September 2, 2004

Test Spin: Mouse on Mars

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Boards of Canada tell us that music has the right to children. Mouse on Mars isn’t part of that progeny; after all, they don’t suck; but Radial Connector is, as the title explains, part of a long tradition of you-know-who begot you-know-what. The sexcellent opening track “Mine is in Yours” ponders the continuous process of artistic procreation in cyclical structure through coitus metaphor and dangling ellipsis.

But this could all be a case of the blind leading the blind, or more accurately, the blind instructing the blind on the mathematics of Fourier transformations, while high on ecstasy: although the words come out abstractly incomprehensible and joyously incoherent, somehow our bodies still know what to do. Mouse on Mars’ Indian guru writes, “The impulse of DANCE is spontaneous” — but that may be because he’s chaste. Radial Connector gets the blood flowing, period.

“Evoke an Object” ironically concludes the record by self-referentially pondering its reason for being. What’s left? — “TO CHOOSE AN OBJECT.” Hah. Good joke right? Wrong. This record is all about geometries, but not your run-of-the-mill circles and squares. Radial Connector describes (and is described by) M