"Electronic music is not a style," Jan St. Werner of Mouse on Mars said. "We work with electronic tools, that's it." That this wise comment comes from St. Werner is no surprise; he makes music in both Mouse on Mars (with Andi Toma) and the more abstract Microstoria (with Oval's Markus Popp) that transcends its mechanistic origins to become the beautiful sound of life itself. Like the squeal of some embryonic creature from a parallel universe, St. Werner's work comes complete with its own style and vocabulary, organic to the core as it inhabits an exclusively electromagnetic plane.

Lithops is what Jan St. Werner calls his solo work, removed from the peerless pop instincts of Toma and the digital conceptualism of Markus Popp. Uni Um It has St. Werner wandering through a warm, intriguing middle ground, where's he free to explore bubbly grooves alongside more challenging sound textures, creating a winning blend of ear- pleasing comfort and disorienting ambience.

At one end of the continuum is the catchy Track 5 (none of the eight tracks are given names or identified on the sleeve), which will be familiar to Mouse on Mars fans. It has the trademark intertwined melodicism to grab your ear, the fat, lazy and stoned- to- the- bone bassline to work over your solar plexus, and an abundance of dubby sonic texture that you'll want to get naked and roll around in.

If Track 5 covers the "warm and happy" extreme, Track 8 shows what St. Werner can do with menacing atmosphere. It begins with an extended drone that sounds like a piece of sheet metal outfitted with contact mic's blowing in the spring breeze, and then suddenly an army of mutant crickets chimes in, signaling... something wicked, surely. The remaining six tracks fall somewhere in between, and all of them are equally great, proving that this musician's tools have become an extension of himself.

-Mark Richard-San