30 Years Mouse on Mars: Bilk

In spring 1994 Mouse on Mars contributed an exclusive piece to Sähkö Recordings’ ambient radio project, a one-week public radio program that was aired citywide in Helsinki, Finland. Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner recorded sounds in and around their studio in Düsseldorf Bilk to construct one continuous composition that spanned the course of one neighborhood walk. Midi-controlled synths, samplers, analogue effects, tape delays, effect pedals, guitars and a jew’s harp were juxtaposed with recordings captured during the walk. An additional microphone that pointed out of the studio window was occasionally dubbed into the mix. The resulting collage was broadcast just a few months before the group’s debut album Vulvaland came out and never aired again. 30 years into the band’s existence Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner revise the duo’s history by producing three LPs that would place the band’s discography under a slightly different light. Bilk marks the beginning of that investigation: a free-flowing assemblage of everything that vibrates and can be caught on tape. A 30 year old recording with subtle new edits and additions.

Recorded at the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields by Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner 1994.
Artwork Soulis Moustakidis. Art Direction Rupert Smyth. Vinyl Master Cem Oral.

https://mouseonmars.bandcamp.com/album/bilk

https://www.anost.net/release/45A7/mouse-on-mars%2fbilk

Mouse on Mars Areal Folds

silent green Kulturquartier Berlin
8.9. — 17.9.2023

»Areal Folds« by Berlin-based electronic pioneers »Mouse on Mars« is a multi-part composition of interlocking sound situations — a complex course that acoustically explores the silent green kulturquartier in Berlin’s Wedding district. The entire site is activated, the architectures inside and outside are animated with self-built, partly moving loudspeakers. Multiple reflections and refractions in the concrete hall, on the long ramp downwards, and in the inner courtyard of the venue challenge the audience to listen attentively. Completely new interactions between architecture and visitors are created.

The subterranean concrete hall forms the energetic center of »Areal Folds« – a spatial entity that is not only characterized by its sheer dimension but also by its exposed concrete architecture. Here, »Mouse on Mars« work with computer-generated, robotic loudspeaker objects. A large and active moveable horn loudspeaker, which can be aligned in the space with great precision, activates the architecture in quickly changing perspectives.

Extensive loudspeaker panels made up of up to 100 individual loudspeakers, on the other hand, accurately project sounds onto a special spot in the room in a similar manner to a light beam, creating an impression of an autonomous sound that is independent of loudspeakers. Robot-controlled percussion instruments are also used, enriching the entire sound event with their short rhythmic accents. Programmed light sequences continuously restage the acoustic setting.

Live performances along the long access ramp to the hall provide a contrast to the program in the main hall. Every day two performers, members of the group »Dynamic Acoustic Research (DAF)«, move across the surface in changing constellations and interact with the architecture and the audience. They, too, are equipped with loudspeakers – mobile panels with which they react to the surroundings situationally, improvising as they go.

Fotos Simon Vogel courtesy singuhr projekte

Curated by singuhr e.V.
In cooperation with silent green Kulturquartier

Spatial Jitter

Spatial Jitter is a dynamic sound and light environment at Kunstbau Lenbachhaus Munich April 9 - September 18 2022

https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/visit/exhibitions/details/mouse-on-mars

The installation intends to challenge the audience to active listening, in which only the limits of attention determine the limits of what is acoustically possible. With targeted shifts of perspective, Mouse on Mars propose to demonstrate their conviction that there is no one valid composition: each listener produces his or her own “spatial compostruction.”

Composition Andi Toma & Jan St. Werner - Speaker Panels & Motorization Michael Akstaller - Percussion Robots Moritz Geist- Lights Matthias Singer - Sound Software Marcin Pietruszeweski, Dietrich Pank - Woodblocks Boris Müller - Percussion Dirk Rothbrust - Curated by Eva Huttenlauch

Along with the exhibition an LP will be published accompanied by a publication with contributions by Louis Chude-Sokei, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Eva Huttenlauch, Mouse on Mars, Patricia Reed, Susanne Witzgall. Artwork by Rupert Smyth, The booklet is bilingual (German/English) Price: 29,90€ Limited Edition Catalogue & LP

The accompanying program is developed in collaboration with BR / Hörspiel, Dokumentation, Medienkunst and Dynamische Akustische Forschung (DAF):

BR2 radio hör!spiel!art.mix: "spatial jitter"

Sound Talks/Spatial Jitter #1 Spatial Jitter: Raum, Klang, Körper

Sound Talks/Spatial Jitter #2 Klänge sind Geflechte, die antworten

Sound Talks/Spatial Jitter #3 Countersonics – Der alternative Klang

Sound Talks/Spatial Jitter #4 Mouse on Mars über ihr Hörspiel Spatial Jitter

new Mouse on Mars Album AAI - February 26 2021

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 Derrek 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 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.“

http://www.thrilljockey.com/products/aai

https://mouseonmars.bandcamp.com/album/aai

https://anarchic.ai/

gAAIme