Jan St. Werner Squares Will Fall, a new solo album from the one half of Mouse on Mars, lands on 13 November via Thrill Jockey, and the contributor list alone is enough to make you sit up: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Beirut’s Zach Condon and the National’s Ben Lanz are all on board.
A piece twelve years in the making
The title track has a history that stretches back to 2012. According to the Bandcamp bio for the record, Werner originally recorded a 30-minute version of “Squares Will Fall” to celebrate a friend’s 30th birthday. The piece kept evolving from there, eventually becoming the foundation for an improvisation between Justin Vernon and Werner during the Mouse on Mars Dimensional People sessions at Vernon’s studio in Wisconsin. Vernon contributed lyrics and vocals to the track, and an excerpt is already available to hear.
The piece also had a life outside the studio. In 2021, Werner presented “Squares Will Fall” as a live performance at the Ural Industrial Biennial, a version in which different parts of the composition played through speakers suspended by long ropes from a circus ceiling. The performers continuously repositioned those speakers during the performance, making them, in the words of the Bandcamp bio, “active participants in the mixing process.” It is the kind of spatialised, participatory approach that sits somewhere between sound art and a gig, and it gives the album a conceptual weight that goes well beyond a straightforward collection of collaborations.
Jan St. Werner Squares Will Fall tracklist and contributors
The full record runs to three tracks. “Swamp Brains” features singer Rosanne Rubino, while closer “Flötotto” sees Stevens on drum machine and Lanz handling trombone and bass. Three songs is a compact statement, but the range of textures across that trio is considerable: Vernon’s vocal improvisation, Rubino’s voice, Stevens behind a drum machine, Lanz’s brass.
Werner’s previous solo outing, Space Synthesis, arrived in 2023, so Squares Will Fall follows relatively quickly, though the ideas feeding into it have been circling for far longer. The gap between that 2012 birthday recording and this release says something about the patience baked into the project.
Mouse on Mars, the duo Werner forms with Andi Toma, have always operated at the intersection of electronic music and a broader experimental sensibility, and Werner’s solo work pushes further into that territory. The Squares Will Fall release reflects that: a title piece with roots in a private gesture, a live installation in the Urals, and a studio session in Wisconsin, all folded into a single composition.
Squares Will Fall is released on 13 November on Thrill Jockey. The tracklist in full: 01 Squares Will Fall, 02 Swamp Brains, 03 Flötotto.
