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”
Jane Rendell (2007) “Site Writing: She is Walking about in a town which she doesn’t know”
George Sand – several quotes
Rebecca Solnit (2000) “Wanderlust”
Rebecca Solnit (2005) “A Fieldguide to Getting Lost”
Virginia Woolf (1925)“Mrs. Dalloway”, (1929) “A Room of One’s Own”,  (1930)“Street Haunting”

Movies and songs: 
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqOjlK2tEYRnKAk_v85qtgASWRvwTpWsM

The Strange Half-Absence Of Wandering At Night

Hörspielmusik 1 Aus  ANNA (mit Sebastian Kunas) BR 2018

Audio Portrait des Kottbusser Tors – mit Schüler*innen der Lina-Morgenstern-Gesamtschule Berlin
2016

KOTTI IST MEINE MUTTI

Einsame Hornissen 

Der erste Schnee
Er lässt sich Zeit
Auf grauen Böden
Macht er sich breit

Am morgen
Sind die Sorgen noch weiß

Ein Mann in gelb
Räumt die Strasse frei
Maschinenstaub
Was bleibt das bleibt verborgen
Unter dünnen Decken

HEYHEYYEAH
DEM CHOAS HINTER HINTERHER
HEYHEYYEAH
WIR SCHWINGEN LEICHT WIR SCHWINGEN SCHWER

Die Mienen trist
Die Lippen stumm
Der da am Boden kriecht da gerne rum
Hat was verloren
Ein Bild aus anderer Zeit

Dynamit 
Aus Dur mach Moll
Johanna hat die Schnauze voll
Vom Bohren
Und tauben Ohren

HEYHEYYEAH
DEM CHOAS HINTER HINTERHER
HEYHEYYEAH
WIR SCHWINGEN LEICHT WIR SCHWINGEN SCHWER


EINSAME HORNISSEN

MÜSSEN STECHEN MÜSSEN

So nananaaaa
So nananaaaa


HEYHEYYEAH
DEM CHOAS HINTER HINTERHER
HEYHEYYEAH
IM KAMPF IM SUMPF IM STADTVERKEHR
HEYHEYYEAH
DEM CHOAS HINTER HINTERHER
HEYHEYYEAH
WIR SCHWINGEN LEICHT WIR SCHWINGEN SCHWER

Einsame Hornissen

radioeins war am Pfingstmontag im Berliner Westen unterwegs. Die Moderatorin Katja Weber machte mit dem Übertragungswagen auch am Varziner Platz Halt und unterhielt sich mit Ruben Kurschat über den Hörspaziergang Friedenau.

Hörspaziergang Friedenau auf radioeins

Album "PayPalPop" will be released on the 14th of May 2021.

https://lnk.to/PayPalPop

Artwork: Markus S Fiedler.
Have fun.

What do you see? (commisioned by visual thoughts webshop)

((( Norbert Lang

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