Mound Magnet

Lithops is the name that Jan St. Werner — one third of the impossible to categorize electronic act Mouse on Mars and one half of improvisational electronic duo Microstoria — assumes for his solo electronic recordings. Named after a type of succulent desert plant native to Africa which camouflages itself as rocks and pebbles, the Lithops project appears to be just another variant of weirdo electronica that you can't dance to (at least not without breaking a toe or two). But Werner's clearly the restless type, if we are to judge by how often his kind-of-ambient, kind-of-groove-y tracks change in terms of sound, texture and melody — everything, really. "Stratografic" has the most unearthly and shape-shifting groove we can think of, while "Vortext" sounds like your computer restlessly dreaming of every song you listened to on it through the course of one day. The second we apply a label to what he's doing, the track has completely changed into something else. The result is music that has so much going on (even when it's relatively quiet) that it seems to change each time you listen to it. Disorienting and pleasurable, Mound Magnet is among the most valid updates of psychedelic music in years.