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Measking Mouse on Mars is not easy. Not because the pair are hard to find, although their current studio is hidden in a deep courtyard in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Or because he continues to be very busy, especially since half of the group, Jan St Werner (born Jan Stephan Werner), is now a professor of pop music, at the Folkwang University of the Arts in the western German city of Essen. No, negotiating with the Mouse on Mars is a work of patience and perseverance.
Which doesn’t mean it’s not fun hanging out with Andi Toma and St Werner, as well as their unofficial member and long-time supporter, singer Dodo NKishi. But each answer to the question can be somewhere very different from what was originally intended, from the quality of the fruit juice that NKishi brought to the studio, to the esoteric, tech-optimist digressions on the possibility of forensics resynthesising the past through old audio.
Chaos is burned into the DNA of Mouse on Mars – one of the most experimental pieces of music to come out. Germany over the past thirty years, and one that has never been recognized or recognized by the country’s music industry.
His childhood friends, Toma and St Werner, from Düsseldorf and Cologne respectively, were born on the same day, in the same hospital – or so the legend goes. In the early 1990s, they began experimenting with electronic music, releasing their first single, Vulvaland, in 1994 with the British label Too Pure. Many more releases followed: studio albums, live albums, compilations, archives, and collaborations such as 2007’s Tromatic Reflexxions with Mark E Smith.
Just as eclectic is their sound, which has evolved throughout the 30-plus years of their career: from strange, dark dance music on Vulvaland; to something akin to “surreal pop” (as Rolling Stone called it at the time) on 2012’s Parastrophics; to postmodern orchestral music on Dimensional People from 2018, with contributions from Bon Iver, National and Beirut; and the first AI test in 2021 by AAI. What unites the different sounds and their parts on the parts, glitches and scattered sounds. They share beautiful DNA with musicians such as Boards of Canada, Four Tet and Matmos, and have influenced artists beyond the music field – as evidenced by their 2004 exhibition and book project Doku / Fiction: Mouse on Mars Reviewed & Remixed, with contributions from writers, academics and artists, including Dietmar Dath and Alice Stepanenk.
After five years of silence, he is about to release Spatial, No Problem, a collaboration with Lee “Scratch” Perry recorded on a whirlwind tour of the dub and reggae legend at his old Berlin studio in 2019, two years before his death at the age of 85. he had an unknown history, and the days were changing. The result is a collage-esque fever dream of a record, marrying Perry’s signature free-flowing vocals with a strange, yet warm mix of countless instruments played by friends, all held together by glitchy electronics. They had the idea of recording the episode as mid-range audio, a technique used to simulate “natural” hearing in 3D. When asked about his familiarity with the method, Perry responded with a big grin, with the sentence “Spatial? No problem”. The album’s title was born, which includes recordings that are said to be some of Perry’s last.
It took Mouse on Mars years to do the job again. Covid did something, but there was also the shock of his death, their self-proclaimed laziness (or rather: business, and they keep arguing about several projects at the same time), previous disputes about the ownership of the assets, and, of course, the size. During Perry’s four days in the studio, she recorded almost non-stop, with friends and collaborators dropping in and out. Toma said: “The parts were very interesting, you might call them unselected, but in fact, about 70 percent of what each song was made of was already there, the composition, the different parts, and who added what, it started in order. And they went to talk about the fish soup that was cooked during the recording, before talking about the energy that Perry brought to the space.
Their respect for Perry is obvious, every attempt to steer the conversation to other topics brings the trio back to their time with him. Their respect for Perry is obvious, and every attempt to steer the conversation around other topics brings the trio back to their time with him. They paint a picture of creative madness: professionals put microphones in every corner Perry could stand and perform, friends entering and exiting the sessions, NKishi proclaiming “God” and Perry in graffito on the walls of the studio, the idea of a meeting of minds between artists who have the same anarchic way of life and art.
Our conversation with his organization amid the chaos reveals this gripping album, as well as their release process. In London, Mouse on Mars will celebrate the record with an “intense and unique installation” at The Pit in the Barbican Center and the aforementioned channel. It will be, as the Barbican announces, “the only way to experience the music as it is intended”. Asking Toma, St Werner and NKishi – who will join the duo for two live performances together with the Nigerian-Jamaican-American artist and writer Louis Chude-Sokei on 5 and 6 June – at the end of April about their plans to set up work seems not to bring: “What are we planning?”, NKishi asks, “it’s a problem in planning again.” To laugh. “Now we are preparing, or we are waiting for them to find us.”
They are not quite as unprepared as they seem, however. In addition to NKishi as a live musician, and Chude-Sokei as a great collaborator on the project (he also added field recordings from Perry’s fabled Black Ark Studios in Jamaica to the mix), there will be a discussion with David Katz, Perry’s biographer, and Ayesha Hameed, a multi-faceted and future artist discussing Af. In Berlin, they have been painting paintings of the world, before installing them at The Pit.
NKishi fills with juice (aronia berry, first pressing), no attempt to stop the conversation. “We don’t want you to leave,” NKishi says with a laugh. No one answered the original question. No one seems to care. At a time when the music industry is becoming more sophisticated, more optimized, more focused on the irreplaceable persona of the media, Mouse on Mars remains a strange concept: a group whose greatest asset is the refusal to be understood. And they’ve been doing this for 30 years, ending up somewhere different from what they originally planned – and making it sound, against all odds, exactly where they should be. After all, the most interesting things still happen when no one knows what’s going on.
