Lute Score: A Concordance

[imomus]

I spent the day working on a bossa remix of an older song, Homemade Soup. Not sure if I'll use it. Decided that Lady Fancy Knickers suits the album much better, and deserves a place there. Went back to work on Lute Score, yesterday's song. Prompted by an anonymous poster who said 'I missed some dampened taka-taka or tuf-tuf noises, the sound of the brutal panda shooting. Shooting pandas in silence frightens more than with a lot of piff paff', I made a new mix with video game noises and a bit less of Ye Olde Momus patented secret recipe tempo distortion at the beginning. The new mix is here:

Lute Score

Sometimes people send little reviews with their Paypal donations. Someone called Jesse Eisenhower called 'Lute Score' 'far far and away my favorite of the new,' describing it as 'a pre-3d wonderland' that 'would have found a happy home on the TurboGrafX 16'. (Whatever that is.) Richard Gardner of Los Angeles, California, asked 'Did Babelfish help co-author this?' Well, not this time. It did occur to me, though, that much of this album is just 'reformatted internet'. The ideas, the instruments, the scales, the sounds, the words, the ideas, everything. When people ask me what instrument I play, I should really answer 'the internet'. When they ask me what I do for a living, I should say 'I get stuff free off the internet, put it in a new order, and sell it to people for money'.

Prompted by Richard's question, though, I thought it might be interesting to go through Lute Score tracing where each line came from. This is a 'mumble' song, a 'nonsense' song, a 'notebook' song, the kind where, under cover of a certain lighthearted whimsicality, I trawl through my zuihitsu ('random jottings') and end up packing in a huge number of themes and allusions that actually mean rather a lot to me personally -- without making the song any less fluffy and cute. Think of my themes as presidential talking points, or pandas popping their heads over the foliage in a rather sadistic video game. Here goes:

You locked me in the bathroom long ago, you bloody bastard

I was at a concert at Superdeluxe in Tokyo last July, and my friend Yuka was singing a song with her band Metro. I couldn't really hear the lyrics properly, but it sounded as if she was singing a song accusing someone of having locked her in the bathroom. I thought 'What a great idea for a song!' Of course, it turned out to be a 'creative mishearing'. I'd like to make an entire feature film one day about someone locked in a bathroom, and why, and what they do to keep things interesting.

But sadness never floods a house where wine flows

This is from an account of Uzbek music I read on the web. It's a translation of a song from Tashkent. The statement is probably true. It's yet another variant on the 'throwing wine in the face of nothing' theme, the Dionysiac element that seems to inform the record. And of course I was planning to call the album 'Uzbektronic', wasn't I?

Lute Score, the video game where you hit the high score by composing
Lute Scores, and shooting off the pop up panda's head

Something made me scribble down 'Lute Score' as a song title. The double meaning of 'score' makes it a video game involving lutes, not just a notation. Lute Score is not a real computer game. But I like to imagine it as something Jeff Minter might have coded for the Atari. Or something like the Bachtron game described in my Electronics in the 18th century show at KnitActive back in 2000. I asked my nephew what he wanted to do when he grows up and he said 'code computer games,' so maybe he can do this game one day. I hope pandas aren't extinct by that time. Pandas keep popping up on my album because they're a symbol both of selfishness (I've never seen anything more slobbish than the Giant Panda at Berlin zoo, lying on its back guzzling bamboo) and of the damage wrought by selfishness (they're endangered by our consumerism). We are pandas, but we are also panda-killers. If the pandas were us, they would kill pandas too. I've been trying to find a way to write a song about a panda that just wants to be a dog, to illustrate my idea that those charged with maintaining diversity often just want to be normal too. It's a rather similar point to the idea that those who live in 'exemplary' high density inner city housing just want to spread out in the suburbs. Some virtues (diversity, density) are not even virtues to the people who practice them. They're 'virtues by default'.

When the monster attacked the city everyone was just too busy making money to give a shit

That was another song idea. What if they held a disaster and nobody noticed? Just how big does an urban event have to be before people stop thinking about money and start thinking about something else? Gigantic monkey sized? Enormous sea dragon sized?

In Samarkand Uzbekistan the Vietnamese chiropodist
Extracted a glass of clear green tea from his samovar

Local colour. I often think of Auden's poem The Fall of Rome when I put in details like this:

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast

A ghost tended two moss gardens, one marshmallow, one ectoplasm
Something to do with the free bamboo, something to do with the snow

That's something I had in my notebook, the ghost is almost a character from a Brothers Quay movie, I think.

Green plants, folk and fairy tales from German Africa

There just can't be too many green plant and green tea references on this record. They are a symbol of 'the good' for me. As are folk and fairy tales. Models of clear, pure folk form. German Africa represents 'the other in the other', a double density of strangeness.

Swamp leg, an inner lightbulb, tragedy on stilts

These are painting titles by Philip Guston and Paul Klee. 'Going For A Walk With A Line' on Folktronic also uses a lot of Klee titles. I love the quirky miniature world Klee packs into a few words.

Pins and needles, shoes and stockings, aches and pains, and vermin
Panthers waging war on cranes and storks

This list was part of a presentation in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles. The museum presents a series of whooping whoppers as if they were established facts. It's therefore a model of Munchausian / Momusian unreliable narration. Actually, I shouldn't say 'Momusian', because the first time I visited the MJT I totally failed to understand that everything in it was fake.

A battered, bandaged head climbs up an uphill landscape

This is an image from a Guston painting. Saw it in San Francisco last July, at SF MoMA.

A 200 foot wingspan black butterfly in space

I went to the room of a Japanese art student, also in San Francisco last July, and made up a story I whispered into her ear. (That's my third favourite thing to do.) It was about this black butterfly.

An eager red-eyed dog licks red raw meat from an open ash can
Lamps, chairs, books, lightbulbs, cherries from a knife

From a catalogue description of late Guston again.

A Decca-Deram furbelow, master of the bungalow

Decca Deram is the label a lot of David Bowie's early, quirky work is on. I wish he would make a weird vaudeville album about children, soldiers and losers again! 'Furbelow' is a word that deserves to be in more pop songs, I feel. It's the detail on a lady's garment. I don't know why a record label would be making them. Perhaps they fell on hard times when people stopped writing songs about gnomes.

Writing with the white ink, the white ink of life

No Momus song is complete without an elegant reference to sperm.

(Note: No pandas were harmed in the writing of this song.)

Comments

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

http://www.geekcomix.com/vgh/fifth/tg16.shtml
^^no reason a seasoned googler as yourself wouldn't have found this already, but here's some education on the poor turbografx.

Also, it seems the link for homemade soup has been doubled up, and the lute score remix is missing.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I done fix it.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

you know, I've always been somewhat awed by the number of (and impenetrability of) referential lyrics in your work, and I find this entry enormously satisfying, in that I don't feel like I'd have understood any of those allusions even if I were enormously well-read. thanks.

I can now go back and listen to your old albums without feeling ridiculously naive and Philistine.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

References in my songs are not about knowledge, they're about texture. I'm more of a magpie than an academic. It's all about kleptomania, the irresistable appeal of shiny things. Does the magpie need to know that this earring has a Celtic pattern which symbolises eternity? Not really. 'Shiny! Shiny!'

Cone of obsolescence

[rroseselavyoui.livejournal.com]

I love taking out of town guests to visit the MJT. I just sit back and watch them react with a huge grin on my face.

Did you know that they've recently opened an elegant tea room and a little theater? I was there a few weeks ago and they were playing a Russian film, the details of which completely escape me, that reminded me of "Russian Ark". Puffs me all up with ethnic pride.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes!! I really like the helicopter/tractor taka taka sounds. wipp wipp… the shooting-thingies sound horrible (this is just a personal aversion) but I think they’re needed here to make it sound like a GAME. But – I was listening to some pandas and they said that a) they are still frightened, and b) they wouldn't consider themselves as being selfish (then went silent again, all too busy lying on their backs, guzzling bamboo - of course)
anna

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

I think I favour the original versions in both instances. Especially with Homemade Soup, which was faultless before.

On a less derogatory note, I once got locked in a friend’s bathroom. It was a rather antediluvian residence and so the bathroom-door had a handle only on the exterior. I realised this only after I'd shut it, of course. I remained composed and commenced logically going through potential solutions to my pickle:

(1) Attempt to open door with hand instead of handle.

(2) Rummage around for implement to substitute handle (other than hand).

(3) Seek method of contacting help (I had had my coat removed by my host and so my mobile phone was out of reach (as were my cigarettes, unfortunately, as they often lubricate time’s passage in such situations)).

(4) Eye window.

(5) Resolve to sit on toilet and wait to be missed.

At this juncture a most profound sort of thought process ensues. This insightfulness, though, is soon replaced by relief when support arrives and you’re set free.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Magpies! (http://www.inri.net/itrecords/magpieonthegallows/index.html)

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

I think the video game sounds do add something to the mix (which sounds even better in this version, btw); but at times they almost seem to distract too much from the melody. Boy, it's odd to be saying that.

The new version of Homemade Soup is excellent.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

NYC humor writer Fran Lebowitz has a children's book about some pandas who want to be dogs - in Paris, because there dogs can go to restaurants!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0679879455/reviews/002-8290066-9688030#06798794557298

[psychicmongoose.livejournal.com]

Decca Deram is the label a lot of David Bowie's early, quirky work is on. I wish he would make a weird vaudeville album about children, soldiers and losers again!

Did you ever hear "Little Toy Soldier," about the evil wind-up toy?

[kojapan.livejournal.com]

Shpeeking of game music, have you ever heard of or used Little Sound DJ http://ttc.darkface.pp.se/lsd/ ?

right now.

[gorillabiscuit.livejournal.com]

i just like affecting celebrities...

-tomas

ochazuke can be homemade?

[psychoxlips.livejournal.com]

i love the mix syle of the room japanese tatami x european or something.
my bed is it's tatami bed.
now i don't have any credit card so i will buy your cd at the store.
there are many of them. like 14 in HMV japan.
i like your "homemade soup" mix version. i like kahimi.

japanese says "OH! I'm glad i am born in a japanese!" when we eat ochazuke.
especially going back from abroad...

Comments, questions, etc.

[red-scharlach.livejournal.com]

Perhaps this has been commented on elsewhere, but I find it interesting that in a certain way the 2005 project seems almost a continuation of the collaborative work method you have chosen for the past few projects. I mean, of course, in the way you seem to accept feedback from us readers/listeners. I don't really know what your view on the feedback is, or if it was an intended consequence of your linking the songs, but I am impressed by the trust it shows of us, your audience.

Additionally, I think they will prove an interesting historical record as we listen to the progress of the material; something I quite enjoyed while listening to the raw Oskar tracks.

With lyrics written in the method outlined above, do you do revisions, or see them with a sort of Ginsbergian (sorry) completion immediately when they are all stitched together (from different pages of the notebook)? In that light, what future do you see for yourself as the narrative songwriter you spoke of several entries ago?

As an aside, I thought that this Medieval Bestiary (http://bestiary.ca/index.html) might be of interest to you, given some of the themes of your recent work. There are some very nice images, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

I once ended up in a huge warehouse freezer and didn’t know how to open the strange door. I was there with my fathers cousin and he started screaming in fear two times louder than I did. Very interesting to see. Luckily we were saved (a worker just entered the warehouse, had a bit of a surprise and smiled) before ending up like all the other unhappy vegetables and ducks and chicken. The world s not fair, no no. anna

Re: Comments, questions, etc.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're right, it is collaboration by other means. In a way doing a 'Live Journal album' is to my 2004 what doing a 'website / e mail album' ('Stars Forever') was to my 1999. In the past I've had a trusted friend or associate who heard the material early -- in the late 90s it might have been Matt Jacobson of Le Grand Magistery, in 2000 one of the editors of Index magazine, Steve Lafreniere -- but I actually really enjoy this LJ feedback. Writing is a lonely business, and it's sad when you have to stifle all the excitements and discoveries and tie the music into a glacier-slow product cycle.

The feedback is all taken seriously, even when it's painful, as in the 'Has Momus lost it?' debate.

With lyrics written in the method outlined above, do you do revisions, or see them with a sort of Ginsbergian (sorry) completion immediately when they are all stitched together (from different pages of the notebook)? In that light, what future do you see for yourself as the narrative songwriter you spoke of several entries ago?

I like Ginsberg! But the answer is, when I trawl through notes to make one of these 'mumbling songs', I throw away 80% of the material, and whittle it down to something that seems to me to work, even if it isn't a straightforward narrative. I end up with one document of lyrics and one of what I call 'lumber', the unused material. Here, just for fun, is the lumber file from 'Lute Score' (next comment):

Lute Score: Lumber

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Lute Score is a video game where you hit the high scores by composing
Lute Scores, and shooting off the panda's head when it pops up suddenly
Panda bears just want to be domestic dogs, only the queer
Panda bears are up for being panda bears, you know
It's something to do with the free bamboo and something to do with the mountain snow
The free bamboo at the zoo and the mountain snow on the mountain
A ghost tended two moss gardens, one marshmallow, one ectoplasm
The London Head, X-rayed, looks like a mailbox full of junk mail
The London Head is a pub where they play Franz Ferdinand on the jukebox
The Archduke, brother of the Emperor, not the band
When the monster attacked the big city people were too busy making money
To even care, some fled the shitty city, most kept doing what they were doing
Irregardless, and the pandas there just wanted to be dogs
At night they'd throw their wine in the face of nothing, just like that
A car is not a travel machine, it's a repetition machine

Hamlet eats an omelette, slings a bloody Mary down
To celebrate the first All-Russian Victory Over The Sun
Swaddling folk in a narrative film made by the Film Board
People dancing round a pole with strings around their trouser cuffs
In the house there were no objects, the music was pleasant and continuous

A horse bet in a stage set in rainy Edmonton
The trains that come here take you to a better place
Later you discovered a beautiful woman had lived next door
But you couldn't match the ugly sounds you heard to the beautiful face

The artist overwhelmed by the grandeur of ancient ruins
The traitor hiding behind the mask of a crack cross country ski team
Green tea and a scribble pad, a Bob Ross show about
Water in high places, are you glad?
A lonely man in a house with a noisy and a quiet side
Became obsessed with the noisy side

You locked me in the bathroom long ago
Through streams of tears and years of snow
Baroque hardcore adventures of a randy serviceman on the 8.15

Seductions, cornerings, allurements, intoxications
At the hands of desperate, and famous, old men
The world a girl sees is a crazy, irrational world
Sugar in all the food, and sex in all the messages

Gardens and plants, fairy and folk tales, German Africa
Tragedy on stilts, swamp leg, inner lightbath
Hot springs bath cure, the edible woman
The fundamental importance of Poon
A mobile phone ringing in the sea

Put the mountains here, arrange the sky just so
The red-nosed monkeys and the tuberous growth

Vietnamese chiropodist cholera epidemic
Grillparzer restraining a lion by land
The legend of a shopkeeper and its donkey
The place where all the accidents go that died by human hand
A chain of flowers from the familiar to the unfamiliar
Peel of Washington and the bees disapprove of loose women
Pins and needles, shoes and stockings, aches and pains, vermin
Panthers have a feud with the cranes and the storks
A 200 foot wingspan black butterfly in space
Horseshoes on a dark flood, sleeping, back view, rug
My battered, bandaged head climbing an uphill landscape
Attempting to scale a ladder, your familiar legs
An eager red-eyed dog licks raw meat in an open ash can
Lamps, chairs, books, lightbulbs, cherries
A Decca-Deram furbelow the master of the bungalow
Writing with the white ink of life

Self-fulfilling prophecy, the Pygmalion effect
Critique of pure logistics, willow pattern synthesis
Turning heads from Baku to Bishkekand
Makeshift cassette stands where teenagers gather
Uzbek-style Europop from Juliano and DJ Pilgrim
Ringing synphone cordophone, with optional tone series
The material becomes elastic by artificial stretching
The Sachs Hornbostel System of instrument classification
For sadness never floods a house where wine flows

[(Anonymous)]

Momus writes: "Decca Deram is the label a lot of David Bowie's early, quirky work is on. I wish he would make a weird vaudeville album about children, soldiers and losers again!"

I thought that Decca Deram reference was to Bowie. You probably already know that Bowie did indeed have plans to revive his 60s work, and may still do so. This from a Bowie discography website:

"After performing 'Can't Help Thinking About Me', 'I Dig Everything' and 'The London Boys' on the short tours of 1999/2000, Bowie became enthusiastic about the idea of re-recording some lesser known songs from the early days of his career. These re-recordings, together with a couple of new songs written in the same spirit, were to appear on an album that was scheduled for mid-2001, tentatively titled Toy. According to David's journal on BowieNet, the production and artwork of the album were finished already in early 2001. However, time passed and rumours filtered through that Virgin appeared to be reluctant to release an album full of songs they didn't have the rights to. At the end of 2001, Bowie left Virgin to set up his own record label ISO, but so far Toy remains unreleased. According to a reliable source, Toy was supposed to have featured the following tracks:
Uncle Floyd/Afraid/Baby Loves That Way/I Dig Everything/Conversation Piece/Let Me Sleep Beside You/Toy/Hole In The Ground/Shadow Man/In The Heat of the Morning/You've Got a Habit Of Leaving/Karma Man."

There was a Bowie reference in another song destined for your latest album, which you also described as being your 'Lodger'. The way you assemble lyrics is Bowie-esque, in general I'm interested in this almost Tom Ripley-ish relationship you have with Bowie. Not just that deep down you might want to be Bowie, but you're also angry at Bowie for not being more like you!

Hugo

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, yes, no doubt, Hugo! He does wear an eye patch from time to time, so he's making an effort at least.

I knew about the 'Toy' album, and even suggested to Index magazine that we interview him (or rather, that I interview him) when the record comes out, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.

Re: Comments, questions, etc.

[red-scharlach.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean my 'sorry' as a dis on Ginsberg, I just always cringe when I say nameX-ian or NameY-ification thanks to a rather pedantic ass who taught film crit in college. The sorry was for the theoryspeak.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

There is a fantastic version of 'You've Got a Habit Of Leaving' on the 'Slow Burn' maxi-single, from the Heathen album. Presumably it is from the Toy sessions.

i also ne

[gorillabiscuit.livejournal.com]

you're impeccable!

do you give massages?

"lute score" is a perplexing idea for a song. right up my alley (although i don't really have a proper alley).

okay then,
okay,
tomas

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

If I may make so bold as to ask, what hardware and software do you use to record and mix?

Sawdust at the luthier's

[(Anonymous)]

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is my favorite place I've never been. It takes the art of fiction to levels even the Bush administration couldn't approach.

"Lute Score" is an entirely entertaining fiction, too--the "extended remix" thrown-out lyrics are much more inventive than what most artists leave in. And yet I'd like to hear a baroque quartet version!

the ex-x