On
AAI,
Mouse on Mars once again reinvent the tireless creativity that's driven them since the beginning of their career. After chopping up the vocals and performances of
Bon Iver's
Justin Vernon and
the National's
Bryce Dessner and abstracting them into electronic anonymity on their previous album
Dimensional People, this time
Andi Toma and
Jan St. Werner take the opposite approach: They synthesize the soul of artificial intelligence and give it a voice.
St. Werner and
Toma tapped an AI tech collective to create custom-made speech modeling software that they could play like a synthesizer and used the words and voices of writer/scholar
Louis Chude-Sokei and DJ/producer
Ya'mur Uckunkaya as the software's source material. Since
Mouse on Mars have used bespoke software and technology on several albums, adding AI to their toolkit only makes sense. Yet
AAI (that's short for "Anarchic Artificial Intelligence") frequently feels more "human" than much of their music. It's softer, more emotional, and more imperfect.
Toma and
St. Werner blur the boundaries between organic and mechanical expertly with the warm, rubbery tones they use and with the album's vivid audio storytelling. "Tools Use Tools" could be an AI work song, and the hot, thick rhythms of "Cut That Fishernet" sound more like a jungle than a mainframe. The narrative style
Mouse on Mars flirted with on
Dimensional People blossoms on
AAI's fully formed world-building: On "The Latent Space," wild electro-acoustic polyrhythms and sprightly vocalizations evoke a virtual gestation that sets the stage for the AI's evolution over the course of the album. The software's voice is remarkably natural-sounding, and hearing it assemble and assert itself is exciting. One of
AAI's most eventful tracks, "Speech and Ambulation," shifts from glitchy babbling -- the equivalent of AI baby talk -- to heady musings on the needs of artificial intelligence ("now that they are no longer defined by computation, how will they talk?") to a stair-stepping melody that suggests ascending to another level. When the AI reaches that level on "Walking and Talking," declaring itself "a walking machine" and quoting
Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side," it's surprisingly moving and funny. As
St. Werner and
Toma trace the AI's evolution, they draw on their own past. Along with the squelching, tactile textures of their early days, the album touches on
Idiology's tumbling beats on "Youmachine" and "Doublekeyrock," while the gleaming glitch-pop of "Artificial Authentic" and "Seven Months" contain echoes of
Niun Niggung. The optimism in the latter two tracks percolates throughout
AAI, offering a vision of a world where AI and humankind coexist in harmony. If anyone is capable of making this dream a reality, it's
Mouse on Mars -- their music is evolving in sync with their technology, and
AAI presents a bold challenge to conventional notions of creativity, authenticity, learning, and emotion. ~ Heather Phares
