Jan St. Werner, one half of German avant-garde electronic duo Mouse on Mars and an endlessly inventive artist, has announced a new solo album called Squares Will Fall. More than a decade in the making, the album brings together Werner’s love of experimentation, inventive sound design and collaboration, with contributions from Justin Vernon, Sufjan Stevens, Ben Lanz and John Colpitts, among others. Squares Will Fall originally began in 2012 as a 30-minute electronic composition, created for a friend’s 30th birthday, before continuing to change over the years. The piece later became the foundation for an improvisation between Werner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon during the sessions for Mouse on Mars’ Dimensional People at Vernon’s studio in Wisconsin. In 2021, Werner reworked the composition into a spatial installation for the Ural Industrial Biennial, where three separate layers of the piece were played through loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling that were continually moved around the space by performers, creating a different listening experience depending on where the audience was.

Werner completed the piece this year, creating its first stereo mix at Mouse on Mars’ Paraverse Studios with his Mouse on Mars partner Andi Toma, who also contributed bass to the final version. After more than a decade of transformations, Squares Will Fall is now being released as record “preserving the piece’s open, cut-up character while translating its spatial and performative origins into a form suitable for focused listening”, as the press release describes. It will see the light of day on November 13th through Thrill Jockey and coinciding with the album announcement, Werner has let loose an excerpt of the sublime and beguiling title track. Describing it, Werner says:

“A computer music free jazz rhapsody jumbled in a space capsule with Justin not really understanding how he got on board. Justin asks the computer. The computer replies with a drum solo.”

‘Squares Will Fall’ comes accompanied by a video made by Galina Nemtseva / Icon Film.