Momus

Momus on the bbc radio 6 at this moment, it is a nice song called I Was A Maoist Intellectual

this is the only momus song i've ever heard.

has this guy grown up yet?

I only got about 20 posts in, but it made me miss Tonic! Saw a few great shows there before I actually moved to NYC: Stars of the Lid, etc. I was up here for CMJ once and saw the tail-end of a Momus gig somewhere downtown. It was only three weeks after 9/11 and the city felt indescribably strange, Anthrax scares screaming out from hotel elevator television broadcasts, seemingly nobody roaming the streets at night. Momus did some songs and then went back to his booth where a few very tiny Japanese women stroked him pensively. I'll never forget it.

=)

I think Otto Spooky and Ocky Milk are my favorite Momus albums. I really love that masterful DIY cabaret concrete thing he has going on them. They are quite deeply psychedelic and experimental, especially considering he's long been a teetotaler. Some of the most bizarre, melodic, lyrical, catchy, and endearing music I have heard from any modern artist.

The first time I heard "The Artist Overwhelmed" I was spellbound, and had to replay it over and over again. It was a total mind-blinder.

Has anyone heard his new stuff? I haven't listened to anything since Joemus. I thought that was a slight letdown but had some very very high points. I still think he's one of my favorite contemporary musicians, especially his post-2k phase. There is some otherworldly beautiful music on the 'Oskar Trilogy' albums. A lot of those songs really sound like parts of dreams I've had. "Sempreverde", "Bantam Boys", and "The Artist Overwhelmed" (all from Otty Spooky) really feel like they only exist in a sublime, distorted dreamworld.

My last Momus experience was seeing him (and, I think, you) on the American Patchwork tour. I was a fan of Circus Maximus, Don't Stop the Night and Timelord. I would like to catch up with his newer stuff but I'm not sure where to start. For what it's worth, I loved your set! And also for what it's worth, I found Momus to be quite approachable, friendly, and accomodating, despite his being ticked off that the venue was too cheap to give him a beer.

Cool, where was that? It's a bit surreal, that summer. It was 10 years ago! Thanks, Super Madrigal Brothers feels like one of my past lives now!

He was working on Oskar Tennis Champion at the time. It has that amazing song "Is It Because I'm a Pirate?" where he portrays a pirate trying in vain to hit on a waitress. He played that live during that tour, along with the beautiful "Little Schubert". That album also has a chiptune medley that I made at the end of it.

Otto Spooky is my favorite, mostly because of the variety of instrumentation. He was heavily influenced by Berlin-era Bowie for those two albums and the next one, Ocky Milk, and they are all deeply psychedelic, bizarre pop and music-hall songs with electronic cut-up acoustic and world instruments alongside retro synths. Some really bizarre experiments in sound and lyrics.

Atlanta (I think it was the EARL?). Fun show. Fake swordfights, kitten impressions, the whole deal. I'll check out those albums, thanks for the recommendations!

Hah, I remember that show, whoever was running it was being a ass about the booze and calling us faggots and stuff. Probably why he's never been back to Atlanta.

Ugh. Well, in spite of it all, Momus was quite nice to me! And I have also not been back to Atlanta.

anyone got to the oto thing?

I've actually come around to Joemus quite a bit in the past year or so, after initially being slightly disappointed. Don't think it's at all a drop in quality from the Oskar -> Ocky trilogy (honestly I'd probably pick Ocky as the weak link of the four-album span). Unfortunately that kind of energy is totally missing from the two most recent albums, though there are some nice moments here and there. The Thunderclown really should've been left as an EP.

I remember really liking the ending of Joemus, with "The Man You'll Never Be" and "The Vaudevillian".

He's been posting great new stuff on Youtube for the past few days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkKh0dOi_Fc&feature=bf_prev&list=PL8F26123A7F7BED5C&lf=autoplay

pretty good!

Catching up on his Hearspool radio series: http://mrstsk.tumblr.com/post/59591346688

I'm listening to the first one, which overlays surreal, soft-spoken monologues with field recordings, ambient classical and pop music. Most latterly is a deconstruction of Wire's '40 Versions'. It's all rather delightful - one part Stanshall, one part Blue Jam (without Morris' wacky excesses), two parts God knows what. It was recorded for Basic FM but has most of the hallmarks of a good Resonance FM show

Hey i was going to buy Momus's book and then i looked on Amazon and saw he has a few!

The Book of Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Jokes-British-Literature/dp/1564785610/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1403564848&sr=8-4&keywords=momus

The Book of Scotlands
http://www.amazon.com/Solution-11-167-The-Book-Scotlands/dp/1933128550/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1403564848&sr=8-6&keywords=momus

UnAmerican
http://www.amazon.com/UnAmerica-Success-Failure-Series-Momus/dp/0985508590/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403564848&sr=8-1&keywords=momus

Has anyone here read these? Which one should i get first...

also the book of japans. I gave the book of scotlands to a friend, idk how good it is.

http://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/pubic-intellectual-an-anthology-1986-2016/

pubic instead of public

good tracklist. looks like almost half of Voyager is there which is A Very Good Thing in my book. i like this quote from a few years back;
"it perplexes me slightly when people say that Voyager is my peak. But it's understandable -- I think the anonymity of the record allows it to fit other people's lives, and the era, whereas the quirkiness of my current work maybe doesn't.. "

i wonder how Cherry Red have been able to release old Creation tracks? i guess all that's been Sorted Out now. the albums were out of print for years which is i guess why he decided to put them all up online for free in 2008. it'd be nice to have deluxe editions of those 80s/90s albums.

always fascinated by anthology/best-of/selected works records curated by the artist themselves, always some big surprises regarding what they put in, and what they leave out. can't believe his picks from stars forever! totally forgot about "life of the fields" though, beautiful song.

Any thoughts on disc 3?

(That's the point where I stop recognising track titles).

very familiar w the first half of disc 3. mostly the stuff from the NYC psych folk prog phase. "Going for a Walk With a Line" is brilliant. i also quite like "Nervous Heartbeat" which has a lovely and heart-tugging strings sample. "Frilly Military" is fun too, i think he wrote that for Kahimi Karie a long time ago and this version has a nice slightness going for it. "The Vaudevillian" is incredible, one of those songs that made me stop in my tracks when i first heard it. love the mix of humor & pathos. wonderful finale (also could've gone w "The Artists Overwhelmed")

oh wherefor art thoa

yum

https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/momus-create-i-procreate-3cd-remastered-expanded-edition/

Thought this revival would be about Momus competition coming back to help us with our Japanese.

Plot twist

Momus doesn’t speak japanese

No compute

i sympathize with or relate to his reasons/excuses for not learning japanese

Do you guys seriously think that Momus never learned Japanese?

did he even learn english

i'm sure he has to at least some extent. but i sympathize with what he says about japan being a nice place to live and not speaking japanese being a way of protecting/isolating yourself from the conformity of japanese society.

I would bet money Momus speaks almost no Japanese

Who does he talk to then? He lives there.

He can’t even gossip.

Momus knows Japanese. he's written lyrics in Japanese and has sung in Japanese. plus i've seen him practice with my own eyes. he was practicing when i was on tour with him in 2002. i was in a chiptune band of his creation called Super Madrigal Bros. it was the American Patchwork tour and we drove all over America playing shows with 2-3 other acts. he was dating a Japanese woman (also his tour manager) at the time and she was helping him with his kanji. it was the first time either of them had been to the US outside of New York or LA, and they were amazed by all the land and space. whenever we passed a farm with cows she would point out the window saying "Nick! Nick!" i have great memories of that tour, it was a lot of fun and brilliant music, and our hosts were very kind Tour Mom & Dad.

i wonder what he's up to these days. i see him on youtube he has a series of videos continuing his old blogging style about art and culture and stuff. this is good news on the new compilation! i've only heard one of those albums but it was a very cool, moody, weird folk record. hope he is well and happy.

i remember seeing you guys play in austin. and momus complaining on his blog about texas being "huge, hot and empty".

woah. that was at Emo's. did they have a drop down movie screen that projected old cartoon before the bands played? i feel like that might have been at that show...

that's not something i remember ever seeing at emo's.

Adam! Had no idea you were a Super Madrigal Bro! (Apologies for the brand new unfamiliar dn I've been mostly lurking for the past decade though I do post now and again when I work up the gumption)

Anyways I made a new account mostly just to tell you that I'm a great fan, and that I desperately tried to see both you and Momus on that tour you mentioned when it came thru Portland, even went so far as to enlist the prettiest girl I knew to try and beg the doorman to let us in but we weren't anywhere near old enough to be there and he wasn't having it, oh well.

Anyways would love to hear anymore memories you have of that tour, or being on AmPatch (you say the band was of his creation?)

cool nice to meet you Florin! im curious how you heard about us. i know they did flyers and ads in the local alt weeklys every where we went.

it was probably the greatest summer of my life. travelling around the US playing a show just about every night every day for a month. Momus had been doing this a long time so he was an old pro by this time, and a lot of places we had stayed were friends of his from previous tours, other artists, musicians, etc. it was mostly sleeping on the floor of a punk house type situation, which is one i have always been fine with. towards the end of the tour we splurged on a few hotel rooms. lol i think we all snuck into two rooms, this eccentric Scottish guy w an eyepatch, his Japanese business manager, and 8 or so freaky teenage art schoolers. on that tour it was Momus, the Gongs, Phillip, and the Supermads:, me and John Fashion Flesh. Fashion Flesh just released an LP by the way (https://www.discogs.com/Fashion-Flesh-Withdrawn/release/10946402) it is amazing kind of in the vein of Severed Heads or Throbbing Gristle, early industrial/synth-pop, instrumental, minimalist, w trippy glitchy stuff and home made synths. amazing stuff!

https://i.imgur.com/2TiUwyTl.jpg
hanging out on a breezy porch one morning after a show

the band itself and the album name was Momus's idea. i was doing chiptune music (this was 1998/1999) and had recorded an album of Christmas music. my main idea was to get this CD to Bjork cos i thought for some reason she would love it or something. i sent it in to Momus (i had previously sent a few other things in) and he wrote me back an email a few months later basically saying "Here's this idea for a band, you would work with this other guy who lives in another state, we need an album by x so we can do a summer tour with my whole label." i was 21, had just dropped out of college, and was living in a 2 bedroom room punk rock apartment with 5 other people and 3 dogs. i was like fuck yes, i'm going to do this, goodbye to my dogshit apartment. i went to the library to use the internet to look for MIDI files and would find songs to do, then do them in Fruity Loops. unfortunately i did not use samples from actual consoles, i was using emulators to isolate channels and make samples from that. NESticle was one emulator I used the most to get samples. i had a lot of tricks i used all the time, like the Gameboy startup sound for bass (this is something Momus used in his song "Walter Carlos" so I ripped it off him) and having it do an octave leap rather than having a break or stopping the note, this gave the songs little glitchy blips at the end of the lines (around this time i was introduced to Roxy Music and the octave leaps in "Virginia Plain" were a big influence). after arranging a song and saving a .WAV i would burn a CDr and mail it to John, who would remix the tracks in his own unique way (often with custom gear, twisting my clockwork creations, like your body stepping outside of yourself and now seeing things in the Astral World. it was like a shadow album living alongside the regular one), and mail another disc back to me. we had them back and forth on the albums and i think it's the best way to get both versions of the material. i think he had gotten a little bit of a budget for 2 records and a tour and it was a really wonderful experience and i will be forever grateful for the invitation. to be able to perform w so many amazing artists and musicians was incredible.

i've always been a huge fan of Momus (imo some of his best work is for real Bowie-level talented but just not as lucky or commercially palatable) and the Gongs and Phiiliip. Phiiliip has done some really cool stuff since then, an album called "Divided by Lightning" that had an accompanying art show and accompanying music video DVD (i love the song that mixes in Boyz II Men's "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye..." over a trance beat and footage of NY club kids in the 80s). i wrote to him on Facebook years ago and he was taking a sound class with one of the guys in Animal Collective and he was learning how to mix properly and stuff. his music started getting less lofi but still very psychedelic, very much like if Beck hadn't decided to start sucking and went back to what he was doing in the early 90s but with Ableton. i heard he had fallen ill and had to move in with his family but that was a while ago, so i'm not sure what's up with him now. i did find a soundcloud page of his recently (Wirekid) that had all these really intense, really crazy and amazing remixes that were like live mashups with new lyrics, melodies, and raps. like he had Buddy Holly's "Everyday" glockenspeil going over a death metal blast beat. or the "Goonies R Good Enough" synth arpeggio over skittering drum n bass. but they are all original songs??? it's really amazing stuff, some of the most unique music i have ever heard in my life. there is one song he did recently that was "Sparkle Off the Clock" and i think it was a take on Justin Beiber (not sure) but it had a really catchy melody and the arrangement was a really nice, crunchy 8-bit thing, complete w video game noises, and at one point he starts mixing in Mr. Miyagi and he's taking about catching the fly and making these swish sounds. yeah this shit is dope.

anyways for the "Shakestation" record Momus really gave us full freedom to do whatever. he didn't tell us how long to make the album or how many songs or what songs to do or anything. he had an artist who would do the cover, Florian Perret, who did an amazing black and white drawings. personally i wanted something colorful and videogamey and pixelly but i respected the collaborative spirit of the whole thing. tbh i think the "Shakestation" cover would look nice on an LP jacket, the CD is just too small to show those details. anyway i had no idea what a madrigal was so i just started slapping sounds together. i wanted to do via video games and medieval music what Esquivel or The Three Suns had done for jazz and exotica, with weird arrangements, stereo effects, basically kitchy electronic Perry-Kingsley style stuff etc. inspired by the Moog Cookbook and A Clockwork Orange (lol i was listening to this soundtrack yesterday, Wendy Carlos is God). the second album has a whole romantic section where we do more modern stuff like the Carmen opera and the whole direction got more baroque in general. i remember Momus not really being happy about that, lol, us time-jumping like that, and maybe we really should have stuck with the medieval smaller scale stuff. half of the second album is still pretty medieval though. it's funny, since then i have read many books on medieval history and have found it to be something i am really very interested in. at the time i was just trawling through MIDI websites for songs to try to cover i didn't really care about the history. well i think if we ever re-visit it (and we have talked from time to time, u never know) then i will take it more seriously and probably incorporate more of a historical concept to the work.

the tour... wow! Portland was cool, i wish you could have made it! i remember we went to a punk house that had little to no furniture in it. by that time i think we had met up with Rroland, who was really cool. he had written all these songs using only a Roland synth. he was Nick's age, in his 40s, which was cool and kind of funny. there were all of us electronic noise kids and then this middle aged father who owned a vineyard and produced his own wine! and yet that music he made was transformative, you really felt like you were listening through his past lives. he was only with us for a few days out west. i remember that drive up and down the west coast so well, it was so beautiful, it felt like we were at the edge of the world, on the edge of paradise. this was the first time i ever heard Klaus Nomi, and i remember driving along the west coast highways listening to "Rubberband Lazer" and just kind of being dazzled by it all (probably on shrooms!).

https://i.imgur.com/eYgFxfel.jpg
here is a photo of me with Cythia Plaster Caster, 2002

the tour was a lot of fun, it was the experience of a lifetime. mostly i really loved the other musicians we were touring with, like we were listening to each other's CDs in the car on the road between shows. i have some great memories of hazy parties, memories of driving across states as the sun rises, etc. the kind of memories you get when you go on road trips with friends. the coolest person i met was Cynthia Plaster Caster who was at our show in Chicago. she had casted Momus and he was in a recent documentary about her. she was a total sweety and just she gave me a big hug and called me a sweetie like the coolest rock n roll aunt ever. i also met Mumbleboy at our NYC kickoff show, but i was so nervous about playing for the first few days, i don't remember what i said. i met Beck's brother at Spaceland and Beck was going to come to the show but didn't and this was a big letdown personally cos i am obsessed with Beck but it was cool cos Phillip had this mix CD with all the Midnight Vultures outtakes and i had never heard that stuff before. still blows my mind. i remember at the second to last show in my hometown of Atlanta the people at the club got real aggressive (i don't remember why, an unpaid bill or something? it seemed unreasonable) and they threw us out, calling us "F*****s", yelling "Get the fuck out of here!" and i felt real embarrassed cos i lived there lol. after the show we stayed with some friends in Dunwoody including Jack Hines of the Black Lips who thought Momus was hilarious and who drove us the next day to the final show in SC. heh after living in 2 cramped cars with 7 other people for a month, it was nice to get into a new car, so i remember how luxurious it felt to be able to spread out and like stick my feet out the window!

i remember going home and bringing a check - we had made a couple hundred dollars which is really impressive now that I've seen a few tours. i was still living with my parents out in the country at this point, so i got home and was completely fried and feeling isolated and getting really depressed and cabin feverish. it was almost like having jetlag or something. it made me want to move to the city, which i ended up doing just a few months later. i've lived here for the past 15 years this winter.

Thanks so much for sharing, that was awesome to read. I was at the Lawrence Kansas show and remember really enjoying it.

He's been videos for new stuff every couple of days on youtube. Residents meets ISB vibe in most of it so far. Anyone listening?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHLymyfTAhw

I have. This is my fave from the new album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5o8VAmEQnM

One of the best opening posts in site history

Is it the one by Anthony? /zing

*Loads, scrolls, nods*

The first three posts are all great.