DESCRIPTION:
Mouse on Mars: Froschroom (1994)
from cd single Frosch '94

Mouse On Mars è un duo proveniente dalla Germania (Jan St. Werner da Dusseldorf e Andi Toma da Colonia). La loro musica rientra nel genere elettronico, miscelato ad influenze techno, trance, disco e ambient, con un massiccio utilizzo di campionatori e sintetizzatori. Nelle esibizioni dal vivo, si avvalgono anche dell'utilizzo dei convenzionali strumenti musicali appartenenti al genere rock, quali batteria, basso e chitarra. Gruppo pioneristico, principali autori del rinnovamento nella scena elettronica tedesca, i Mouse On Mars traggono ispirazione da gruppi quali Kraftwerk, Faust, Can e Neu! pur distinguendosi per qualità e originalità di arrangiamenti e ricerca sonora, dando vita ad una innovativa sintesi di ambient, kraut-rock, techno e pop.

Mouse On Mars, the Duesseldorf-based duo of Andi Toma and Jan Werner, applied the post-rock aesthetics to post-techno music. The pseudo-psychedelic trance of Vulvaland (1994) was unusual mainly because of its tragic, gloomy mood, but Iaora Tahiti (1995) layered elements of dub, jungle, hip-hop inside a shell of warped ambient/cosmic cliches, thus creating a new kind of futurism, one that was not Kraftwerk's paranoia of machines but a very bodily (and current) neurosis. Autoditacker (1997) consolidated that style in a baroque synthesis of light polyrhythms and bizarre electronics, while Instrumentals (1998) was perhaps the most austere enunciation of their deconstruction technique. The "thickness" of sound effects on Idiology (2001) gave rise to an hallucinated symphony of instrumental colors, while coldly vivisecting a catalog of retro styles. Mouse On Mars are a duo from Duesseldorf (Andi Toma and Jan Werner) who coined a pseudo-techno language influenced by the experiments on rhythm carried out by such German electronic groups as Kraftwerk and Neu.

Vulvaland (Too Pure, 1994) was still insecure and tentative, but already capable of elaborating post-psychedelic trance in the kitsch-retro sound of the nine-minute robotic ballet Frosch (also reminiscent of the looping ethno-funky-beats of Talking Heads' Fear Of Music). The ethnic element is also prevalent in the Afro-Indian polyrhythms of Uah. But the nebula of Chagrin shifts the emphasis from the rhythm to the surrounding electronics, from hedonism to ambience.
Future Dub is a seven-minute hallucination that blends the ethnic/rhythmic element and the atmospheric/ambient element. The ominous and subliminal atmospheres of Katang, an eleven-minute magma of wadded beats and languid tones, redefines ambience for the ambient-house generation.