Nervous Heartbeat: a homemade pop video

[imomus]

Back in February I offered you the first taste of the forthcoming Momus album Ocky Milk in the form of Frilly Military: a homemade pop video. Today I'm delighted to offer you another -- my own video for the song "Nervous Heartbeat". Click the picture to watch it on YouTube.



The song's lyrics are based on Japanese onomatopoeia, the colourful Japanese phrases which express something like an emotion by copying its "sound" -- even if it doesn't technically have one. (What's the sound of a painful condition? Zuki zuki. A glittering spakle? Why, pika pika of course!). You could see the song as an ultra-emotional way of learning a language.

The video shows a sequence of people I happened to meet in New York in April. I asked them to look sad, but the atmosphere of the song is perhaps best described as sensual, full of mono no aware (the "sigh-ness" of things) and natsukashii, nostalgia, or the longing for that which has never been. Nostalgia for an absent person, perhaps, or one you haven't met yet.

Speaking of love and couples, the article you helped me with last week, The Kinsey of Clicking, is now up on Wired News. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Comments

I give it 5oive

[(Anonymous)]

Best track i've heard from you in a looongg time. Timelordish in places. Is it reperesentitive of the album? I do hope so.

Re: I give it 5oive

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's representative of the album's torchy, Enka feel, yes. Everything on this record is warm and sentimental. Other tracks get more "absurdist torch", like "Pleasantness", based entirely on extracts from Google-translated Japanese blogs; crooned grammatical errors and oddities. I tried to catch an atmosphere both experimental and warm, familiar and strange.

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

i like it,
will there be a downloadable version?

the clouds (?) moving across their faces is somehow very New York!
re-reading your plan for recording Ocky Milk the other day, made me think of the Mashroom Haircat album you worked on. "experimental and warm, familiar and strange" describes that one perfectly for me too.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually one track on the Mashcat album was re-recorded for Ocky, "Dialtone". So that's a good connection to make!

Re: I give it 5oive

[larameau.livejournal.com]

"Other tracks get more "absurdist torch", like "Pleasantness", based entirely on extracts from Google-translated Japanese blogs; crooned grammatical errors and oddities."

i guess you're the first songwriter who used machine-translated texts as lyrics!!
are the "oddities" you mentioned the result of these Google translations? hmm, sounds very interesting... and very funny, too

Re: I give it 5oive

[imomus.livejournal.com]

are the "oddities" you mentioned the result of these Google translations?

Actually the album uses two different types of technology as "oddity engines":

1. Google translation of Japanese blogs.

2. Faulty OCR scanners.

Example of 1: "the scorch of stripes enters uniformly in the favourite food". (Sung very tenderly, torch-style.)

Example of 2: "on a fir-fetched coast, at an airport fury-free shop". (Jaunty delivery, accompanied by sound of Berlin U6 line and Harry Partch marimba.)