Aai

Mouse on Mars, the Berlin-based duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, approach electronic music with an inexhaustible curiosity and unparalleled ingenuity. AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) takes their fascination with technology and undogmatic exploration a quantum leap further. Emerging from a primordial ooze of rolling bass and skittering electronics, hypnotic polyrhythms and pulsing synthesizers propel the listener across the record’s expanse. Hidden in the duo’s hyper-detailed productions is a kind of meta-narrative. Working with AI tech collective Birds on Mars and former Soundcloud programmers Ranny Keddo and Derrek Kindle, the duo collaborated on the creation of bespoke software capable of modeling speech; text and voice from writer and scholar of African Studies Louis Chude-Sokei, and DJ/producer Yağmur Uçkunkaya were fed into the software as a model, allowing Toma and Werner to control parameters like speed or mood, thereby creating a kind of speech instrument they could control and play as they would a synthesizer. The album’s narrative is quite literally mirrored in the music – the sound of an artificial intelligence growing, learning and speaking. This exploration of artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool, allowing the duo to summon their most explicitly science-fiction work to date.

A genre-less embrace of cutting-edge technologies have ensured that each Mouse on Mars release sounds strikingly modern, a fact made more remarkable when one reflects on the duo’s 25 years of making music. AAI compiles some the most immediate and gripping music in Mouse on Mars’ extensive catalogue. In Chude-Sokei’s text, as machine learning advances, robots begin to develop language, conscience, empathy – “anarchic” and unpredictable qualities. Drawing parallels between the evolution of human and machine, AAI uses technology as a lens to examine deep philosophical questions. The question of how we use technology and world resources feels particularly poignant and timely as we head into 2021. AAI posits that we must embrace AI and technology as a collaborator to break out of our current cultural and moral stagnation, and to ensure our survival as a species. As Werner explains: “We have to let AI develop qualities that we attach to humans, like empathy, imperfection and distraction. Not to avoid machines becoming competitors who will do things faster or better, but because we’ll stay stuck in our selfishness, fear and xenophobia if we do not open up to those new concepts of life machines are able represent.”