Mouse on Mars live at Il Motore

by Max Jones

Il Motore is at the northern end of Little Italy, hence the Italian name, and is surrounded by warehouses that could easily host the hard electronica that is Mouse On Mars.

The difference between MoM and a rave DJ, though, is in the danceability, or lack thereof, on their tracks. To successfully dance to a MoM song requires disjointedness that only true yogis possess. That isn’t to say there weren’t a couple youngsters in the crowd doing their best to keep in rhythm with this arhythmic music; there were, but they were dancing just as hard when the music stopped. The rest of the crowd was much older, and clearly had grown up with MoM, the duo itself being on the wrong side of 40.

The guard knew what to expect, which wasn’t dance beats, but rather an exhibition of how much technology can be involved in a song whilst still qualifying as music. The answer: quite a lot.

The problem is that this makes the viewer wonder: do Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma really need to be there? Besides a handful of vocal loops provided by the duo, they spent the majority of their performance acting like a bored office worker, i.e. concentrating really hard on their computer screens without actually doing much.

With that being said, there is a heavy amount of artistry in the performance, just not of the melodic variety. Their live show sounds like Robocop took Trent Reznor’s spot in NIN, and their light show was a visual representation of Thom Yorke’s nightmares. Intense? Absolutely. Enjoyable? It depends if you want a night of dancing or a night of marveling at what technological masterminds we humans have become.