MOUSE ON MARS
Sep 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
WALK THE LINE
Mouse on Mars swerves around the clichés while veering toward pop
As the grand old Germans of '90s electronica, Mouse on Mars' Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma knew full well that the follow-up to 2001's Idiology (Thrill Jockey) had to blaze new trails to fulfill the musical hijinx that their fans had come to expect. After such lauded albums as Vulvaland (Beggars/Too Pure, 1994), Autoditacker (Thrill Jockey, 1997) and the Glam soundtrack (Thrill Jockey, 2003), Mouse on Mars found that its standard techniques simply answered new questions with old information. St. Werner and Toma sought a novel approach to elevate their music beyond the stifling sounds of the modern marketplace.
“In current music, production is a substitute for creativity,” St. Werner says. “The engineers understand how all the sounds work; the virginity is totally gone. There is no sound experimentation in the studio anymore. It is boring, and it removes the spontaneity. But great pop music never accepted those boundaries.”
St. Werner believes that the standardization of sound has caused repercussions against all forms of electronic music. “The clichés are so easy to understand that people just lose interest,” he says. “There is a lack of value and content and quality. Everything is electronic, from your cell phone and commercials to your pacemaker. Electronic is everywhere, so why pay for it?”
Radical Connector (Thrill Jockey, 2004) answers the question with sounds that are both foreign and familiar. MOM has always combined clever wit with an acoustic and electronic performance approach, to which Radical Connector adds calculated dollops of classic pop influences as diverse as '80s funksters Cameo (“Wipe That Sound”) and Security-era Peter Gabriel (“All the Old Powers”). Dark techno beauty (“Send Me Shivers”) appears, as well as sweet apocalyptic dread cloaked in crunching imagery (“The End”).
“We dealt with the problem by developing the undercurrent, seeing the structure underneath the whole situation,” St. Werner explains. “This led to our making this a warm pop record because what we do is what pop music always was or what we always liked about good pop music. That is why we called it Radical Connector; it seemed like we could apply all the sounds we had and not for the sake of diversity, but because it is all part of the music. We could go more extreme in the sounds; they became so dense that they became like harmonies. At such a speed, you start to relax.”
MOM used traditional recording methods while tracking everything in its Cologne and Dusseldorf, Germany, studios with drummer and vocalist Dodo Nkishi and other instrumentalists.
“We like the Shure SM7B, AKG D 112 and C 414 B-ULS and the Sennheiser MD 409 microphones,” St. Werner says. “We use different techniques. For instance, we use flat surface microphones on the wall. It is taking the reverberation, the vibration through the wall, basically. That makes a quite indirect but very roomy sound. We record with one very good room mic and several AKGs for the drum kit, then some more passive ones that are not too sensitive. We mic the drum kit very directly so you really have the direct slam, or the hit-on-the-head sound. Then, you have a very good, subtle room mic, then the indirect flat wall mic, which is more about the room vibrations. With those different approaches, you can very nicely, very subtly, but with a lot of variation, mic up the drum kit. That also works when recording indirect guitar sounds.”
Whether recording drums or guitar, MOM ultimately sees the creative process as organic and holistic, the duo's brain trust hardwired for sound and action. “The magic comes in how you connect all the sounds,” St. Werner admits. “That is where the band is at now. We are the human patch bay that brings it all together.”
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