Maybe a bit silly, but memorable and ultimately fitting. Their sound is lively and intricate, nervous and sometimes annoying. But that’s just their rules: Always be ironic, put everything to the test, never rest on achievements, stay in constant motion.
The musical result is highly successful, although truly not easy listening. All sorts of timbres and masses are mixed into horizontal and vertical layers. Melodies and fragments of melodies, hectic, clanging, rattling, and pulsating sound bodies, rhythmically articulated and somewhat improvisational processes – the pulverized and puzzle-like texture of their music is ready.
From the very beginning, Mouse on Mars has taken a playful openness as the foundation of their work, which develops on a friendship basis as a "work in progress". Collaborations with other musicians have always led to surprising results, whether with Mark E. Smith of "The Fall" or with former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flür. Their pieces sound full and are full of surprises; they are complex and playful.
Mouse on Mars love experimentation, love playing with expectations and their subversion, continuously generating irritations through musical V-effect. They set signs, draw boundaries, and push against limits. And above all, they transcend them. Because why settle when it can also be mobile? Thus, they remain in a state of "good ambiguity," as Dietmar Dath once formulated in the exhibition book "doku/fiction".
In their constant balancing act, Mouse on Mars arrived at the museum in 2004: in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle. For their project "doku/fiction," of course, the exploration of boundaries and their transgression was once again the focus: the attempt to provoke development, the question of what can be extracted from electronic music, what it can lead to.
The answer was colorful, diverse, and complex: Under the motto "Mouse on Mars reviewed & remixed," friendly artists had taken inspiration from Mouse music and created their own works. The basic premise, the twist, was that they were not allowed to sound! Silent remixes, no noise, music transformed in silence. Originally planned as a pure book project, the decision was later made to exhibit it. And in the end, it also became sound again: The exhibition contributions were turned into sound by Toma and Werner and included as a CD with the book.
Those who feel dizzy from so many references have landed on the Mars mouse planet and are probably also in a pleasant state of suspended animation. The charm of ironic lightness is hard to escape. Or perhaps the CD player has long since been turned off.
