Vampire Weekend asked Momus to make a new song over samples from the instrumental backing track for Diplomat's Son from Contra. Salty Hot Peanuts is what he came up with.
After some teething problems which caused a slight delay, physical copies of the 2010 album from Momus, Hypnoprism, are now shipping 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 also 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 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 previous album from Momus was 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.
Conference
November 23rd 2010
Signs
November 16th 2010
Kitchen, living room
An account of my first week in Osaka.
November 13th 2010
Momus lives in Osaka
Correct my Wikipedia entry, someone: I live in Osaka now.
November 7th 2010
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
Earlier Zuihitsu scrawlings (zuihitsu means something like "random fragmentary brush-jottings" in Japanese) are here.
