Mouse on Mars w/Ratatat, Junior Boys
Fri Oct 1, Chop Suey,
9 pm, $12.
Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner is endlessly amused by the unexpected ways people use his band’s music. Recently, a German female TV celebrity gushed to him and bandmate Andi Toma, “Your music is so great to make sex to.” St. Werner sounds genuinely traumatized by this confession.
“Uh, should we stop this now because this lady was able to make sex to our music?” he asks rhetorically, and his shudder is audible all the way from Amsterdam, where he lives part of the year (Düsseldorf is Mouse on Mars’ other home base).
Dude, you should be thrilled folks get it on to your music.
“Whatever people want to do with our music is okay,” St. Werner charitably concedes. “Our music might pop up in a cheesy TV program. [Something off Niun Niggung made it onto an episode of Sex and the City.] And one of our tracks is going to be commissioned to a funny movie, something like American Pie. Then there was a sports show, a science program, and a children’s program where mushrooms were growing in high speed.”
For the last decade, Mouse on Mars have been making some of the greatest unhinged pop music you’ve heard practically everywhere except on commercial radio. Their new album, Radical Connector (Thrill Jockey), is their most conventionally accessible of the eight they’ve released, but it’s still too oblong and idiosyncratic to flow through America’s narrow mainstream media portals. Featuring the quirky voices of drummer Dodo Nkishi and German female glitchtronica artist Niobe, Connector contains MOM’s best shot at a club anthem (the Basement Jaxx-y glittery disco sludge of “Wipe That Sound”) and their weirdest track ever (“All the Old Powers,” which prophesies screwed and chopped Martian hiphop).
How different Connector sounds from Mouse on Mars’ first two albums, Vulvaland (1994) and Iaora Tahiti (1995). Those works floated in deep dub space and gamboled through blissful techno pastures, postulating an unlikely amalgam of the Beach Boys and the Orb. These albums’ beguiling wonderment and a friskily playful spirit became MOM’s hallmarks.
Over the years, Mouse on Mars have both moved deeper into eggheaded territory (contributing tracks to comps on theory-mad Mille Plateaux Records and Onitor’s Politronics collection of electronica and essays) and splashed into the shallow waters of pop and dance music (a soundtrack for an unreleased film starring Tony Danza, Glam; the “Distroia” and “Actionist Respoke” singles). But MOM’s music possesses a quicksilver elusiveness that makes it impossible to pigeonhole. They are the rare band that satisfies on both an intellectual level (amazingly detailed sound design) and on a sensual plane (such warm, bubbly textures, kookily funky rhythms, and cute tunes). Their music is consistently enchanting and instantly recognizable–a description applicable to very few musicians.
MOM have been fortunate to record for a label (Thrill Jockey) that allows them freedom, and to be blessed with imaginations that burst out of the shackles of genre-fication. “We’ve never been very aware of styles,” claims St. Werner. “It’s more about tempo, grooves, and the space between sounds. Our music has become more dense and thick. Especially with the new record, it’s a bit slower in tempo. As we’ve speeded up through the years, the music’s become quite hard and dynamic, but also very fast. The new record twung [sic] itself into the middle more, but it has a depth that equals out the speed range.”
MOM’s creative approach involves both calculation and spontaneity. “For our kind of music, you have to be open and move in many directions and make quick decisions and be aware,” says St. Werner. “If we make up a concept or try to be like something or make our music appropriate for an audience, it doesn’t work.
“Musically, we’re going in so many directions; it’s so dynamic, so alive,” St. Werner continues. “For us, it’s impossible to pin it down and really understand which purpose it serves. We build up our music from sounds, and if we build a certain picture with them, it’s not because we wanted to create that picture, it’s because we were interested in the details.”
