April 30, 2001

Mouse On Mars: Edinburgh La Belle Angele

Mouse On Mars continue to defy categorization as they blitz Edinburgh...

What is it, this curious sound, this bastard hybrid of disparate grooves emanating from the shadows? What, why and how are Mouse On Mars? Are they dance? Well only of a twisted, seriously monged sort. Theirs is the soundtrack to a rave in a madman's beard, a cut-up, beat-spattered tech-noize that sets the floor quaking like a frightened bouncer. This is the sound that Chris Morris hears in his head, all the time.

Clearly, the people here tonight have discovered the dark-side of the Ibiza moon, raving like crazed giraffes as the two men on stage (Euro-buddies, Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner) nod furiously over their music machines, wrenching from them sometimes frightening, sometimes wondrous sounds that seem to surprise themselves as much as the crowd.

But are they rock? They met, so we're told, at a death metal concert, and sure enough, just when you thought things were getting a little too complacent, a guitar is summarily hauled out. Thus their techno mainframe is corroded by molten chunks of guttural riffola, their regurgitated, teutonic grooves spiralling off into almost-genius plains of compulsive, grinding euphoria. For Mouse On Mars understand implicitly the essential dictates of hardcore dance/rock: keep it grinding, keep it heavy and keep it going for days until the entire room's collective head is set to explode in a shower of glitter and gore.

By design this is music stripped of all humanity, subscribing to every classic Kraut-pop aesthetic. It's dance music for robots, soulless grind for electric sheep. And often it's quite brilliant, in those moments where Andi and Jan lock into an instant of mechanical lunacy and suddenly all of this senseless clatter makes perfect, beautiful sense.

So what is it, this curious sound? It's music, just music, unencumbered by rules and blinkered minds - musik, pure und simple.

Paul Whitelaw

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