Mouse on Mars

There's very little precedent in music -- pop or otherwise -- for the bizarre and amazing electronic spasms created by this German duo at the forefront of the so-called blip-hop movement. In their superfast gushes of micro-musical sounds, they recall Carl Stalling's hyperactive soundtracks for the classic Warner Bros. cartoons, or, more recently, John Zorn's postmodern jazz-metal bands like Naked City. But in their actual sound -- the slippery, squiggly, stuttering, spitting jumble of a zillion robotic pulses beating at once -- mankind simply had to wait for the invention of the PowerBook to hear stuff like this.

Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner began working together in 1993 with a basic palette of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) and Eno-meets-krautrock ambitions, and their first two albums show a budding genius for tricky electronic soundscapes that seem vaguely sentient. Curious, humanlike noises and questioning melodies break out of a murky wash of tones, evoking sci-fi films not yet made.

With Autoditacker, they sped things up and made a great leap forward into a crazily multifaceted consciousness that can only be described as cartoonish. Suddenly acquiring a sense of humor, Toma and St. Werner strip away the comforting, oceanic background of sounds, and instead give us a never-ending vaudeville show of tiny sounds that can sound divine and otherworldly, nobly jazzy, or familiar as a fart. The song titles are revealing, although they seem as arbitrary as titles for Jackson Pollock paintings: "Tux & Damask," "Schnick Schnack Melimade," "Juju."

Niun Niggung and Idiology brilliantly continue the mad blipping and hopping; by this point the group stood at the head of an international movement of similar-minded laptop auteurs. With every album, Toma and St. Werner have sharpened and expanded their approach, which on Idiology reaches mind-boggling levels of frantic complexity. What's more amazing is that this is dance music, not just guys making up weird sound effects, and the songs never lose sight of their fundamental rhythmic pulse. Reversing the usual trend, Toma and St. Werner's beats actually get dancier the more they cram them with wild intergalactic funk.

The MoM discography is crowded with singles, vinyl-only albums, and disparities between American and European releases. Rost Pocks is a useful collection of miscellany spanning their career; curiously, the tracks with vocals by Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab are the least interesting (this stuff is too hyper to be background music for any vocalist). Glam and Instrumentals, originally limited-edition, overseas releases, are not groundbreaking but are worth seeking out just for glimpses of their menageries of sounds. (BEN SISARIO)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide