Recovery splashes down, "Ashes" covered

[imomus]

Quite a lot has happened since I last spoke to you (Sunday), dearlings. First, we now have a release date for the Joemus album: November 24th. I put the sleeve together at the weekend, combining Stefan Sadler's double portrait with the Joemus font specially designed by Stijn Segers, from Werkmannen (Stijn also has a Casio orchestra, Casio Nostra, who are looking for places to play in Berlin).



Secondly, the Recovery box set has come out. This box set is the reason Joe and I got together in the first place. Put together by Kamal Ackarie, it's the first release on a new label, Fractured, an imprint which will specialize in one-off editions and artists’ projects. Recovery consists of ten vinyl 7-inch singles in a box, and it's limited to 500 copies. Basically, it's the only place you're going to hear Foetus singing "Warm Leatherette", Fennesz covering Norwegian pop idols Aha, Jason Forrest's take on 10cc, Matmos singing Bow Wow Wow, Throbbing Gristle remaking Pink Floyd, or Ryoji Ikeda going AC/DC... Check out the Pitchfork news story for the full track listing.

Out in the blogosphere, people have been marvelling at the box set's appropriationist packaging (by Graham Dolphin), or wondering whether "when the avant-garde do mainstream, do they become mainstream?" and calling the project a "guilty secret". You can hear short mp3 samples of all the tracks here (click the song titles).

Me and Joe did Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes", "not so much a pop song as a ping pong match between Coco the Clown and Major Tom," as I put it in the sleeve notes. "Batted by the paddles of inner and outer space, drugs and travel, the 60s and the 80s, pop and paranoia, verse and chorus, call and response, mumble and screech, episode and sequel, capsule and ground, the celluloid ball bops back and forth with a series of satistfying thwack and plock and boiiiiiing noises."

[Error: unknown template video]

It was these satisfying thwacks, plocks and boings which led me to invite Joe to make a whole album. "Ashes to Ashes" isn't on Joemus, but I want to present the cover today in the form of a YouTube video, a collaboration between me and Jordan Fish. Enjoy!

Update: A different edit of the video, in higher resolution and quicker to load than the YouTube one currently is, can be seen here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Damn. Can't get that youtube video to work.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It does seem to be extremely slow-to-load, like they've hosted it on their Martian server or something.

Tell you what, I'm going to host it on imomus.com. And, just for fun, I'm going to put a completely different cut there. This'll be the link (in about fifteen minutes from now):

Momus and Germlin: Ashes to Ashes (http://imomus.com/ashesvid3.mov)

[(Anonymous)]

Very sonically busy version of Bowie's last indisputably great single. What made you cover it? Does it have any special resonance for you? I suspect the teenage Momus lapped up the Kafka reference...

[(Anonymous)]

... just as the middle-aged Momus lapped up those Jap girls in synthesis

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, have you seen this interview where he talks about his Japanese influences?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Does it have any special resonance for you?

I think it's -- quite simply -- the best single ever made. It's got pop, but also meta-textual strangeness. It recapitulates Bowie's great themes: madness and space and isolation and intoxication and decadence and children's songs. It's got a great riff. And that irregular, rotating 3-against-4 end section. And Schwitterian yammering, and Bowiesque mumbling, and that great falsetto vocal. And Jap girls in synthesis.

And it went to number one, and I remember all the kids who teased me at school for liking Bowie coming up and saying, when that happened, "Hey, you were right about Bowie after all!"

[(Anonymous)]

You were still at school when you were 20?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Interesting! "The discipline of movement".

I had a similar reaction when I mentioned Mishima in my first Japanese interviews -- people would drop the subject like a hot potato.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(By the way, you're usually someone who leaves trolly comments, but this video was a nice gift, thanks!)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, but I was still in Scotland, and I kept in touch with people I'd been at school with. I'd run into them on the street and -- such was the level of Bowie-mania in 1980 -- that would be the first thing they'd say. "Hey, you were right about that Bowie fellow!"

[(Anonymous)]

I like how he says he'd like to live in Kyoto, anticipating the following year's Move On with its "nights in Old Kyoto, sleeping on the matted ground".

[(Anonymous)]

I read somewhere that the Japanese are quite surprised that Mishima is held in such high esteem in the West, and that a rough equivalent would be if a Japanese artist told a British interviewer that Somerset Maugham was his favourite British novelist...

[(Anonymous)]

Il n'y pas de quoi, sparring partner!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Moss Garden" (on "Heroes") is also said to be about Kyoto.

David Bowie has spent quite a lot of time in Kyoto, where he's rumoured to have lived for long periods in a house called Togendo, owned by an orientalist called David Kidd. Here's Eri Wilde's investigation of Togendo (http://www.davidbowie.com/users/eriwilde/15Aug.html), lavishly illustrated.

If this really is where Bowie lived (and where he took Iman for their honeymoon), it seems odd that it's now standing empty. Then again, perhaps -- after David Kidd's death -- Bowie retains it as a summer house.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, what's your theory as to Bowie's precipitous decline in quality post-Scary Monsters? The corruption of success? Pressure to perform following label change? Getting older? Going clean? Or something else?

Also, has his mediocrity of the past quarter-century retroactively affected how you feel about his seventies greatness?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Here's an account of Kidd's life taken from a Spanish pdf (http://www.librosdelasteroide.com/datos/pdf/24.pdf) I found, which mentions Bowie and Togendo.

"David Kidd (1927-1996) arrived in Beijing in 1946 on a university exchange program. He'd studied Chinese at the Universtiy of Michigan, and was preparing to deepen his study of the elusive and subtle subject of classical Chinese poetry at Yenching University, one of the most famous missionary Christian universities, later assimilated into the University of Beijing. He met his future wife, Aimee Yu -- the daughter of a supreme court judge and descended from Manchu aristocrats -- in an opera house in Beijing. The death of her father and the triumph of the Maoist revolution precipitated this unusual marriage between a pekingese young aristocrat and an American from the plains of Kentucky.

David Kidd decided to set in writing their memories of four years lived in Beijing (1946-1950) a decade after his departure from the old imperial capital. The book was entitled The Emperor's Horses (1960). Decades later, in 1988, David Kidd issued a second and expanded version of the book, which included a visit to Beijing during the Deng Xiaoping's era of reform....

David Kidd lived a crucial moment in the rugged history of China's 20th century. Located in the heart of Beijing, within the vast and luxurious but decrepit mansion of the Yu family, with their collections of bronzes, calligraphy, jade and other antiques, with its gardens, ponds and pavilions, David Kidd recounts the advent of communist power without resorting to the cliches of epic...

In 1950, on his return to America, David Kidd was paradoxically accused of communism by the McCarthyites. Since he'd divorced Aimee Yu, he moved to Japan in 1956. He dedicated himself to collecting art and university teaching. In 1976 he opened the traditional Japanese arts school, the Oomoto Foundation. David Kidd's house in Kyoto, Togendo, became an obligatory pilgrimage stop for young bohemians.

David Kidd's friendship with David Bowie is well known. Even today you can visit the Cafe David, near the Kyoto Cultural Museum, in which his partner in the last decades of his life, Yasuyoshi Morimoto, has reconstructed the atmosphere of a traditional mansion. David Kidd also started a foundation dedicated to AIDS research."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think it's hard to separate the greatness of Bowie's work in the 70s from ambition, discomfort and cocaine. But when you've achieved massive wealth and success, how do you stay ambitious? Where else is there to go? How do you keep manufacturing discomfort? And if you keep doing that amount of cocaine, how do you continue to exist at all?

To your second question, no.

[(Anonymous)]

So you're subscribing to the old "artist must suffer for his art" line, eh? I'd have thought that was too Romantic for you!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's quite what I'm saying. It's not about suffering, but about being outside something, being marginal. Bowie's best work is about alienation and discomfort and ambition and madness, and those are all "on the outside" things.

[(Anonymous)]

The interesting thing about Bowie was that he was both "outside" and "inside". Yes, his themes were alienation, madness etc., but at the same time he was a huge commercial success. From Ziggy on he was a massive star and all his albums hit the top ten, even the supposedly "difficult" ones.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

...And while you clearly don't have to be on the outside to write well about the outside (after all, people who are really outside are struggling just to survive), there is a connection. In other words, there are limits to how convincingly you could write about one state while living in another.

Bowie hints at this in the interview above, when he talks about traveling constantly to prevent himself getting too comfortable.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Ta for posting the youtube, I heard your take on the previous MP3 posting and think it's a great version.
Love the ping-pong analogy....and the costume recreation!

[pulled-up.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Well done on getting the album finished. My birthday's the 20th, will be hoping for an advance copy...

Looking forward to listening to the Recovery box set when Joe gets back with it this evening!

Emma

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Congrats, Nick. Now get working on that album with Anne!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Glad you like it -- but the mp3 posting was a totally different version!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

(Kidd must have been from Western Kentucky, because there isn't a flat parcel of land to be found anywhere in the mountainous Eastern part (http://farm1.static.flickr.com/51/128426474_bb463b13ee.jpg?v=0) of Kentucky from which I hail.)

[ksta.livejournal.com]

Love the Ashes to Ashes. I can't make out on my crap computer speakers - is Bowie still singing in there, or is it just his influence and/or ghost?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

That blue looks good on you bb. Though why didn't you sing it in the lower key?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

BEING STRAIGHT.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

If all those bitches who have opinions about Bowie would actually get involved in the fandom and wrote me some fucking slash about him I don't think I'd mind them half as much as I do.

But as it stands they're all a bunch of n00bs who need to stfu.

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

There's a silly theory that after John Lennon was shot, David Bowie died. Whether Bowie himself had anything to do with this is another matter.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"It's only me" (said in Love You Til' Tuesday voice)!

[shadowshark.livejournal.com]

Great timing... I just listened to Ziggy Stardust yesterday, which has been one of my "Disney/Star Wars." I didn't really like it.

Would you recommend another or his albums that's a little more interesting or should I just play that one again a few more times and listen differently?

[i-am-a-hot-sale.livejournal.com]

that's my favorite bowie song, and yours is a great version, fantastic! I'm even more excited about joemus now, was already pretty excited. you captured the essence and did it in such a playful manner.

[womanonfire.livejournal.com]

aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! love lovelove!

[akabe.livejournal.com]

Is that an early Eno look you're sporting?
Ashes to ashes really really works . the lyrical side survives , or wonderfully coexists with, all the butchery

thank you

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend Lodger and the first half of Scary Monsters. That's the closest Bowie came to Avant Pop. African Night Flight! DJ! Up The Hill Backwards!

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, that was a dashed off comment on someone else's computer earlier.
The Joemus version certainly advances drastically from the original template.
Do you think that this latter version can be made available - outside of the Recovery box set - at some later stage?

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

No, no, no! MOMUS needs to write Bowie slash. It's the next step in his Bowie fanboyism.
LOLOL I uploaded these to Facebook yesterday:

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

lololol.

Yeah I think he needs to, as well, only he'd probably try to make it ~edgy~ and disgusting.

Pastiche and allegorical "Mad Hatters"

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I'm just thinking Chroma key on that wall Nic otherwise, worthy time spent. For Whims http://www.chromakey.com/.

Thought you might be interested in an article about lowbrow
and Nick Mount.

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/09/03/lowbrow-and-street-art-a-conversation/

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Oh my God what the fuck is that noise??

[fluorophoric.livejournal.com]

Is there any dada influence in your work?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh certainly; Dada is the banana skin under Modernism. John Talaga and I were definitely thinking Dada when we decided to make the songs on my Stories of O trilogy (Oskar, Otto, Ocky) melt into each other.

[(Anonymous)]

nice cover of ashes... Seeing the hip-hop artists in the video made me think about how we don't get to see the fall-out that a lot of those artists go through.. when they're famous we might see the ridiculous drug-use (amy winehouse / britney spears) but hip-hop continually glamorizes that life-style because its always new faces. Do any hiphop artists (other than mildly snoop dog) talk about how they left that life behind? david bowie survived through it and seems like a lot of times talks about how terrible his fallout was.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

i like the re-edit way more!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh! Thanks!