Ipecac Recordings
2006
Varcharz
About This Album
Just in case anyone thought Mouse on Mars got too poppy and danceable on Radical Connector, its follow-up, Varcharz, is nearly its polar opposite: jagged, fractured, splintered, and downright violent-sounding, it's easily the most extreme music the duo has made, and is right in line with the rest of Ipecac's output. The album's squelchy, stuttering beats have ties to Mouse on Mars' noisiest, most abstract earlier work, such as Niun Niggung's "Distroia," but Varcharz is hardly a regression or a rehash. If anything, the way Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma repeat the tracks' simple themes and tweak them until they're just about to break into a million pixels makes the album among their most experimental work. This theme carries to song titles like "Chartnok" and "Retphase," similarly chopped-up bits and pieces of almost-recognizable words and self-explanatory, onomatopoetic syllables. "Bertney" is a particularly good example of Varcharz's modus operandi: beginning with a twinkling, mischievous melody that could've been borrowed from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, it's processed and disfigured until it's completely overridden by brutal hissing, scraping, and thumping.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,20 and 21)

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16.
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21.
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21.

 
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