Niun niggung. Yeah that sounds about right. mouse on mars are one of those outfits you’d like to hold at gunpoint and force to explain themselves. What does the name of the album mean? What do the song titles mean? Do you think it’s funny to make up words? And how do you make this nice music? Luckily for me, although this album is obscure, replete with random bleeps and machine mayhem, it is also accessible. There is a healthy dose of pop in there. There is also a big organic element.

I don’t know if that’s typical of these guys, but the list of musicians credited on the liner notes is quite long. In fact, the opening track with its guitar picking and soulful horns, and only a minimum of electro squiggles and dubby background noise, sounds like laidback Nightmares on Wax or Red Snapper or one of those not-triphop type people.

Although this is definitely a machine-made album, the brass is a prominent feature on several tracks, providing a warmth that counterbalances the knob-twiddling voyages into techno arcana. There are plenty of those, with rhythms cobbled together from squawks and clicks and static, and riffs stitched from found objects and random emissions. There is a nice fragile quality about the arrangements, as if these eclectro fragments came together by accident and could fall apart again at any second. The pace is pretty relaxed, frisky rather than frenzied, with the exception of the standout “distroia” which ups the ante a bit with some dirty, crunchy drum’n’bass/breaks.

According to their blurb, mouse on mars pride themselves on the depth of their pieces, which are densely layered and always feature several drum loops and other rhythm-y bits as well as whatever bleeps, squiggles and melodies are floating around. This is complex and adventurous music, the collaboration between alien robots and a 70s soundtrack band, but for all its esoteric integrity it still sounds really good.

Year: 1999 Label: Thrill Jockey

BUY: Niun Niggung – mouse on mars from chaosmusic.com