The 2010 album from Momus, Hypnoprism, now out in the US and Europe (via labels American Patchwork and Analogue Baroque). The album features on its cover Diamond Eye, a painting by New York-based Japanese artist Misaki Kawai. Design is by James Goggin of Practise. The record can be ordered via iTunes or as direct digital downloads from Darla, or Amazon (physical), as well as from the labels themselves.
The "hypnoprism" of the title is YouTube, a sort of hypnotic musical prism, the source of much of the inspiration for this album, and even some of the sounds. Hypnotised by watching his favourite music videos on YouTube, Momus made songs aspiring to the same qualities -- that mysterious catnip which makes you want to play a pop song over and over, and commit it to memory -- then immediately made videos for them and posted them. As a result, the whole album is available right now, right here, as a YouTube playlist:
There are notes on the composition of the record in the back pages of Zuihitsu, here. The mixes on the record (which will come out as a digipak CD only) will be different in some cases, longer, with fades engineered by sonic surrealist John Talaga.
Momus appears at two Berlin parties this week:
Remember The Time
A Momus performance at Splace
Thursday 30th September 21:00 - 21:30
Splace has been a regular free art party event on Thursday nights in a space at the base of the Berlin TV Tower, Alexanderplatz. Thursday sees its final event, titled Fade To Black. Momus has been invited to give an art performance at the party, and has chosen to link the venue's ending with his own imminent departure from Berlin. Remember The Time is a performance in which Momus circulates through the room holding a bright halo...gen lamp and a ghetto blaster cued up with Michael Jackson's song Remember The Time. Momus will pick out guests whom he'll remind, one by one, of times they shared in previous lives together in Berlin. These will be improvised verbal performances of imaginary extrapolated friendships, punctuated with dance moves quoted from the video of Jackson's epic video for the song.
Artists Amy Patton and Dirk Peuker will also be curating installations in the space during the evening.
Enter Splace by approaching the TV Tower from the south (fountain) side, climbing the stairs to the patio level, and moving anticlockwise around past the casinos to the empty unit overlooking the tram stop and Alexanderplatz station.
Admission free
Hypnoprismatic Sinfonia
A launch event for the new Momus album Hypnoprism
Saturday October 2nd 21:00
At 21.30 on Saturday October 2nd there's an album launch event for the Momus Hypnoprism album in which everyone is invited to bring musical instruments (acoustic or electric) and play along shambolically with a projection of the YouTube videos for the album. Come and make a sinfonic din in the manner of the Portsmouth Sinfonia:
Location: R20 Ziegrastrasse 11 Berlin, near S+U Sonnenallee (Staalplaat Working Space)
Map
Momus has written a book about Japan for Sternberg's Solution series.
The story is simple. Twelve idiots -- possibly conspirators, possibly visionaries, possibly liars, or possibly the most privileged and valuable future-witnesses the world has ever seen -- have found a way to the future of Japan. It's a messy business, involving crawling into a calving cow, and, after the initial twelve idiotic visits, nobody has been able to reproduce the feat. A commission of enquiry is established, and the idiots duly give accounts of their voyages to a panel of Japan experts who try -- not without exasperation -- to match the extraordinarily idiotic things they're hearing with known facts, likely scenarios and extrapolated outcomes.Amongst other things, the book makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the "far". We live in a time when difference and distance have been eroded and eradicated by globalisation, the internet and cheap jet travel. This "book of Japans" will try to restore a sense of wonder -- along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies, well-founded rumours, clouds of interference and globs of barn ectoplasm -- by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but time.
Published by Sternberg Press in late 2009, The Book of Scotlands is a series of delirious speculations about the future of Momus' motherland. Commissioned by German editor Ingo Niermann and modelled on his book Umbauland, The Book of Scotlands was well-received in Scotland.
"I don't think I am over-stating it," wrote Gerry Hassan, "to say that The Book of Scotlands will be read and reread, studied and assessed centuries from now for what it says about early 21st century Scotland". And Pat Kane in the Scottish Review of Books said: "The Book of Scotlands is a considerate, deeply generous take on the life of this country and its possible futures."
The Book of Scotlands can be ordered online via Sternberg's website (click "order") or via Amazon.de, or Amazon UK or Amazon US,
The Book of Scotlands was one of sixteen titles shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council's SMIT Book Awards 2010.
The Book of Jokes is Momus' first novel. Commissioned originally by french publisher La Volte, it was published first in English in September 2009, followed in October by the french edition Le Livre des Blagues, and will appear in German in the autumn of 2010 through Blumenbar.
"Most of the book's story lines orbit around taboos, including scatology, pedophilia, bestiality and talking, chess-playing penises," said the Los Angeles Times. "One of the book's central conflicts poses the question of whether two men can be each others' uncles, which can be answered only with some of the most lurid, labyrinthine incest in literature."
"The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes," wrote Adam Novy in Dossier Journal, "it's a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials. Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical."
The Book of Jokes can be ordered in English via Amazon, and in French via FNAC.
The most recent album from Momus is Joemus, released in November 2008.
Culturedeluxe called it "the best album from Momus in years, a brilliant, hallucinatory Nintendo arcade gloop of analogue pop and retro lounge as performed by two Space Invaders posing as human beings". "A great precis of where Momus's current musical fascinations lie", wrote Prefix magazine.
A collaboration with Berlin-based Scot Joe Howe, Joemus is available in the UK and Europe from Cherry Red and in the US from Darla. Other Momus releases are listed on this page. Six albums Momus released on the Creation label are available as free downloads from ubu.com.
Pretty much from its inception, Momus has used the web to communicate. From 1995 to 2003 the Momus website entertained visitors with frequently-updated content: monthly essays, daily photos, accounts of Momus albums, some portraits of Momus, collections of podcasts, a CV, audio clips and tour diaries. Then, from January 2004 until February 2010, a LiveJournal blog called Click Opera took over, adding Web 2.0 functionality and a lively comments section.
In February 2010, for a series of reasons outlined here and here and in this radio interview, Momus completed the Click Opera project and came back to iMomus.com, bringing a touch of blog influence back to the old Web 1.0 site in the form of a new yellow notebook column called Zuihitsu.
Meanwhile, news and status tweets -- for those who like that sort of thing -- from Momusworld can be found at wolon, the Twitter feed of Momus' faithful personal digital assistant, Maria Wolonski.
Mrs Who? *
Mrs Tsk *, vaguely named after a Yiddish actress Franz Kafka fell in love with in 1911, Mrs Tschissik, is a new Tumblr site for the more private and aesthetic side of Mr Momus' musings.
September 8th 2010
Letter from 1984
Somewhat in the spirit of Letters of Note I present a Momus curio from 1984: an audio letter to my communist transport planner friend Babis, a fellow student at the University of Aberdeen who'd already graduated and was living with his french girlfriend Catherine in postgrad accommodation in Mecklenburgh Square, London. I was planning to visit him there at Easter (and in fact went) and was very heartened to think that I now had like-minded friends living in London, a city I moved to later that year, shortly after graduating (in absentia) from Aberdeen with a first class honours degree in English Literature.
Letter from 1984 (mono mp3 file, 4mins 19secs, 2MB)
Things to know:
The accompanying photo is me circa 1984, taken by Malcolm Ross of Josef K at his house.
I was very influenced at this point by Saul Bellow, whose novel Herzog presents a character who narrates letters (mostly unsent) to various people in a dense, quirky style.
The "good news about Chesterfield" was Tony Benn's victory; the left-wing figurehead had just won a by-election in the Chesterfield constituency for Labour. He kept the seat until 2001.
I'm in between two relationships in this letter, giving "intellectual stimulation" to my half-Belgian ex-lover Helen while trying to court Ali Smith (who later became a famous novelist) unsuccessfully with enormous Herzog-style letters.
This is really how I spoke in 1984! Moving to London seems to have erased my Scottish accent.
Babis, plus a desire to land "publishing contracts" (in music or writing) was the reason I moved to London. My greek friend told me that the city's inner boroughs were some of the most radical places in the whole of Britain, a kind of eye-of-the-storm ruled by Ken Livingstone of the GLC and radical councils like Brent and Brixton, and somehow immune to Thatcherism. In fact, the GLC had just two years left before Thatcher abolished it. The Soviet Union would collapse four years after that.
I spent ten years in London (half of it in a bedsit off the King's Road I'd taken over from Babis' girlfriend Catherine), then three more in the late 1990s, but ultimately found the city's way of being incompatible with mine.
Babis is now a transport planning consultant raising a family in Athens. We visit each other when we can. Sunday August 8th 2010
Japan's Galapagos Syndrome: cite Darwin, think Lamarck?
As we all know, Charles Darwin took a five-year trip on The Beagle and studied finches and tortoises in the Galapagos Islands. That's why, when the BBC website recently ran an article entitled Revealing Japan's Low-Tech Belly, it included a photo of a giant tortoise on the Galapagos Islands captioned: "Is Japan burying its head in the sand when it comes to new tech?" The accompanying paragraph raised the issue of "Japan's much-touted Galapagos status. Like the plants and creatures on those islands Japan's tech standards and business practices have developed a unique character incompatible with anything beyond its borders." A blogger called Hideki Onda is quoted as saying "this Galapagos approach was an error perpetuated by the civil servants... Anything as foreign and revolutionary as Apple's WYSIWYG GUI operating system will never be accepted, even if it was the best. You see Apple had not paid respects to the Japanese bureaucrats."
Now, anyone who's ever tried to change money, use an international bank card, order a train ticket, or do other basic things in Japan -- only to be presented with lengthy Japanese-only paper forms to fill out or machines that spit their cards back at them -- will know the weird anomalies that this article is pointing out. Japan is a very high-tech nation, but it clings to some stubbornly low-tech ways. And sure, it is something to do with the much-maligned (especially by western market enthusiasts) mandarin bureaucrats who rule Japan. They have a not-so-secret agenda to keep ministries and officials in work, to keep things as they are, to keep things Japanese, and to limit foreign influence and power. Call it selective enforcement or passive aggression if you like, but it's the way Asian societies have worked for millennia. A great deal of what's good about those societies is tied up with this stealthy resistance to global business and the West's traditional double-whammy of trade and war (gunpowder with a side-order of opium).
If we're not the "western market enthusiasts" who tend to imply, in articles like the one on the BBC website, that technological progress has little to do with politics or aesthetics or autonomy or diversity, we might well be worried by the idea that "Japan's Galapagos approach is an error". Apart from anything else (for instance, the deeply problematical assumption that technological progress follows a single, correct trajectory requiring global conformity to a single norm), the Darwinian metaphor used in the Galapagos Syndrome label is being misapplied when the diversity gets described as an "error".
For Darwin said no such thing. In his 1837 B Notebook -- thinking about Galapagos tortoises, mockingbirds and rheas -- Darwin broke through to one of his most crucial ideas: that variation (and hence diversity) is essential to adapt and alter a species to a changing world. "He sketched branching descent," says the Wikipedia article on the voyage of the Beagle, "then a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, in which "it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", discarding Lamarck's independent lineages progressing to higher forms."
This is what disturbs me about articles about Japan's technological difference which invoke the metaphor of the Galapagos Syndrome as some kind of error: not only are they implying that diversity is somehow a bad thing, they're actually using a Lamarckian model that Darwin rejected. "Lamarck believed that all life was organized in a vertical chain, with gradation between the lowest forms and the highest forms of life, thus demonstrating a path to progressive developments in nature". Life had, Lamarck believed, "a natural tendency toward perfection".
Scientists now believe that Lamarck was simply wrong about this. As Sciencenet puts it: "Research shows that students have a tendency to think in Lamarckian terms. That is, students often invoke the needs of organisms when accounting for change over time. The apparent confusion may be reflected in statements such as "leopards evolved their spots in order to survive better in their environment," or "elephants evolved their large ears so that they could disperse their body heat better." They may also often believe that evolution is goal-directed." However, "the Darwinian model is more plausible and therefore accepted by the scientific community today." Like these students, journalists, while invoking Darwin, are actually paraphrasing Lamarck. This seems particularly true of business journalists, who buy into corporate hype about products which "get better all the time" and extend their market share as a result.
As the Wikipedia article on Galapagos Syndrome explains, the metaphor was originally used to explain why Japanese cellphones hadn't stormed global phone markets, despite being capable of amazing things (having 3G capabilities years before the rest of the world, for instance). It seems to have been coined by Takeshi Natsuno, inventor of the i-Mode. Describing Japan's "super-advanced" phones, Natsuno called them "fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins". A New York Times article last year opined that "Japanese cellphone makers were a little too clever. The industry turned increasingly inward. In the 1990s, they set a standard for the second-generation network that was rejected everywhere else. Carriers created fenced-in Web services, like i-Mode. Those mobile Web universes fostered huge e-commerce and content markets within Japan, but they have also increased the country's isolation from the global market. Then Japan quickly adopted a third-generation standard in 2001. The rest of the world dallied, essentially making Japanese phones too advanced for most markets. At the same time, the rapid growth of Japan's cellphone market in the late 1990s and early 2000s gave Japanese companies little incentive to market overseas." The problem came when the domestic market reached saturation, and Japanese phone companies weren't able to offer their over-advanced models to foreign markets in order to keep growing.
Notice the different ways the Galapagos metaphor is being used in the 2009 New York Times article and the 2010 BBC article. For the NYT, the diversity is a good thing, at least until Japan tries to market its products abroad. Darwinian thinking is basically respected here. In the BBC's account, we suddenly have evil mandarins perpetuating a senseless diversity simply to keep Japan stubbornly different and maintain their own stranglehold on the island nation. Difference is an "error".
We could speculate that this confused alternation between the Darwinian and Lamarckian models is a deep characteristic of global capitalism itself. Diversity is good in captialism... until it's bad. In theory capitalism wants a lot of competing products on the market so that it's truly competitive. In practice it seeks monopoly: the eradication of diversity, and the imposition on the biggest possible scale of a single "winner". The current winner is of course the iPhone, which has shifted the emphasis from hardware to software. Everybody who isn't making an iPhone -- or something very like it -- is basically being told to pack up and go home.
But this is where we need to listen carefully to what Darwin actually learned in the Galapagos Islands. Things change, and that's why diversity and variation are so crucial. If the iPhone is right for now, it'll almost certainly be wrong at some point in the future. Websites like Engadget have boiled the Galapagos metaphor down to the five-word summary "too complex to survive abroad". But that isn't the conclusion Darwin drew from the Galapagos animals. Darwin's actual message might be better expressed if we rejig those five words as: "Abroad to survive? Complex too!"
Life on earth survives thanks to diversity, because changing circumstances mean that today's winners can suddenly become tomorrow's losers. When the meteor hits, when the Green Revolution fails, when the bees unexpectedly die, the kind of anomalous diversity found in the Galapagos Islands -- or in the technology of Japan -- is exactly what saves us from the most dangerous failure of all: global success. Wednesday July 28th 2010
Bohemian holiday
Because Hisae is going back to Japan soon, we took a last European holiday together over the weekend, renting a BMW and driving around Bohemia. When I say "Bohemia" I mean that interesting place where Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic all meet.
Our first stop was the Spreewald canals, which were packed with portly sixtysomething Germans, rather tidy and expensive. We attempted to wander in the Spreewald Biosphere Park but managed somehow to wander in a toxic Cold War weapons testing area instead, full of spooky abandoned huts, landmines and chemical weapons (according to the warning signs, which we read only on the way out).
Close to the Polish border, we discovered a weird theme park with camels and a "culture island".
A night at a hot Italian penzione in Gorlitz, then we headed south through Poland into the Czech Republic. By chance we stumbled on an incredibly interesting Bohemian castle at Frydland, and took the tour, scraping together some Czech crowns we had from previous trips.
I began to get flashbacks during the tour; courtyard after courtyard, room after room, the crest for a family called Clam, the way the baroque structure dominates the surrounding countryside... could this be the model for Kafka's novel The Castle?
According to this page, it did indeed serve as Kafka's model for The Castle. For me it was the name "Clam" which gave it away (there's a Herr Klamm in The Castle), but I also had a strong sense of deja vu, maybe better described as deja lu.
Here I am in a village church, confessing to the sin of driving a BMW through pristine countryside. Actually, I'd recommend all car owners (especially those who live in cities and have no children) to get rid of their vehicles and just rent a car once or twice a year for jaunts. You'll get all the peaks without any of the hassle.
A lot of my greatest pleasures on holiday are architectural. This is a primary school in a small Polish town (the kind of town where a dog runs after your car barking).
And this is an extraordinary wooden house in Upice, Czechoslovakia, dating from the 1550s. Currently being restored, this building has amazing presence and wonderful shapes.
There was a fellow from 1559 (probably) in the street-crossing sign outside.
I think a lot of people thought I was from 1559 too.
But returning to architecture, here's the wonderful sci-fi commu-modernist TV tower atop the Czech Republic's highest mountain, Snezka. You get there via a cable car, and on the top it's quite flat and there's the most gorgeous green forest you've ever seen. The Poles built their own sci-fi building on their side of the mountain, but it suffered a structural catastrophe during a storm in 1974 and collapsed (it's now been restored).
When you cross the Czech and Polish border frequently you really notice the differences. The Poles drive recklessly, are overweight and brash, speak excellent English, have terrible roads, show entrepreneurial spirit. The Czechs have great infrastructure and great scenery through which -- like the Germans -- they walk, cycle, scoot, paraglide and mountain-trek got up in full kit. They also don't shout at foreigners the way the Poles do.
Then again, the Poles make great miniature villages.
Germany seems slick and eco-futuristic after Poland. On the autobahn north to Berlin there are nothing but pristine forests and vast, beautiful wind turbines... and then the looming space station known as Tropical Islands, a synthetic leisure environment in the middle of nowhere, a dome-like glass and steel skin protecting a sort of waterworld theme park that (to sombre ambient music) proposes replicas of Bali and other exotic places. A cathedral to hedonism and affluent indolence. Monday July 5th 2010
In praise of black velvet
Imagine the young Momus in Edinburgh in 1978. Actually, he's not Momus yet, he's Nick Currie, a schoolboy at the Edinburgh Academy. It's winter, and he's just had his 18th birthday. "You can go for a gin and tonic in a pub now!" says his father, but young Nicholas has other ideas. Still a tender-minded virgin whose idea of sex comes from the ethereal waifs in the David Hamilton posters on his bedroom wall, Nicholas sees an ad in the Edinburgh Evening News for a porn film at the Classic Cinema, formerly the Scala (and now a bingo hall) on Nicholson Street. He catches a bus from the city's Georgian terraces to the seamy south side and nervously buys a ticket for the film they're showing, entitled Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle.
Titling the film as if it were part of the Emanuelle series is pure opportunism on the part of the distributor (and confusing, too, since there's another film of the same title set in the American south); in fact, this is an Italian film originally entitled Velluto Nero, or "black velvet", and directed in 1976 by Fellini protege Brunello Rondi. It stars gorgeous Indonesian-Dutch porn star Laura Gemser. Google "Velluto Nero torrent" and you'll probably be able to download the film with a P2P client. It's set entirely in Egypt, and has a fantastic score by Dario Baldan Bembo which mixes then-current synths with north African muslim music, sacred and profane. The results remind me of Francis Lai, of Eno's Music For Films, of Kitaro's music for the NHK documentary Silk Road, and of Malcolm Clarke's BBC Radiophonic Workshop score for a BBC Radio 3 piece produced by Piers Plowright about Paul Klee, Going For A Walk With A Line, particularly the section (synthetic impressions of Tunis Hamamet) dealing with Klee's 1914 visit to Tunisia, a revelation to the young painter in terms of colour, form, sensuality and atmosphere.
One theme from Velluto Nero by composer Bembo has haunted me ever since. I've made an mp3 of it (in two iterations, separated by a more Eno-esque piece) here:
Excerpt from Velluto Nero soundtrack by Dario Baldan Bembo (stereo mp3 file, 8.2MB, 8 mins 57 secs)
In this piece (punctuated by sex cries, hammy dramatic lines, Gemser's possessed screams, and the sound of a goat being sacrificed) a synth oscillates in dark, warm waves over a wheeling chord sequence. Somehow, this atmosphere worked its way into the music I would later produce as Momus. I wanted the same dark sensuality, the same exoticism I heard here. It's amazing that I remembered this music so clearly over the decades, and that it marked me so deeply. I only heard it once, as an impressionable teenager in Edinburgh's cold winter, transported by a pretentious Italian exploitation film -- abject and dark and silly, yet transcendental and rarefied as well -- to an exoticised, orientalised Egypt.
Velluto Nero remains the only porn film I ever saw in a British cinema. In fact, it's one of only three porn films I've ever seen in proper porn cinemas anywhere (along with an odd Chinese equestrian costume flick I saw at the now-demolished Music Hall cinema in New York's Chinatown, and a Japanese film I saw in a love-seat fleapit in Shinsekai, Osaka, a couple of years ago). I think I was lucky to be "initiated" into adulthood with such a well-made piece -- sure, the plot is ludicrous, but atmospherically, sensually and musically nothing can touch Velluto Nero.
It so happens that I've been asked to make a film soundtrack over the summer. It's a radically different film from Velluto Nero, of course, with a much colder emotional colour range. But somewhere in the back of my mind Dario Baldan Bembo's dark, deep music will still be resonating, no doubt. Monday June 14th 2010
Earlier Zuihitsu scrawlings (zuihitsu means something like "random fragmentary brush-jottings" in Japanese) are here.
