The final words that Mark E. Smith speaks on Jan St. Werner’s Molocular Meditation might be the most mundane thing that the phlegmatic leader of post-punk legends the Fall ever recorded: “I think that’s the lot, Jan. Thanks.”
The comment was directed at St. Werner, the producer and musician known best as one half of electronic duo Mouse on Mars, letting him know that Smith was done recording. Arriving after nearly three minutes of synthesized clangs and what sound like faulty oscillators having a heated debate, it’s an odd postscript from a singer and poet known for fiery invective and grumbling insults.
Everything else leading up to that aside is pure Smith. His coda comes at the end of “VS Cancelled,” a gentle nose-thumbing at Domino Records, the label that released the sole full-length by Von Südenfed, a collaborative project between Smith and Mouse on Mars. In the song, Smith reads an email from Domino’s general manager Jonny Bradshaw, who is dropping the group from the label. “I’m afraid it looks like we won’t be able to pick up the option. I told you times were tough.” Smith punctuates that last sentence with a rueful laugh.
One trait Smith shared with St. Werner was a penchant for reinvention. That was often by necessity for the Fall founder, considering the dozens of people who logged time in his band during its 40-year existence. But throughout the respective careers of both men, each project often seemed to begin with a clean slate, completely ignoring what came before. Likewise, Molocular Meditation has little precedent in the discographies of either artist, whether separately or together.
The album’s centerpiece is its title track, a re-edited version of a sound piece commissioned by Manchester, England’s Cornerhouse that premiered in 2014. The 20-minute work was originally conceived for multi-channel sound, which meant being in a room surrounded by St. Werner’s freeform electronic trills and hums while Smith’s growling voice spat out blank-verse poetry: “The first problem of young American males/Public speaking according to the talking ducks of Russian television/You can throw all this behind you/This is a better life here.”
Even in this mixed-down version, St. Werner’s music is enveloping and exciting. He responds to Smith’s word spouts by either buttressing them with synth wobbles or matching a frizzy melody to the rhythm of the speech, in the vein of the Books’ “Be Good to Them Always.” Or he will help punctuate a word by hitting it with an extra jolt of sound, so that when Smith draws out the syllables saying “immobile,” he’s paired with a groaning keyboard line.
Smith’s work here is more lucid than anything he did on the last few Fall albums or his guest appearance on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach. Maybe that has to do with not having to worry about melody or keeping up with a band, but he sounds hale and inspired, evoking the spirit of William S. Burroughs’ recorded work in his delivery and unmistakable drawl.
The rest of Molocular Meditation comes from work that St. Werner was doing around the same time that he was constructing the Cornerhouse piece. Smith is also a central part of “Back to Animals,” but laid beneath waves of bioluminescent sound and rhythm. “On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds,” a commission by Finnish festival Music Nova, is less interesting: an array of arpeggiated patterns that leaves an itchy, unresolved feeling inside.
St. Werner kindly lets the late Smith have the last words on this album, and it is, again, the ideal farewell for the singer and poet. He sounds positively tickled to be throwing up two fingers at Domino Records and mocking the superfluous details in the email (“I’m in Switzerland at the moment”). It’s the perfect punctuation mark to finish the story of a truly unique collaboration.
