An Open Relationship
The long-running German duo reflect on not being a band and their approach to collaboration
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Ever since 1993, Mouse On Mars has been creating a parallel musical universe where intelligence and playfulness, sophisticated noise and pop sensibilities, theoretical frameworks and a sense of fun go hand in hand with all tomorrow’s parties. The members hail from Cologne and Düsseldorf but nowadays operate out of Berlin, and they have had an international outlook right from the start, working with labels like Too Pure, Thrill Jockey, Domino and Ipecac. They even set up their own label, Sonig, to release some of their more obscure side projects and a host of international artists.
\n\nTheir collaborations with (and production work for) acts like Stereolab and Mark E. Smith of the Fall are further proof of the far-reaching impact, as are their forays into the worlds of classical music and fine arts. Having released their 11th studio album, Dimensional People, in 2018 via Thrill Jockey, Mouse On Mars continue to be restless, irreverent and wildly inventive. In these edited and condensed excerpts from their Fireside Chat with Frosty on Red Bull Radio, the duo talk about their open musical ethos and the fulfillment that comes with working together for so long.
How much time in a year would you say you spend together? Are there years that you don’t see each other in person?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nWe see each other a lot.
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nYeah, I don’t even look at him anymore, so I don’t see him a lot. I just feel him.
\n\nAre there times in music that you’re not sure who created what?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nTo be honest, we don’t care who created what in our music.
\n\nDo you remember the first time that you guys actually met?
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nI remember exactly when we were introduced and actually, I think I invited [Jan] the next day or something, and we had coffee and cake and listened to music. [Jan] was telling me about his project and had set up a little studio and I [ended up] mixing it. It seems like we started [making music] immediately, but without having a plan like, “Let’s make a band” or something. I think we both liked to create sound and then kind of reflect on it – not discuss it, but being kind of stimulated [by it]. So it was easy to bring our stuff together. And it worked together pretty easily.
Mouse on Mars was always a pretty open situation.
Where was this?
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nIt was in Cologne, and that has always been the connection. The studios, the record store, label and the communicating part was all happening in Cologne.
\n\nYou mentioned that sometimes it isn’t about concretely sitting down and saying “OK, we’re going to make music.” Sometimes collaborations are about coffee and cake, the things in between and the conversations in between, rather than the explicit music. What is the balance? Are the fruits of the collaboration more about you guys philosophizing about other things?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nI think that’s a good point, because just briefly after I had met Andi and started Mouse on Mars, I met Markus Popp, who was in this group Oval, and we had a project together called Microstoria that was a band based in Berlin. So I had to go to Berlin to work with Markus, and it was always like meet, go straight to producing sounds, select them and arrange them. Mouse on Mars however was always a pretty open situation. The music came rather casually. We worked hard and intensely, but it was really sharing more about everyday life. The studio was in Andi’s house and his wife had just had a child, and when she was pregnant with the second child we were in Italy. So I was there with my wife and friends were also there. It was a house, and it was more like a living together situation. Mouse on Mars has always been, in a way, like an attractor, but then there are all kinds of things around it.
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nYeah, and at the time there was actually more time to spend, which we don’t have now, because everything gets more and more detailed. You have to do more things apart from just creating music, and it’s too much sometimes.
\n\nWhen you’re walking into a studio space, is there anything you can do purposefully to be present in both of those worlds? How do you stay open when you walk into a space but also know that time is ticking?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nThe thing is, I never felt comfortable being a musician. I don’t even like the term “music” very much. I feel I’m just helping to make things happen. Whichever way they want to go, if I can assist, I’m very happy about that. I don’t feel like I’m expressing myself through music, and there’s obviously limitations, and within these limitations a certain kind of sound probably comes into existence. But it’s generally not my ambition to be a skillful producer of music, so I would say the approach is just to let things happen. And it’s pretty simple, if you surround yourself with instruments, or musicians, or if you walk into a studio, it’s quite likely that something like music will come out of it.
The process of creating with a person for such a long time is something very special.
What is the attractive power of sound?
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nMusic, if you listen back, it always changes. For me, it’s much more complex [than other mediums]. And also, if you create a sound and you don’t record it, it’s gone. But it’s still vibrating in your mind, in your brain. So it stays much longer in the imagination. When we started, it was much more complicated to create, but still it was much faster than most of the other possibilities.
\n\nWhat is the power of a record to you? Are there records that bring you guys together?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nThe record is a great form of archiving a certain chunk of music, and it’s a great form of organization because you know where it is – you put a record on your shelf. You know the amount of music that is on the record. You can imagine vaguely how much effort it was to produce it. You can imagine how it came to life. And right now is great because new formats arise, and people are much more aware of different formats, different ways of consuming sound.
\n\nBut it all comes down to what is actually happening in our perception apparatus, I think. This is where it’s really interesting, because all these things around us, you can change them and juxtapose them and split them up, make them more complicated or more simple. In the end, it’s our perception that makes it alive, that really makes us see and hear things, and this is where we learn. This is where we change.
\n\nIs there a sound experience that you’ve encountered – that is not an album format –that has impacted you greatly? Or alternatively, is there an album that’s embedded in your DNA as a human or as a musician?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nFor me, the experience of visiting The Dream House was definitely a game changer, because it brought a lot of considerations just so casually together. Like, how do you deal with time and music? With composition, what’s the cognitive aspect of people hearing things differently? How do you deal with each listener having a different physical condition, having a different psychological condition? And how do you put all of this into a piece of music? Or what is a piece of music, and when does it start, and when does it end? Is it like your memory? Where is that music actually happening? Is it on the record? Is it when you put the needle on the record, or the laser on the CD or the drive going through the file?
\n\nThere’s always a delay chain. It’s an incredible mix, if you really zoom into it. You memorize in micro, mini micro seconds, you memorize something that happened. You predict something that really happened. You assume that a piece of music will continue in a certain way. You get indications. You get information that makes you expect something. That changes your perception. So if you really zoom into this, music is a totally weird and blurry phenomenon.
\n\nBut back to certain records, there are lots of records that [have stuck with me]. But I always go back to Arnold Dreyblatt’s Animal Magnetism.
So the perception does seem important. I mean, Steve Reich is dealing with phasing and time lag and Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” is all about decay and this perception of time. Recorded music is a static point, and then we move around it in an axis based on our experience. If we listen to the same album every day for a whole year, it’s going to change through your experience. Are there things, though, that you can intentionally do in recording music that you feel can imbue it with the power to be open enough to reflect experience? Does that matter to you? Is specific more important, or is the nebulous?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nIt’s like writing an interesting book, or making a movie. You can only reveal that much – you can only be that explicit about something. So you have to find the [balance between giving] certain hints, and where you really open it up and let it go, and then give the hints toward the story again, you know, get back to where the thread is.
\n\nAnd it’s the same with composing music. We’ve always tried to keep it as open as possible. We’ve considered all our records to not really be finally mixed. It’s kind of a freeze frame within a specific moment within the production. So we’ve come through quite a bit to be able to provide that chop, that moment. But it could be different, and I think all our records somehow translate that – that they could sound different. And I think that the connection between the different sounds, that’s what we always try to do within production, and it’s not just production, it’s how you arrange the sounds, and of course how you make them in the first place, and how you filter them.
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nIt always has been quite fragile when we work. We stack sounds a lot, and then they kind of, in our sense, become one sound. And so, I mean in most of the cases, the production and the mixing was always done at the same time, and a certain mix was the mix. So that’s almost what Jan was talking about, where it could’ve gone wrong. It could’ve been falling apart again, which also happened a lot. Like you set up something, you say this is the perfect picture. Next day you listen to it, we just move a few stuff, add something. Then suddenly it totally breaks apart.
\n\nDo you think that you might have stumbled upon a language that is a very obscure language spoken by many people in fringes of the world? I mean, people who appreciate sound and appreciate different forms, especially when you guys were starting?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nI have no idea why and how it works, but wherever we go in the world, we find people who are already [into our] music because music is just traveling in weird ways. And they get something out of it. It’s very rare that we meet people who go like, “You’re in Mouse on Mars? Man, I hate that crap. It’s the most horrible shit I ever heard. You gotta talk to Quincy Jones really quickly, because you’re going nowhere.”
\n\nBecause people get it very quickly that this is not for them. We don’t hide. We’re not mean. We’re not hiding behind complicated layers of sound, you know. It’s pretty strange. Immediately you can decide if you want to continue listening. But it is a language that’s global in the sense that it’s not based on a certain syntax or culture that it needs to repeat. It’s the urge to communicate, it’s the need to interact that is the basic force in the music. And that transcends immediately to old and to young and to different cultures.
\n\nIs there something that you both feel is kind of that universal sound that cuts across experience for you – that you resonate with?
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nI like to listen to [the Beach Boys’] The SMiLE Sessions because it doesn’t reveal too much like the whole song structure or something. It’s just super nice and very heartfelt. And with our last record, Dimensional People, if things were not really well done, we just kept it and put the next thing on it, or took the one idea from this part of the song and transferred it to the next song and worked on a different structure. It might be influenced from The SMiLE Sessions idea.
Have you heard a modular album before that that you felt had an approach you wanted to emulate?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nNo, there was no reference to what someone had already done. We just thought, we have so many elements that we want to connect and we have to find a system. And we wanted to be able to keep a certain time signature, and a certain harmonic scale so we can juxtapose all these elements. All the sessions we recorded and the musicians we had come in were basically jamming on these two either rhythmic or harmonic schemes. And so we could juxtapose everything.
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nYeah, it was quite simple harmonic and rhythmic structures, but it was amazing how different in the end the outcome was.
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nOur brain makes simple things very complicated sometimes, and very complicated things can appear as pretty simple if you understand the principle and the intention behind it. But generally, we were pretty aware that if we would try to copy something that existed, we would have a really hard time to do that, so we always tried to go the most easy way, and that is just to pretend there’s no reference. I think that if you were a bit more knowledgeable or intellectual, you might probably constantly tell yourself that this has been done before, but we just ignore all this. Makes our life easier.
\n\nWere there some collaborators on Dimensional People that were total cold calls, or were you familiar or had prior relationships with the people you were collaborating with?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nIt was kind of like [we worked with] whoever came in the time that we were recording.
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nYeah, there was this limited time we were there, all the people were there, and we were in the basement and musicians just came down.
It’s just somehow amazing that we’re still not a band after all these years.
Jan Werner
\n\nThat record tells the story of us having an overload of options and activities and actually not knowing anymore how to get those together. And on top of all that, new people came in, actually musicians, who we had known but never collaborated with, but somehow started having a relationship with us. And through that relationship with those people, a few other things fell into place.
\n\nMeeting all these musicians made it easy for us, although there were too many of them, to kind of reconsider all these disparate elements. And that’s why the record is called Dimensional People. It’s actually through this diversity of these different people and their difference in character, meeting them in different situations and learning about different aspects of their personality, that to us was like a glue in a way. Through the psychology of dealing with these people, certain technical obstacles became obsolete.
\n\nWas there a point that this felt like a particularly overwhelming record that then starts to find clarity?
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nThe new record is more like one song. It didn’t take too long to record this stuff. They were all done within three weeks or something. But then there were about three or four months of just meditating in front of the screen with all these tracks, thinking about how we should put it together. And it felt impossible to bring it together. But then the dynamics became faster and faster, and then there was more clarity about the album.
You’ve mentioned that you don’t like to call yourselves musicians. What do you feel your role is?
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nPeople ask us all the time at the airport or elsewhere when we carry gear around, “So what do you do, are you a DJ?” And we’re like, “No, we’re not DJs.” “So what do you do?” ”We make electronic music.” “Ah so it’s techno.” “No it’s not techno.” And I started saying, “No, it’s actually systemic music.” And they go, “Ah, OK, wow. That’s cool. I like that.”
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nYeah, he’s doing the systemic part. I’m doing the motoric part.
\n\nIs there kind of a glimmer, a moment, that springs to mind, or even just a part of spending your life in sound that’s most fulfilling for you?
\n\nAndi Toma
\n\nI think sharing this project and then spending the process of creating with a person for such a long time. That whole thing is something very special.
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nIt’s just somehow amazing that we’re still not a band after all these years, and it feels really good. It’s kind of like assuring for young people who start not wanting to be a band. You can do that.
\n\nFulfill your dreams.
\n\nJan Werner
\n\nYeah, you don’t have to be a band. It’s good.