Pop Goes the Mouse

Indeed, what most distinguishes Radical Connector is the prominence of vocals. Every song features them, though most of the time they're chopped, broken, edited, deconstructed, and morphed into sounds no larynx could ever produce on its own. Björk may get the avant-garde credit for her all-vocal album Medúlla, but Radical Connector is no less throaty. Despite their synthetic feel, the album's reconstructed vocals grew from an organic compositional process, according to the band.

"When we started to record, we had very simple harmonic lines, like classic folk songs or something," says Toma. Working the raw material with "a producer's approach," using the computer as an instrument -- and at the same time attempting to avoid the hackneyed "vocoder aesthetic" that plagues music from retro electro to Celine Dion -- St. Werner and Toma began hacking at the sung parts, using hardware and software alike to layer these bastard sounds into complex formations. While the strategy gives the album its trademark stutter and shudder, it also required pretty extreme patience on the part of Mouse on Mars' collaborators Dodo and Niobe, whose re-edited contributions bear scant resemblance to their original efforts. "Niobe is a very close friend," avers Toma, "so it made sense to work with her, because if you work with a well-known vocalist, you can't do anything [radical] with the vocals." As a case in point, the Fall's Mark E. Smith -- whose curious enunciation is one of contemporary rock music's most recognizable -- recently contributed lyrics to a remix of "Wipe That Sound," but understanding that Smith is "his own character," in Toma's words, the band declined to muck about with the English singer's work.

R.C. Baban

Larger Than Life: Mouse on Mars.

Details

Ratatat and the Junior Boys open

Wednesday, Oct. 6

771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

The Independent

Related Content

• Mouse on Mars: Show Preview
  October 10, 2012
• Stiff Life
  March 20, 2013
• The Top 10 Worst Film Performances By Musicians
  February 14, 2012
• Carly Rae Jepsen's Kiss: A First Listen
  September 14, 2012
• 10 Great Songs About Cheating on Your Lover
  January 23, 2013

More About

• Andi Toma
• Britney Spears
• Cologne (Germany)
• Mark E. Smith
• Celebrity News

For Radical Connector, though, the strategy is such that each sound's character -- whether sung, sampled, or played -- is twined and tangled into an unrecognizable amalgam. "The elements of the songs merge into each other even though they don't really fit harmonically," explains Toma. "Each song is really like three elements morphing into each other. It was really difficult to make this happen, because if you just put them together in blocks, in parts, it doesn't work. So the song is really being created on the [mixing] desk, where we're fading elements into each other. I think it's the same if you work with genetic material -- it's really a mathematical thing." Seems geeky, sure, but on disc, it works. In Mouse on Mars' hands, a drum hit unfolds into a bass bulge or a glottal stop in the same way that a rocker's guitar string blossoms into a feedback crescendo. "It sounds kind of hippie," admits Toma, but this idea of energy and flux is at the core of the band's philosophy.

The title Radical Connector can be read in multiple ways -- as Mouse on Mars' attempt to tie all its incarnations back to the band's roots, say -- but most compellingly, the phrase speaks to the knottiness of the music itself. What's shocking, then, is how easy it all sounds, which only speaks to the band's care and precision in the studio. "Sometimes you have to be really careful," says Toma. "Suddenly everything falls apart because you want to introduce just one element, or you make one sound louder, and the whole idea totally changes. It's still very fragile."

All this suggests that despite Mouse on Mars' hesitation to use the word "pop," these particular German experimental musicians might have at least one thing in common with Britney Spears -- besides an abundance of hooks. As Spears said to Rolling Stone, "Anyone can write a boring artistic song. Pop music is the hardest shit to write."