All guilty pleasures belong to us!
The American musician and performer John Mouse is a proud outsider who makes music that sounds as if it didn’t belong to our time at all. He plays synths, approaches them with a punk primitivism but keeps his in-depth knowledge of medieval music by hand and teaches philosophy and political sciences at a university. Originally, he studied experimental music but his flatmate Ariel Pink pointed him towards songs that better suit his baritone as well as sense for absurdist humour. Maus’s first two albums flopped but 2011 saw him finally succeed in his “search for the perfect pop song” on the album We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves. Maus become one of the artists of the so-called hypnagogic pop wave, a celebrated experimenter with a guilty pleasure format. When he unleashes his wild performance, all boundaries of good taste come falling down.