Mouse on Mars believe in the creative potential of chaos. “Music is a strong anarchic force,”Jan St. Werner, a member of the duo, told the New York Times in 2018, effusing about its propensity for mutation and cross-fertilization. In a genre often premised on the reliable pleasures of steady beats and familiar tropes, Mouse on Mars revel in the unpredictable. At the time of the interview, St. Werner and his bandmate Andi Toma were promoting their album Dimensional People, a lab experiment involving custom-built percussion robots, bespoke mobile apps, and three-dimensional sound spatialization, plus the voices of Amanda Blank, Spank Rock, and members of the National, Beirut, and Bon Iver, among dozens of others. A volatile mix, it made good on the group’s interest in music’s joyfully intractable nature.
St. Werner’s observation about music’s mutability might double as the mission statement for the group’s new album, AAI. The title stands for “anarchic artificial intelligence,” and it may be their most uncategorizable project yet, using AI as both form and content, structure and subject matter. On the surface, AAI sounds like a continuation of some of the ideas on Dimensional People. Longtime percussionist Dodo NKishi’s forceful polyrhythms drive the songs, which come wrapped in weird, shimmery textures that glisten like oil slicks. There are long, hypnotic drum jams and short, disorienting atonal bursts; at the center of it all is the voice of Louis Chude-Sokei, a Boston-based professor of African American studies. He contributes an accompanying essay—part theory, part speculative fiction—that lays out many of the album’s themes about machine intelligence, and some songs double as philosophical lectures. In the early track “Speech and Ambulation,” Chude-Sokei muses, “We reduced language to symbols and assumed that machines were merely the perfection of logic. We did not imagine them capable of desire…. What we still don’t know is what machines want. Now that they are no longer defined by computation, how will they talk?”
In a sense, the song is an answer to that very question. It turns out that the voice is not really Chude-Sokei’s, but rather that of an AI that has been trained to mimic his speech. If you listen closely, you can detect traces of this sleight of hand; there’s an occasional strangeness to the pronunciation, like a non-native speaker testing an unfamiliar word. But there is no gotcha moment, no big replicant reveal; Mouse on Mars have bypassed the easy drama of deep fakes to delve into the realm of synthetic essence. Where Dimensional People’s voices were often run through electronic processing until they sounded almost like synthesizers, here the voice is a synthesizer, in effect. Working with software tools designed by the Berlin AI agency Birds on Mars, among other technical collaborators, Mouse on Mars are able to “play” the AI’s voice as though it were a software instrument, changing its speed and pitch, glitching its enunciation, even altering intonation and emotional resonance.