Mouse On Mars AAI

Mouse on Mars, the Berlin-based duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, approach electronic music with an inexhaustible curiosity and unparalleled ingenuity. ‘AAI’ (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) takes their fascination with technology and undogmatic exploration a quantum leap further.

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 Ranny Keddo and Derrek Kindle, the duo collaborated on the creation of bespoke software capable of modelling speech; text and voice from writer and scholar of African Studies Louis Chude-Sokei and DJ/producer 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. This exploration of artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool, allowing the duo to summon their most explicitly science-fiction work to date.

Original artwork by Casey Reas, inventor of the computer graphics language Processing.

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