Looks like this ships immediately, but digital is not released until the
end of Feb.
Curious if anyone has ordered the CD through Bandcamp and was given full
digital on purchase?
https://mouseonmarstj.bandcamp.com/album/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. Operating in their unique orbit within dance music’s nebulous
echosystem, the duo’s hyper-detailed productions are inventive,
groundbreaking but always possessing a signature joyful experimentation. 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. New album AAI
(Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) takes Toma and Werner’s fascination with
technology and undogmatic exploration a quantum leap further. Collaborating
with writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, a collective of computer
programmers and longtime Mouse On Mars collaborator/percussionist Dodo
NKishi, the duo explores artificial intelligence as both a narrative
framework and compositional tool, summoning their most explicitly
science-fiction work to date.
AAI compiles some the most immediate and gripping music in Mouse on Mars’
extensive catalogue. 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 modelling speech. What appears to be Louis Chude-Sokei narrating
through the story is in fact the AI speaking. Text and voice from
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. Artwork was provided by the inventor of the computer graphics
language Processing, Casey Reas, a further exploration of technology’s
application in the context of art.
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."
credits
releases February 26, 2021