Jan St. Werner always seems to use his Lithops moniker as a conceptual clearing house, fleshing out new ideas on record as he hashes out the ever-shifting sounds of his much beloved, much scrutinized project Mouse on Mars. St. Werner's best Lithops pieces are tightly wound sonic anomalies sparking out of white noise with transient, implied melodies. Unlike the malleable and transilient sounds of Mouse on Mars, Lithops compositions are, almost as a rule, embryonic and fragile ambient works. Ye Viols! plays with the model at its own peril.
Ye Viols! compiles St. Werner's recent forays into composition for art installations, with these 11 instrumental narratives forming keenly rhythmic commentaries on a technophile world. Synthesizers flow and loop with urgency, beats arrive promptly on the downbeat, subroutines whir in the background. Each piece visits a different corner of the industrial maze, appealing to Zuckerzeit -era Cluster on "Graf" while rushing the listener through factory floors, WWII radio rooms, and gamelan orchestras in "21. jhrdt".
But for all the "recombined industrial iconography" adorning Ye Viols! , its works resist cohesion. The rave-tinged mechanics explored on "Apps 1" and "Apps 2" fritter along as a sly rejoinder to the sweat of the dancefloor, whereas the following piece, "Bacchus", whirs statically like a jet engine. The record ends up a jumble of techno-organic identifiers: Eleven works singing 11 vaguely similar tunes in 11 different keys. The installations that source the compilation reportedly span a number of themes: "Graf" accompanied a series of futuristic architectural sketches, whereas "Bacchus" soundtracked collages of imagined hybrid life forms. Decontextualized from their sensory environment, the pieces share only a superficial grasp at the wonders of technological innovation.
As today's dominant technological upheaval, the Information Age, forces the evolution of music consumption, composers such as St. Werner are (for the better) diversifying their creative output in order to stay relevant. Ironically, while St. Werner has the chance to engage listeners on a new medium, this limited-edition run of 1,000 individually numbered Ye Viols! CDs seems chained to a fast-dying world of shiny discs and brick-and-mortar commodities. The compositions on Ye Viols! can hint at his Lithops' dynamism, but they are tailor-made for the passive participation of art installations, not for home listening. In its greatest and most banal irony, this futuristic package begs for the minor middle-ground of a simple accompanying DVD. As it is, Ye Viols! belongs not in the auspices of Jan St. Werner's varied works, but in a museum gift shop.
