I murdered a pretty little bonsai tree

[imomus]

Reading this blog, you might be forgiven for thinking that its author is an amateur sociologist, poseur, journalist, traveller, self-mediating slummy fashion pin-up, cultural commentator, rentable eccentric, and so on -- yet pass over the fact that he also makes pop records. But he does, and it's the main thing he's been doing for years and years. He even released one last month, an album called Ocky Milk. Never mind what our self-mediator has declared about it, though; what are other people saying?

On the whole, they're liking it very much, whether they're bloggers, skeptical music lovers on bulletin boards, or journalists. Here's what some reviewers have said:

"Ocky Milk is supremely welcome. It's as rich and enjoyable an album as Nick Currie's made in years: warm, funny, arch in most of the right places, made with an admirable integrity and a genuine playfulness—and, at long last, surprising." Theon Weber, Stylus magazine

"What’s immediately striking about the album is its quietness. Momus uses space and silence to great effect throughout the album." Brandon Bussolini, Dusted

"The pleasure of Momus's music lies in his peculiarly elegant, catchy brand of lo-fi; he's on dandy form here, as a conspiratorial, synth-pop storyteller on The Birdcatcher, camping it up on Frilly Military and blending spooky spoken-word incantations on Devil Mask, Buddha Mind." Arwa Haider, Metro

"The drifting quality of this record is very attractive, especially on the more inventive numbers such as the hazy, faintly sinister 'Dr Cat'," says Leo Chadburn in Playlouder. But his praise is qualified:

"There are, however, some mawkish moments, notably the sentimental 'Nervous Heartbeat' with its Japanese onomatopoeia... Similarly questionable is 'Count Ossie In China' on which Momus reprises the risible Jamaican accent I hoped never to hear again after his 1995 track 'The Madness of Lee Scratch Perry'."

Leo might like to know that I'd planned to include another song with a bad Jamaican accent on the album, but dropped it for this very reason. I've decided to let you hear the outtake today; it's down below. As I emailed a friend at the time, "I'll probably be slaughtered by the PC for doing a (bad) Jamaican accent and implying that Jamaicans are tree-murderers with knives. But who says it's a Jamaican accent? It's Imaginaican. And therefore it's only slandering my own imagination."

Actually, listening again to "Bonsai Tree" I think it's an interesting piece. Even Ocky Milk's outtakes had something good about them. And I can explain the accent: the "Imaginaican" is Welsh, see, blud. I mean... "boyo".

Bonsai Tree (Stereo mp3 file, 3MB, 3mins 17secs.)

Update: Here's Ishimaru's Miyagi Bonsai Shop Dub Remix.

Comments

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Ocky Milk hasn't grabbed me as immediately as Oskar and Otto both did. I like many of the songs, individually, a great deal, but the lack of variation in tempo over the length of the album makes it difficult for me to listen to the whole thing in one sitting. It may grow on me.

I still treasure Otto Spooky!

[dzima.livejournal.com]

In Bonsai Tree, Momus has definitely gone Tricky on us (as I said before).

[(Anonymous)]

After your "Funky Forest" entry earlier this week you could have titled this one "Reggae Forest".

But wouldn't a Welsh "Imaginaican" be murdering leeks? Realistically, I mean.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

"But who says it's a Jamaican accent? It's Imaginaican. And therefore it's only slandering my own imagination."

That'd be the George Lucas defence?

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

haha, oh wow. I hadn't considered that parallel.

[psychronic.livejournal.com]

This song is awesome, I love it mon!

Initially I would have agreed with Stanley Lieber in that Ocky isn't quite as good as Otto, but a couple of days ago I listened to Ocky all the way through on my headphones and I realised that I hadn't really heard it properly until then. It's a triumph! Otto Spooky is still perfect to me though, for some reason it all came together at exactly the right time...can you imagine a metalhead listening to it with a huge smile on his face?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

can you imagine a metalhead listening to it with a huge smile on his face?

I'll try!

[(Anonymous)]

Are you happy with sales?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I see I'm at 12 in the Darla Hot 100 (http://www.darla.com/topSellers/). I think I peaked at 6. I shall have to fall back on the old indie cliché: "We just make our records for ourselves. If anyone buys them, that's a bonus."

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I read that Leo Chadburn review. I can see where he's coming from, but personally, the accent didn't bother me. I seem to recall that I had a brief struggle with my artistic taste filter in my brain upon hearing Count Ossie in China, which went something like, "Do I suspend my disbelief? Okay, I do." And with that, the struggle was over, and I like the track very much.

After all, I suspended my disbelief similarly for Kate Bush when she did Cockney and Aussie accents on The Dreaming. As she sings on one of the tracks (http://www.lyricsdomain.com/11/kate_bush/leave_it_open.html) on that album, "We let the weirdness in". I generally find that life is more interesting when you do.

Thanks for the link.

m

[(Anonymous)]

Hi momus protocol check

Re: m

[(Anonymous)]

Only use thin clients these days. Got no time for fat clients ok now that I said hello maybe ill go read what you wrote

Mon

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

By the way, the Bonsai/Jamaican connection reminded me that Natsume Soseki was probably a fan of reggae, even giving one of his novels the title 'Mon (http://www.library.tohoku.ac.jp/collect/soseki/mon-e.html)'

[mini-snape.livejournal.com]

But WHY? WHY a Jamaican accent? *insert desperate flailing of limbs here*

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's a running theme on Ocky Milk which you could state as "What if Jamaica were floating in the Sea of Japan?" There are so many rasta-looking people in Japan that you sometimes think it already is. I spent the early part of 2005 living in a totally rasta house in Hokkaido, for instance, watching the film "Rockers" over and over.

And so I send Nyahbinghi drummer Count Ossie to China, or set a young dread loose in Japan, bringing his sensuality but also a certain psychopathology; he's murdering the bonsai trees.

The Japanese are fascinated (http://imomus.livejournal.com/157776.html) by negritude, but also tend to equate foreigners with crime (http://www.japantoday.com/jp/popvox/621). This track ties up both of these "occidentalist" projections.

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

Bonsai Tree needed that electronic dub sound treatment. In fact... I just made a remix. :)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/bonsai-tree-miyagi-bonsai-shop-dub-remix-mp3.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's pretty good!

I worked on this song so much, because it was never quite right, and some of the mixes I did slowed the song down and dubbed it up, with some of the same effects you've used. It began to lose the sensuality and immediacy in those versions, though it gained in sinisterness. But yours is good! Nice extreme dubbing FX, and nice chop-up in the lyrics!

[(Anonymous)]

OT: Hey, Momster, what's up, where's your take on the recent spate of teenage suicides in J-wonderland? I want to see you spin that into something positive, a praise of close communities or something, respect for the other and all that.

teenage suicide

[(Anonymous)]

Sigh if omly they could realize it gets better zzbn

[badspelling.livejournal.com]

I guess the greatest irony is that while the reviewer takes issue with a persona that you're putting on, the reviewer himself uses both a pseudonym and and persona on a regular basis when working his 'real' dayjob.

Remix album

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

On a tangent: have you thought of inviting some people to remix your tracks and releasing a remix album?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

We're all Imaginaicans now.

[rroland.livejournal.com]

i like permagasm very much, is that a track that Rusty had a hand in? I love what John did midway through. oh, btw i think it is a headphone LP, at least it works better for my aged ear that way.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, Rusty recorded Permagasm, then reworked it quite a lot, with the first verses all having a different placement of guitar and vocals. I edited several of the mixes together and did the transition at the end where it leads into "Permagasm". John reworked the whole thing and added his own sounds, like the bleeping before it goes into the drum section, and the repetition of "softer than the world".

[(Anonymous)]

Why do some people find it "questionable" for a white man to do a fake Jamaican accent? It's not like Momus is ridiculing Jamaicans in either of those songs. Do some people really find it offensive?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think that insecurity, or a sense that some groups are "victims", leads to a kind of paranoid hypersensitivity which assumes that all references to the group in question must be slights, and should be elided. So we remove all references which don't go the extra mile to make "semantic amends" for inequality in the form of suspiciously fulsome praise.

An example of the effect of this is that all labels for black people will eventually be considered offensive: "coloureds", "negroes", "blacks", "African-Americans"... They shift, but as long as stigma is assumed to inhere in the group, each label
in turn will be tainted, and will have to be abandoned.

But it isn't just labels -- and this is where things get alarming. Soon enough all representations of the group will have to go too, all references. No more gollywogs, no more bushmen, no more rastas. What remains is silence... and the suspicion that speech has been fixed so that society doesn't have to be. Semantic inequality has been hidden so that existing inequality doesn't have to be addressed.

This silence, no matter how well-intentioned (if the avoidance of embarrassment can be called a good intention) is worse than the slander which preceded it. It's a new form of being "untouchable". It's a new stigma, a new class marker. "I must be careful what I say. Better not say anything."

It isn't just this specific group that becomes invisible and unspeakable. Groups in general are thereby effaced. There's, allegedly, just "the individual" and "everyone in the world", with nothing in between.

Outakes

[(Anonymous)]

I like this and have no problem with the accent or your character vocalisations. My wife has ordered "Ocky" for my birthday, so looking forward to getting the album.

Isn't your George Formby outake from "Otto" on the new album, and wasn't "Lady Fancy Knickers" an outake from "Oscar" ? So maybe this song will make it onto the next album..

Richard

Re: Outakes

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, songs that don't fit one record often fit the next. Not sure about this one, though.

Happy birthday, I hope you like the record!

[xinit.livejournal.com]

Somehow I missed the release. Emusic to the rescue.

Thanks.

[jip.livejournal.com]

Dank je wel! http://musicbrainz.org/show/release/?releaseid=567985

And it looks like i'm getting a cheap left-over trainride
this weekend to Berlin. Any suggestions for colorfull places
to visit to get over my winter depression?

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

Wow thats wierd. The music gets posted, I make a remix and its on musicbrainz by the end of the day. Awesome.

[saint-claws.livejournal.com]

Whooohoo free music. Where would the internet be without it?

[tundraboy.livejournal.com]

While digging through some old papers, I ran across these photos my Japanese friend gave me featuring you and he in NYC, circa early 2000s. I'm sure you have copies, but:

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I'm especially fond of Nick's incarnations during his tenure in NYC. There's something delightfully theatrical about them.

zzbn here

[(Anonymous)]

Hi momus just woke up here. In PST. Am listening to AValanche coming down the mountain thin client

Re: zzbn here

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder. What it means to only have net access via opportunistic handheld

[(Anonymous)]

Myspace is down stole a gun last nite. Walked out of nimby with an unattended weapon. Then an exbf. Came over. He's. Like where's the gun

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, are you seriously happy with the attention Ocky Milk has been getting? I mean, a forum thread or two, a blog here, a Pitchfork-wannabe there... it's not exactly blanket coverage, is it? My kid brother's myspace electronica does as well. Not in any of the music mags (that I can find), not in Wire, not even in Pitchfork, let alone national newspapers or anything like that. While at the same time someone like Green Gartside gets a Mercury nomination. It's not a bad album, I guess you deserve better.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Naturally I would like Ocky Milk to get wider exposure. I would like reviews in The Wire and Pitchfork and so on. I'd like to be nominated for the Mercury. But why get bitter, or envy someone like Green Gartside? Is Green in the Whitney Biennial? Does he publish books about photography, or appear in anthologies of emerging visual artists like Phaidon's "Ice Cream"? Does he have his own column in Wired News? And so on...

Being an artist is a bit like being a viscous liquid (take your pick of which one) or an eel: you simply ooze into the spaces available, and you assume the shape of the cultural containers you find. I'm a liquid that can fit the beakers and petri dishes of art, music, and writing -- and perhaps if I'd had big success in one of them I'd voluntarily have committed myself to its limitations -- but I sort of like seeping from one to the other. It makes me feel free. I can escape the socialisation that goes on, the restrictive gatekeepering, the petty resentments and politics, and so on. I feel the same about states: I like to ooze from one state to another. I like to avoid feeling Oedipal about authority figures in any given state. They aren't worth getting worked up about, and if you do expend emotional energy on them you quickly find that your cathexis includes uncomfortable amounts of foolish puppy love.

Of course utter freedom is impossible, and you need context to give your work meaningful shape. But I think you can snatch a bit of context, a bit of shape, from one world and take it into the other. I really feel that that's what I've been doing for the past decade or so. I quoted the song "Lady Fancy Knickers" the other day, a line about "a new theory of everything -- a tub of custard, a manky carpet and a piece of string". The custard, carpet and string came directly from a review of an installation in an art magazine, but I put them into a pop song. The danger of living only in the world of pop is that you'd be taking stuff from pop and putting it into pop -- the mawkish songwriting conventions of your competitors, a little dialogue with your critics in the press, a tip of the hat to your musical heroes in the past. And that's how a lot of pop music sounds now... and I wouldn't even exempt Scritti Politti's new album, alas.