Mouse on mouse - DoIT

Groovy kick on beat.. Beat that mouse !!

Coma Break Beat

The Size of the Synth...

Over the last decade, Mouse On Mars have become one of the leading names in European electronic music. Their experimental approach brings together analogue and digital, lo-fi and hi-fi, and real instruments and samples to create an organic-sounding whole. 

"We like to examine the structure of every single sound," says St Werner. "We spend a lot of time on this. And then, once you put these sounds into the song, you see another structure. You see the narrative, which is more arranged, more linear, more like a song with introduction and verses and chorus. All these parts, all these bits of narration, have many levels, and every sound itself has different frequency and dynamic characteristics and things. We like to see the core of a song, and in there are lots of different sounds. They're like a composition, and they have to work with each other and one has to lead to the next one. The story told in our music makes you willing to accept a lot of strange things.

"How we produce sounds is very intuitive, and the result of a long process. We may work a couple of weeks on a track, and put all sorts of things in, and the narration is changing, the structure is changing. It's an awareness of feeling... where the space in the track is, and how every time you add something, the space can become even larger. We follow this and watch it and the more we get into it, the more we see space here and another possibility there that can hint at another direction, and in certain places it can become very dense and in other places it can open up.

The MOM processing arsenal includes the odd home-made speciality.

"We want to create space, we want to shape space — we don't want to stuff the music. But often the more you throw into the track, the more the story, the personality of the track, becomes clear. Sometimes you have to be very strict, and decide that certain things should not happen. That's a constant game and it changes by how you feel on any particular day. But we feel there's so much space in music that we can do this. There's no other art form that has the space music has. Music for me is pure structure.

"A sound triggers emotions and references in your mind and it may be something that you don't fully understand, and there's a sound right next to it that you hear on another level. All these relationships become like a well-cooked dish. You can taste the ingredients separately, but all together they make something different. When you have all those different elements, you can't control it any more. It's so complex that it's playing with you as much as you play with the music. I like that, when music really invites you to see what you can do with it. And then you get to that feeling in the studio of producing something that feels very unique and very special to you, and that probably no-one else has made before."

The Size of Synth