There is something dreadfully fitting in a solitary man of the German electronic pair Mouse on Mars calling forth a whole company of extraordinary companions for his newest solitary endeavour. Jan St. Werner, whose machines of noise have long disturbed and delighted in equal measure, announces a new record titled Squares Will Fall, arriving November 13 upon Thrill Jockey. Among the contributors gathered to this singular work are Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon, Beirut’s Zach Condon, and the National’s Ben Lanz.
Of Cords, Tents, and Gatherings Long Past
The genesis of the title composition, as a Bandcamp notice reveals, is no recent invention but a thing born in 2012, when Werner first fashioned an extended rendering of “Squares Will Fall” to mark a friend’s passage into a new stage of life.
What began as a private tribute has since become, through years of patient labor, something far more extraordinary: a foundation upon which Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Werner himself made music together during the sessions for Mouse on Mars’s Dimensional People, recorded at Vernon’s own dwelling in Wisconsin.
The piece did not rest there. In 2021, Werner presented “Squares Will Fall” as a living, breathing performance at the Ural Industrial Biennial, where fragments of the composition issued forth from speakers hung by long cords from the roof of a great tent meant for spectacle, continually moved about by the performers themselves, who thus became active agents in the very mixing of the sound. One imagines the dreadful spectacle: voices and tones moving above like spirits given cord and hand.
The Remaining Company of Voices
Vernon lends both word and voice to the title track itself, a portion of which now circulates for the curious ear. But two further pieces complete this modest yet singular list of songs. “Swamp Brains” features the voice of Rosanne Rubino, while “Flötotto” finds Sufjan Stevens at the machine that keeps time and Ben Lanz upon the low brass instrument, a most peculiar pairing that promises equal parts melancholy and mischief.
The full accounting of the record stands thus:
01 Squares Will Fall
02 Swamp Brains
03 Flötotto
A Continuing Chronicle of Singular Sound
This new offering follows hard upon Werner’s prior solitary work, Space Synthesis, which appeared in 2023 and confirmed his standing as a man who fears no strange machine and no strange partnership. Those wishing to recall the pair’s achievements together may consult Philip Sherburne’s account of Mouse on Mars’s 2021 record AAI, a chronicle of their continuing endeavours in sound wrought in common rather than in solitude.
What comes forth from this gathering—Werner, Vernon, Stevens, Condon, Lanz, Rubino—is less a mere record than a correspondence between distant studios and distant years, a composition that has traveled from a friend’s gathering to a Wisconsin recording room to a great tent in the Urals, gathering voices as it went like a traveler gathering companions upon a long and doubtful road. One awaits November 13 with no small measure of curious expectation, wondering what dreadful and beautiful shape these squares shall finally take when at last they fall.