Evergreen

[imomus]

Here it is, the finished version of the song I described on Thursday:

Sempreverde

Sorry, this track is no longer available. Please buy the CD when it comes out!

As before, it's a dollar if you like and keep the download. A small price to pay for peace of mind! (Caution: This song might cause irregular heartbeat, anxiety or insomnia in some people. Always follow the directions printed on the packet and if necessary consult a doctor.)

Sempreverde

The man from the north enters the tube
Wriggles his way to the perspex cube
The man from the south dissolves in his mouth
A lozenge of Sempreverde

The man from the north and the man from the south
One by the brain, one by the mouth
Climb through the tube into the cube
Of the perspex Japanese garden

And in the pines a tiny sun shines
Birds small as insects fly through the air
The panda unzips the skin of a pig
Flops himself down in the garden

Fiddle me blank, fiddle me blind
All the young girls fiddle their minds
Jilly and Debbie and everyone's here
All for the Sempreverde

Giants and fairies and strange effigies
Sacred and artificial trees
Dragons and serpents and fish and birds
In the perspex Japanese garden

Otto the rich, Otto the poor
Spilling the stuff on the party floor
The past is so sad, the present is worse
Thank heaven we haven't a future

The world fills with trash and eskimo ash
Clouds of white gas floating in from the past
Crawl to the cashpoint, bring me the cash
And I'll get you the Sempreverde

I said 'I'm going to rape you'
She said okay
I said 'Don't say okay because then it's not rape'
She said 'Okay, I won't say okay'
On two tabs of Sempreverde

Evergreen Sempreverde

*

The current lead story on Salon is Irresistible Force, an interview with Stephin Merritt on the eve of the release of the new Magnetic Fields album, 'i'. Merritt is now giving interview with the deft, morose panache of Morrissey in his prime, so it's well worth having to sit through a Last Samurai infomercial to get to the meat of it... er, sorry, the veg. And, proving that my stock is higher in the East Village than in Clerkenwell, I did not go unmentioned (in a context which, you will see, also relates to this new song):

'Merritt does not keep careful track of what's happening in popular music these days, and seems entirely dismissive of most that he's heard. I asked him a few times if there were young and active artists out there whom he liked, and all I got was that Momus (mid-40s) is a "great lyricist," and that he likes the new High Llamas record. Since he stopped reviewing records, he doesn't get them sent to him for free in the mail anymore, so he says that "unless it's boring thumping disco music, I probably don't hear it, until my friends play it for me. Which they rarely do anymore, since I hate everything they play for me."

'...Merritt feels there is nothing new or groundbreaking in popular music these days. "There needs to be a new technology," he said. "That's usually when that happens. Robotics would be great. If we could have an easily used robot guitar, for example, we could do lots of nifty things that have not been done. Computer-assisted songwriting would also be great."

'With my Luddite hackles raised by this and a few of Merritt's other comments (he's enthusiastic about the development of computerized singing), I wound up asking a genuinely ridiculous question: "Would you want a world in which everyone played perfectly metronomical drumbeats all the time?" Merritt paused to bask in the full absurdity of the question, and then, smiling, his voice more animated than at any other time during our conversations, answered, "Yes! Yes, I would!"

Thank you, Stephin!

Story

Comments

Re: honestly...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about computer voices. Seen as a gimmick, they've clearly had their day. But, seen as just another colour in the musician's sound palette, they can be justified. It would have been easy, after all those twangy novelty guitar records in the 50s, to say one was sick of the electric guitar, that it was a flash in the pan and a fly by night. But people stuck with it and developed all sorts of new sounds from it. I think computer voices are like that. They will be singing throughout our lifetimes. They already surround us in public places, on the phone, etc. They have become 'normal' without losing any of their inherent weirdness.

The reason I used one here is to exaggerate the artificiality of the 'perspex Japanese garden', to make it seem like a very synthetic, high-tech and engineered experience. I love the idea of a folk song resembling 'Greensleeves' being sung by a computer. I love the contrast between the computer's 'emotionless' voice and the heart-rending sound of the Mongolian horsehead fiddle that accompanies it, and I like the absurdity of a computer -- which has no body and no desire -- singing 'I'm going to rape you'. For me, the result takes me into 'Man Who Fell To Earth' or 'Bladerunner' territory: that sub-genre of science fiction which is about emotion and memory. This is something I worked a lot with on my 'Timelord' album ten years ago, for instance in the song 'Christmas on Earth', where an astronaut celebrates Christmas back home, despite the fact that he is subject to an Einsteinian time shift which means that his friends all died long ago.

Re: honestly...

[(Anonymous)]

Hear, hear. The computerized singing on "Sempreverde" is the most expressive and oddly affecting yet on any Momus song, going much further than what can be heard to great extent on the "Slender Sherbet" remakes or even the singing PDA of "Handheld." Remember when you first heard a computerized voice, most likely courtesy of the telephone company? That was like hearing your first electric guitar, indeed, and of course the possiblities are endless...

However, isn't Stephin Merritt probably referring to the new sampling "packages" which use actual flesh-and-blood singers to digitally create your vocal lines? (I've heard the posted examples and was duly impressed--I think it's Yamaha who's most hard at work on this, and if you're not as lazy as I am, you can do a search and judge for yourself. The packages are named for the singers whose phonemes were originally sampled.) In the future, in theory, one could slice and dice any singer and then utilize the results to sing your own material. Who, then, would sing "Sempreverde"? Someone ageless and evergreen, I hope--Barbra Streisand?

By the way, this song is the most otherwordly and eerily beautiful of the recent batch, with a renewed sense of mystery one can really appreciate after the slightly more straightforward melodies and choruses of the past few. Meaning in plainspeak, I already treasure it!

Re: honestly...

[(Anonymous)]

Enough with my being lazy--here's that Yamaha site with some downright scary examples:

http://www.vocaloid.com/en/sample.html

I long for the day when Momus will employ one of these transhumanoid singers.

Re: honestly...

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Chordmeister – Generation Sex (http://www.divineguitar.co.uk/Tribute%20CD/CD2/05_Generation_Sex.mp3)

This is a nice example of computer voice manipulation… it was recorded for a Divine Comedy tribute album (http://tribute.neilhannon.info/home.htm), and it was made using Virtual Singer^TM (http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/virtualsinger.htm).

Re: honestly...

[automatique.livejournal.com]

Nonsense! Of course synthesized voices are a gimmick. The voice has already had it's 'electric guitar' - it was called 'microphone'.

Re: honestly...

[thevulgartrade.livejournal.com]

I personally think you succeeded admirably in your objectives regarding the juxtaposition of the electronic voice and the acoustic instrumentation. One of the things that I think is sorely missing from a great deal of music that focuses on electronic augmentation is it lacks the soulful presence that this track gradually builds over its journey. I also think it touches a very pertinent topic in an increasingly mechanized world: how do we fit our souls into binary code, or MIDI, or a place where time is bent beyond recognition?