Ye Viols

Mouse on Mars maestro Jan St Werner delivers yet more experimental noise - this time in the guise of Lithops - in an early 2009 release where each track was made for various art instillation pieces over a number of years, creating not so much an album as a collection of one offs. Consequently Ye Viols is a record without any real coherence or flow. This does not mean it isn’t a good album and or one worthy of a listen, it’s just a difficult one to dive straight into.

The trouble with listening to something like this is you really don't get the whole perspective necessary to appreciate it. We can only presume the real sensory experience is only achieved in the setting for which the music was written for. This is very much evident on ‘in nitro’, ‘apps 1’ and ‘apps 2‘. Each one a very accomplished electronica, but all three cry out to be played in a gallery setting. Elsewhere ‘sebquenz’ starts off very strongly and mixes what sounds like futuristic cuckoo clocks with electronic base and it really does get the head nodding. Towards the end you hear voices speaking in the background and it really does convey the feel of a gallery.

A couple of tracks that can stand apart from the concept though are opener ‘Graf‘, and with even greater potency, the latter-sitting ‘Penrose Avenue‘. ‘Graf’ is quite tribal in its rhythms before descending into clicks and beeps, while standout ‘Penrose Avenue’ has a somewhat more organic sound with bubbling noise coming through the speakers, to firstly be replaced with layered strands of increasing noise and then ending abruptly.

Ye Viols is very much a sound collage, where Werner is the sculpture trying to craft multi layered soundscapes, and fair play to him.