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imomusTo get totally into the themes on my 2000-recorded, 2001-released Folktronic album I should really be an urban ethnomusicologist with a robot assistant like the one you hear in my hour-long audio documentary Fakeways: Manhattan Folk, made just before the album and still the best piece of scene-setting for it. This Alan Lomax figure would probably have to start with the basic facts: Folktronic is an album made by a 40 year-old Scottish musician who moved to New York in March 2000. He records the album at 38 Orchard Street, at the Chinatown end of the Lower East Side. He's been in New York just a couple of months when he starts, but already he's absorbing a lot of the local zeitgeist, and particularly the idea that America is a nation with plastic roots where you can be whatever you want to be -- as long as it isn't authentic. He lives with his Japanese girlfriend.
Books and people influence this record. The people are new New York friends like Steve Lafreniere, a journalist who interviews me for Index magazine, the singer Stephin Merritt, or the multimedia designer (and friend of Fischerspooner) John-Robert Howell. As for the books, just as the prog-medieval direction of the Kahimi record I'd made in 1999 (most of which is glommed onto the end of Folktronic) was influenced by Paul Stump's book The Music's All That Matters, the "Fake Americana" material that comprises two thirds of Folktronic is influenced by Nicholas Dawidoff's book In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. But a much more important source is a copy of German sexologist Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis I buy at the New Museum bookshop.
In a website thought published in April 2000 I have "a great idea": "Why not make an album of folk songs about sexual fetishes, set to synthesisers? Folk songs are usually about mining disasters or clipper mutinies, but why shouldn't they be about archaic hysterical sex fetishes too? The songs should have a childish gaiety, be light and celebratory... They would play with the associations of the words Folk, Fake and Fuck. The Folk (ballads, reels, laments, shanties, forebitters) would be Fake Folk, of course, played on early monophonic synthesisers. But the Fuck would also be Fake Fuck, because that's what fetish is. It's an evasion of the 'real thing', which is fucking. It's a fake fuck... A world in which the authentic was not prioritised over the fake, and 'healthy' fucking had no precedence over fetish, would be a rather splendid one, it seems to me."
And so I set to home-recording, alone in my tiny apartment, and often naked. In proposing inauthenticity as America's authenticity, I was making Manhattan -- a city of Jews, gays, Chinese and the art world -- the centre of all authentic inauthenticity, and in proposing deviance as the most universal sexuality I was merging Alan Lomax with Alfred Kinsey. Steve Lafreniere -- who heard most of these songs before anyone else did, and was in a sense their ideal listener -- started referring to me as "the Heliogabalus of Orchard Street". Other people influenced the album: Gavin Brown, whose art gallery in the Meatpacking District featured Jeremy Deller-like garage sales and a great scenester bar called Passerby. Spencer Sweeney's distortion-noise band Actress, which I heard at Passerby, blasting over the speakers. A conceptual folk band called Centuries, who came in from Coney Island to play weird gigs in tribute to Bruce Haack and Klaus Nomi. The records of Raymond Scott, which I'd buy from Other Music or Kim's. The bizarre school operas of Ford Wright. The scene around Fischerspooner, Bobby Conn, Ukrainian and Polish folk rituals in the East Village and Williamsburg. Thrift stores and painted Easter eggs.
Appalachia: I'd call this Cornelius-influenced "ring modulation baroque". I remember playing it live for the first time at Tonic, and Arto Lindsay shouting at the soundcheck "Momus, it's distorted!" Which is funny if you know Arto's noise history. This was supposed to sound like Actress, but didn't.
Smooth Folk Singer: The brutally simple sampling style here (I think it's a Leadbelly groove) owes something to Dymaxion, who'd recently worked with Takako Minekawa. There's a 90s-style campy irony here which grates a bit now, lots of Stylophone, and you can hear New York City police sirens in the background. It's Adorno meeting Stephin Merritt, with a backbeat. I recall thinking this record was going to be hugely popular in America, as big a seller as 69 Love Songs. It wasn't.
Mountain Music: The American Indian museum at Battery Park was a big influence; I bought some CDs of ethnic fiddle music which get used a lot, meshed with the Country Music patterns on my Technics KN600. Inspired by the same museum, Shizu started making beadwork samplers with "digital" pine trees on them (shapes that translated easily to Jack Howell's Flash programming when Folktonic became Folktronia, an exhibition at Zach Feuer's gallery in Chelsea). A bit later, concept-country band Big and Rich would mine the same seams. I recall Rednex being important too. Trashy country-inflected chart pop, Beck, Bruce Haack...
Simple Men: John Cage percussion accompanies a ditty which sites in Appalachia Adorno's ideas about our projection of "soul" onto the poor. The history of the recording of folk music in America is the history of Jews descending from the cities to pass amongst -- or pass for -- yokels (hello Robert Zimmerman!). It's a bit like Thomas Jerome Newton's limo sweeping by astonished hillbillies in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Two incredibly incompatible cultures (opposite Gini-spectrum ends) gawping at each other.
Finnegan the Folk Hero: But if you allow that fakeness, you allow folk to update itself. Why shouldn't folk be as relevant to the 2000 NASDAQ crash as the 1929 stock market crash and the depression which followed it? Are only red states allowed to folk? What about blue ones? And what about web designers down on their luck, are they to go unsung?
Protestant Art: I pit the sensibility described in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ("Keep your receipts!") against the excesses of the New York art world. This was a time of NEA scandals; people didn't want their hard-earned tax dollars spent on Piss Christs and scato-AIDS performances. It's Charles Ives, Grandma Moses and the Nazis versus Ron Athey, Karen Finlay and Chris Ofili! Which side are you on?
US Knitting: And what if your sense of American folk comes via American TV? From Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons? As I speculate in the Fakeways documentary, "For a generation whose knowledge of the world comes through media, there's no gap between media pastiche and sincere self-expression, whatever that is." Why shouldn't you learn American Gothic values from TV, or some other artform? Thornton Wilder's Stage Manager in Our Town, doesn't he owe something to Brecht? And this song, is it pastiching Dylan's John Wesley Harding album, or David Ackles' American Gothic? Can we feel, here, the results of several coast-to-coast Momus tours, and the rush of American rural landscapes against a car windscreen?
Jarre in Hicksville: Here we reach a more poignant Outsider Pop, Avant Pop, or Unpop. I'm sampling Patterns of Plants by Mamoru Fujieda, so things take a more introverted, Japanese turn. The theme is how electronics destroy indigenous culture of small towns: "They've built themselves a synthesiser, smashed their old guitars". This is pomo meta -- music about music, song about songs. It's a bit clever-clever, a bit touching too. The Harry Partch feel is nice.
Taperecorder Man: Recounts Dylan's electric "betrayal" of his folk roots at the Newport Folk Festival, but makes it a backstage battle between Alan Lomax and Dylan, resulting in the apocryphal moment when "folk musique concrete" is invented. Here the theme and the sound meld quite well; it really is the blues reworked by Raymond Scott, with Alan Lomax samples thrown in and lots of fake crackle.
Little Apples: I play on the emotions in a certain kind of cerebral country song -- Country Roads, Virginia on my Mind -- stretching wordy, alienated verses into weirdly irregular shapes. There are millennial tech references (Bryce, the Apple G4 Cube) and samples from Alberto Camerini, an obscure Italian synth pierrot. Sci-fi banjos, geodesic domes, and a sort of appealing melancholia missing earlier on the record.
Robocowboys: Gary Numan in a spaghetti western! Cowboys singing along to Texas Instruments! The lonely crowd! The paradox of an individualism where "everybody does it like no-else can" and "alienation's a kind of belonging". Should've been a single!
Psychopathia Sexualis: The most obviously Krafft-Ebing inspired song on the album. High IQ academics study bestial Anytown USA residents. A German sexual analysis of America, a scientific take on irrational sexuality and religion: "Evening Reverend, how's your sister, your lovely sister your wife?" A typical American town... with transparent walls.
Folk Me Amadeus: Here the album's main theme ends; this really sums it all up. Amidst Falco references and the riff from Europe's The Final Countdown, I update the tale of 1960s folk rock: "My children were fair and wore stars in their hair, now they're bald, watch TV and buy New Age CDs". But -- and it's a sort of redemption -- "the lack of deeper meaning's getting deeper all the time". Cotton-Eye Joe by Rednex actually has me crying by the end of the song, garlanded by the poignant bleeps of Palm Pilots.
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Handheld: And speaking of Palm Pilots, here's a love song to one of the critters. There's an influence from Japanese concepto-pop here; Cornelius and Delaware. And of course from Holger Hiller's Moog reading of Hindemith's Wir Bauen Ein Stadt. The folk theme has ended; we're back to baroque. The robot voice is done well -- if only the whole album had been sung like this! I'm not too happy with the sound of my voice elsewhere.
The Penis Song: The theme has now gone; we pull out all the stops -- and all the dick jokes. This is basically Robb Wilton or Georges Brassens-style bawdy variety, designed to be a live favourite. Monty Python looms large, and maybe a certain kind of campy Williamsburg cabaret.
Heliogabalus: A return to classic Momus and classical themes. I'd been watching I Claudius on DVD. And there's an echo of Oscar Wilde in the line about "the mantle of the evil always claimed by joyless vultures to explain the strange allure of other cultures". You can hear that I was mostly hanging out with gay people in New York.
Going for a Walk with a Line: From here on the album is in medieval-prog mode (although this number is more of a rap), so it's a reversion to my 1999 style. That fact makes it feel like the record is moving backwards in time, not forwards; like it's the end of a 90s logic, not the beginning of a noughties logic. Here we have the Dufay Collective influence, Paul Klee, Germanic spirituality, lots of BBC Radiophonic Workshop references. I like the introversion, the dreamy imagination. Seeing the Prinzhorn Collection of art by the mentally ill at the Drawing Centre influenced this. The Nazis' Entartete Kunst show made no distinction between Klee and the lunatic asylum. Something of the atmosphere in this track also informs the German radiophonic piece about me, 700 Minuten Beim Flaneur. So I guess this actually does point forward to my "German period".
The Lady of Shallott: This is a demo of the Kahimi Karie track from 1999, with inserts of the studio recording. It's musically more interesting than most of Folktronic, deeper somehow. Kate Bush, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...
Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan: Manhattan imagined from London via Eno's late 1970s stay here. Splicing between demos and originals, I'm still learning editing, as you can hear. These songs rarely got mentioned by reviewers, but they're by far the best on the record, though outside the concept. There's more than mere jokiness. Mentions NY Chinatown before I lived there! The snows of Villon are falling on Manhattan as rain.
Pygmalism: This -- in some ways my masterpiece -- melds Kubrick's 2001, Bladerunner and Pymalion. It's typically "overdetermined" -- there's really way more going on than anyone has a right to expect from pop music. The perfect end to an imperfect record.
Folktronic is available on CD from this page and in the US via iTunes. John-Robert Howell's Flash console featuring some of the tracks is online here.
Books and people influence this record. The people are new New York friends like Steve Lafreniere, a journalist who interviews me for Index magazine, the singer Stephin Merritt, or the multimedia designer (and friend of Fischerspooner) John-Robert Howell. As for the books, just as the prog-medieval direction of the Kahimi record I'd made in 1999 (most of which is glommed onto the end of Folktronic) was influenced by Paul Stump's book The Music's All That Matters, the "Fake Americana" material that comprises two thirds of Folktronic is influenced by Nicholas Dawidoff's book In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. But a much more important source is a copy of German sexologist Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis I buy at the New Museum bookshop.
In a website thought published in April 2000 I have "a great idea": "Why not make an album of folk songs about sexual fetishes, set to synthesisers? Folk songs are usually about mining disasters or clipper mutinies, but why shouldn't they be about archaic hysterical sex fetishes too? The songs should have a childish gaiety, be light and celebratory... They would play with the associations of the words Folk, Fake and Fuck. The Folk (ballads, reels, laments, shanties, forebitters) would be Fake Folk, of course, played on early monophonic synthesisers. But the Fuck would also be Fake Fuck, because that's what fetish is. It's an evasion of the 'real thing', which is fucking. It's a fake fuck... A world in which the authentic was not prioritised over the fake, and 'healthy' fucking had no precedence over fetish, would be a rather splendid one, it seems to me."
And so I set to home-recording, alone in my tiny apartment, and often naked. In proposing inauthenticity as America's authenticity, I was making Manhattan -- a city of Jews, gays, Chinese and the art world -- the centre of all authentic inauthenticity, and in proposing deviance as the most universal sexuality I was merging Alan Lomax with Alfred Kinsey. Steve Lafreniere -- who heard most of these songs before anyone else did, and was in a sense their ideal listener -- started referring to me as "the Heliogabalus of Orchard Street". Other people influenced the album: Gavin Brown, whose art gallery in the Meatpacking District featured Jeremy Deller-like garage sales and a great scenester bar called Passerby. Spencer Sweeney's distortion-noise band Actress, which I heard at Passerby, blasting over the speakers. A conceptual folk band called Centuries, who came in from Coney Island to play weird gigs in tribute to Bruce Haack and Klaus Nomi. The records of Raymond Scott, which I'd buy from Other Music or Kim's. The bizarre school operas of Ford Wright. The scene around Fischerspooner, Bobby Conn, Ukrainian and Polish folk rituals in the East Village and Williamsburg. Thrift stores and painted Easter eggs.
Appalachia: I'd call this Cornelius-influenced "ring modulation baroque". I remember playing it live for the first time at Tonic, and Arto Lindsay shouting at the soundcheck "Momus, it's distorted!" Which is funny if you know Arto's noise history. This was supposed to sound like Actress, but didn't.
Smooth Folk Singer: The brutally simple sampling style here (I think it's a Leadbelly groove) owes something to Dymaxion, who'd recently worked with Takako Minekawa. There's a 90s-style campy irony here which grates a bit now, lots of Stylophone, and you can hear New York City police sirens in the background. It's Adorno meeting Stephin Merritt, with a backbeat. I recall thinking this record was going to be hugely popular in America, as big a seller as 69 Love Songs. It wasn't.
Mountain Music: The American Indian museum at Battery Park was a big influence; I bought some CDs of ethnic fiddle music which get used a lot, meshed with the Country Music patterns on my Technics KN600. Inspired by the same museum, Shizu started making beadwork samplers with "digital" pine trees on them (shapes that translated easily to Jack Howell's Flash programming when Folktonic became Folktronia, an exhibition at Zach Feuer's gallery in Chelsea). A bit later, concept-country band Big and Rich would mine the same seams. I recall Rednex being important too. Trashy country-inflected chart pop, Beck, Bruce Haack...
Simple Men: John Cage percussion accompanies a ditty which sites in Appalachia Adorno's ideas about our projection of "soul" onto the poor. The history of the recording of folk music in America is the history of Jews descending from the cities to pass amongst -- or pass for -- yokels (hello Robert Zimmerman!). It's a bit like Thomas Jerome Newton's limo sweeping by astonished hillbillies in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Two incredibly incompatible cultures (opposite Gini-spectrum ends) gawping at each other.
Finnegan the Folk Hero: But if you allow that fakeness, you allow folk to update itself. Why shouldn't folk be as relevant to the 2000 NASDAQ crash as the 1929 stock market crash and the depression which followed it? Are only red states allowed to folk? What about blue ones? And what about web designers down on their luck, are they to go unsung?
Protestant Art: I pit the sensibility described in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ("Keep your receipts!") against the excesses of the New York art world. This was a time of NEA scandals; people didn't want their hard-earned tax dollars spent on Piss Christs and scato-AIDS performances. It's Charles Ives, Grandma Moses and the Nazis versus Ron Athey, Karen Finlay and Chris Ofili! Which side are you on?
US Knitting: And what if your sense of American folk comes via American TV? From Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons? As I speculate in the Fakeways documentary, "For a generation whose knowledge of the world comes through media, there's no gap between media pastiche and sincere self-expression, whatever that is." Why shouldn't you learn American Gothic values from TV, or some other artform? Thornton Wilder's Stage Manager in Our Town, doesn't he owe something to Brecht? And this song, is it pastiching Dylan's John Wesley Harding album, or David Ackles' American Gothic? Can we feel, here, the results of several coast-to-coast Momus tours, and the rush of American rural landscapes against a car windscreen?
Jarre in Hicksville: Here we reach a more poignant Outsider Pop, Avant Pop, or Unpop. I'm sampling Patterns of Plants by Mamoru Fujieda, so things take a more introverted, Japanese turn. The theme is how electronics destroy indigenous culture of small towns: "They've built themselves a synthesiser, smashed their old guitars". This is pomo meta -- music about music, song about songs. It's a bit clever-clever, a bit touching too. The Harry Partch feel is nice.
Taperecorder Man: Recounts Dylan's electric "betrayal" of his folk roots at the Newport Folk Festival, but makes it a backstage battle between Alan Lomax and Dylan, resulting in the apocryphal moment when "folk musique concrete" is invented. Here the theme and the sound meld quite well; it really is the blues reworked by Raymond Scott, with Alan Lomax samples thrown in and lots of fake crackle.
Little Apples: I play on the emotions in a certain kind of cerebral country song -- Country Roads, Virginia on my Mind -- stretching wordy, alienated verses into weirdly irregular shapes. There are millennial tech references (Bryce, the Apple G4 Cube) and samples from Alberto Camerini, an obscure Italian synth pierrot. Sci-fi banjos, geodesic domes, and a sort of appealing melancholia missing earlier on the record.
Robocowboys: Gary Numan in a spaghetti western! Cowboys singing along to Texas Instruments! The lonely crowd! The paradox of an individualism where "everybody does it like no-else can" and "alienation's a kind of belonging". Should've been a single!
Psychopathia Sexualis: The most obviously Krafft-Ebing inspired song on the album. High IQ academics study bestial Anytown USA residents. A German sexual analysis of America, a scientific take on irrational sexuality and religion: "Evening Reverend, how's your sister, your lovely sister your wife?" A typical American town... with transparent walls.
Folk Me Amadeus: Here the album's main theme ends; this really sums it all up. Amidst Falco references and the riff from Europe's The Final Countdown, I update the tale of 1960s folk rock: "My children were fair and wore stars in their hair, now they're bald, watch TV and buy New Age CDs". But -- and it's a sort of redemption -- "the lack of deeper meaning's getting deeper all the time". Cotton-Eye Joe by Rednex actually has me crying by the end of the song, garlanded by the poignant bleeps of Palm Pilots.
[Error: unknown template video]
Handheld: And speaking of Palm Pilots, here's a love song to one of the critters. There's an influence from Japanese concepto-pop here; Cornelius and Delaware. And of course from Holger Hiller's Moog reading of Hindemith's Wir Bauen Ein Stadt. The folk theme has ended; we're back to baroque. The robot voice is done well -- if only the whole album had been sung like this! I'm not too happy with the sound of my voice elsewhere.
The Penis Song: The theme has now gone; we pull out all the stops -- and all the dick jokes. This is basically Robb Wilton or Georges Brassens-style bawdy variety, designed to be a live favourite. Monty Python looms large, and maybe a certain kind of campy Williamsburg cabaret.
Heliogabalus: A return to classic Momus and classical themes. I'd been watching I Claudius on DVD. And there's an echo of Oscar Wilde in the line about "the mantle of the evil always claimed by joyless vultures to explain the strange allure of other cultures". You can hear that I was mostly hanging out with gay people in New York.
Going for a Walk with a Line: From here on the album is in medieval-prog mode (although this number is more of a rap), so it's a reversion to my 1999 style. That fact makes it feel like the record is moving backwards in time, not forwards; like it's the end of a 90s logic, not the beginning of a noughties logic. Here we have the Dufay Collective influence, Paul Klee, Germanic spirituality, lots of BBC Radiophonic Workshop references. I like the introversion, the dreamy imagination. Seeing the Prinzhorn Collection of art by the mentally ill at the Drawing Centre influenced this. The Nazis' Entartete Kunst show made no distinction between Klee and the lunatic asylum. Something of the atmosphere in this track also informs the German radiophonic piece about me, 700 Minuten Beim Flaneur. So I guess this actually does point forward to my "German period".
The Lady of Shallott: This is a demo of the Kahimi Karie track from 1999, with inserts of the studio recording. It's musically more interesting than most of Folktronic, deeper somehow. Kate Bush, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody... Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan: Manhattan imagined from London via Eno's late 1970s stay here. Splicing between demos and originals, I'm still learning editing, as you can hear. These songs rarely got mentioned by reviewers, but they're by far the best on the record, though outside the concept. There's more than mere jokiness. Mentions NY Chinatown before I lived there! The snows of Villon are falling on Manhattan as rain.
Pygmalism: This -- in some ways my masterpiece -- melds Kubrick's 2001, Bladerunner and Pymalion. It's typically "overdetermined" -- there's really way more going on than anyone has a right to expect from pop music. The perfect end to an imperfect record.
Folktronic is available on CD from this page and in the US via iTunes. John-Robert Howell's Flash console featuring some of the tracks is online here.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 11:32 am (UTC)"This -- in some ways my masterpiece"
in some ways so true. this was the first momus record where the intellectualism put me off. (except the kk songs + going for a walk with a line)
was henry darger an influence too on these songs?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 11:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 11:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 11:45 am (UTC)Fair enough, guv! But if that's the case, you're not really being logical telling me to shut up about my life and my work. The ideas don't really materialize without the life and the work.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:00 pm (UTC)Unfortunately I feel as though you lose yourself with "...Oskar" and the subsequent records after this - Folktronica feels like it should've ended here and it in a bunch of ways it definitely did with the books/blog and all.
Think you can be this sonically original and striking again in 2011? No sarcasm there.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:13 pm (UTC)You may be overestimating Folktronic because of the place it has in a nostalgic moment in your own lifestory (and I welcome personal accounts of how these records fitted the lives of their listeners) just as I'm underestimating it because there's an "awkward interval" between 2000 and 2009. The memes, like the spectacle frames, look a little naff.
But I agree that Little Apples has... something.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 01:44 pm (UTC)Personal nostalgia
Date: 2009-11-18 07:04 am (UTC)Still, this is one of the more enjoyable Momus albums imvho. It is, by no means, my favorite of your albums (that honor is still The Philosophy of Momus), but it also has that special aspect of being the last album - so far and as I understand it - that you had complete control over the music aspect. Your next albums are all based around collaborations more than exploring a particular theme (not to say you don't have themes you wanted to base your work around; you discussed this in regards to Joemus, after all). Handing over the sonic background to your lyrics has greatly changed the feel of your work and I look forward to the time when you construct an album from top to bottom by yourself again.
To finish, the second album I found of yours was Ping Pong ... which is also very enjoyable if very silly and disjointed. For a while I felt that those two albums (and for a while just one album) was all I ever needed in regards to your music. That there was nothing else you could add. It took a long time to change this idea.
I'm currently reading Book of Jokes also. Have you ever read/heard of G. Legman and his books Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter. It seems to do in a scholarly manner what you do with the Murderer and Molester characters.
-Edge
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 12:46 pm (UTC)Rainmer
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 02:47 pm (UTC)Can one-man-bands be fronted?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 03:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 03:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 02:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 03:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 07:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 08:17 pm (UTC)"Wot you got?"
"This little wonder was trying to smuggle some asterisks through British Borders in his case."
"Asterisks? Oh deary deary me."
"I'm afraid you're going to have to step into the office, sir. The one with the mirrored window. Walk this way, please, sir."
"Always a joker in every pack, isn't there, sir?"
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 09:02 pm (UTC)"Reckon it's Paris Song, sir."
"Let's ave a listen.."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 03:23 pm (UTC)http://www.artandleisure.com/art/momus/flash/folktronic/folktronic.html
It makes me happy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 03:29 pm (UTC)still happy online.
Date: 2009-11-16 05:50 pm (UTC)in the "New World". Sort of like Captain Smith not finding Pochahontas but the end of Celtic musicality.
There might be plans to start textile related industries in Cuba in the post-gripple era though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 04:53 pm (UTC)I should probably mention I have nostalgic attachments to OCKY MILK too, but that's because I was living on the internet when that album came out.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 04:58 pm (UTC)Ha, living on the internet! I know how that feels!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 08:51 pm (UTC)The expectations of '69 Love Songs'-type success is telling; whilst that album takes a theme and plays with it, 'Folktronic' seems too anarchic, too carefree to stay within even an unconventional structure and unity- the quality that, arguably, makes Merritt's album so great.
I guess is why I think 'Pygmalism' was such a defining moment for me, when I first heard this record- arriving, as it does, just when the album seems about to crack under the restless desire to break its self-imposed limits. It's a dazzling song.
If the album didn't meander, if it didn't lose its focus, the ending wouldn't be quite so hard-hitting. But such structural playfulness is hardly a characteristic of your average pop record- I can't really blame the public too much!
- Mike
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 09:52 pm (UTC)If anything, the nonsense aspect explored in Going For A Walk With A Line, is pretty much your current focus. Pygmalism is the highlight for me. I listen to the noughties albums a lot more than the previous two decades - probably because of the experimentation.
Fascinating post - always good to hear what inspired your work.
Richard
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 10:23 pm (UTC)We Scots aren't really prepared for the heat of
an Appalachiana New York summer!I will not let thee go unless thou bless me
Date: 2009-11-16 11:06 pm (UTC)Re: I will not let thee go unless thou bless me
Date: 2009-11-17 12:59 am (UTC)Re: I will not let thee go unless thou bless me
Date: 2009-11-17 01:29 am (UTC)Re: I will not let thee go unless thou bless me
Date: 2009-11-19 01:33 pm (UTC)Re: I will not let thee go unless thou bless me
Date: 2009-11-19 06:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 11:30 pm (UTC)I'd have been married along time ago.
Where did you come from?
Where did you go?
Where did you come from Brian Eno...?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-17 02:00 am (UTC)I was also pleasantly drunk, which would explain what I was doing, at a discotheque, in the Loire Valley.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-17 02:14 am (UTC)This type of appropriation is interesting and prevelent - and is all around me: I walk out my door in the 4th andr. and the first vendor sells, "American" hot dogs - I... don't quite know what exactly it is, he's selling (or why these fine parisian people, with educated tasted find these things tempting), after crossing the street after the fake american fake 50's diner, I can go to Omberkampf to a fake, "American" dive bar, right after the fake, fake milk bar (Le Orange Mecanique!). I'll go back to the States and wonder about all those strange French restaurants that seemed so authentic, before.
It makes me think: what do I know about anything, except some façade? How do you get into the core of something, without being it?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-17 04:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-18 06:17 am (UTC)Folkt
Date: 2009-11-19 02:47 am (UTC)First of all, thanks so much for this "Naughties" Countdown, which so far has been as informative and insightful as last year's "advent calendar." Where did this year go? Where did this decade go? It honestly feels like it just began to me, so it's a little hard to explain my nostalgia--and I feel most nostalgic about "Folktronic," since it was the first "new" Momus album I ever bought. Contrary to what the dissenter says at the start of these comments, the author's dramaturgy only makes we want to go back and listen to all these songs yet again and hear what I might have missed.
Best to be aware that I didn't discover Momus until a couple years after "Stars Forever," so this era will always seem like the ur-Momus to me. I remember eagerly posting stupid fanzine-type comments to alt.newsgroups.momus and feeling a mixture of embarrassed horror and amazement whenever the actual Momus appeared like a genie from the bottle and commented on something I'd said. Maybe all of us posters to that newsgroup and readers of the ancient Momus website had just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of influence on the direction and production of the CD--so I feel in a way this record, too, was a collaboration of sorts.
By the time "Folktronic" came out, I'd accumulated all the other Momus CDs I could, but it was even more exciting to have something current; as I recall, I couldn't find it in any record store, so I had to order it from some place like CD Universe (was that the place to look in '01?) It almost goes without saying that I immediately loved it, though it was a lot to take in all at once--it seems like it might be the longest Momus album, and certainly one of the densest (though "Joemus" is even denser). And I, too, always felt the last third of the album never got enough attention; it seemed both to broaden the overarching "folk" concept and provide a nice little dessert as well, with the "Penis Song" in there as a palate-cleanser.
Also, this was the first new Momus lp I was able to put on an mp3 player--and remember, this was before the iPod. It was exciting to put the complete works on one of the several overpriced devices I ran through at the time and go out strolling (but seldom shuffling). For a while I owned a hand-held organizer that I trained to play "Handheld" at startup. I could also listen to the songs, ripped to my computer and accompanied by visualizations--that was lifetime ago when those things were novelties, wasn't it?
At that time, I was discovering people like Bruce Haack and Moondog and Raymond Scott, too--as well as song-poems, outsider art, and "secret histories" that only the Internet could reveal. The turn of the century (2001, to be pedantic) was a heady time, and "Folktronic" seemed to mark the occasion well--everything old was new again and everything new was strange and disorienting and a little dangerous. George W. Bush wasn't even president quite yet and I can honestly say that despite our all-knowing sophistication we were more innocent, no? The first time I would see Momus live was only a month or so after the WTC bombing and "Folktronic" was not the centerpiece of the Momus performance, but other songs with a more political edge. Times had already changed!
So... I've gotten older and slower, while Momus seems to keep getting younger and more energetic (the Benjamin Button of the entertainment industry); I can no longer even begin to keep up with the prolific output of Momus on the Net or out in the World (one essay a week used to fill me up sufficiently), and now everything digital seems to weigh the world down instead of lighten it the way it used to seem to (Twitter, Facebook, etc., all those things I hate and refuse). But "Folktronic," though somewhat dated in the way things less than a decade seem to age faster than they will in another ten years, still sounds like a brilliant concept to me, with an equally brilliant execution. All children at school, some not even born when this work was recorded, should be issued a copy to help them understand what 2000/2001 was really all about. That includes you young'ens here!
To be continued in next comment...
Re: Folkt
Date: 2009-11-19 02:50 am (UTC)"Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind."
A Zedd and Two Knots
Re: Folkt
Date: 2009-11-19 01:46 pm (UTC)I got a big rush of nostalgia the other day looking through all my photos of my first Tokyo soujourns in 2001, 2002. That seems like another life altogether now... One I'll be revisiting when I look at the Oskar album.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-19 12:03 pm (UTC)I like these commentaries, though - if you already know the songs, they are fascinating. I think I probably like most of these songs more than you do, Nick. (And it is sad that Erostratus and 7th Wife have never (I don't think) had a proper release.
I'm not sure that Charles Ives should have been on the conservative side, as you say in the notes to Protestant Art. I mean, he was conservative - he would probably have been horrified by Piss Christ - but his music wasn't.
Someone recommended Gerson Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke. I second their recommendation. It took me years to find both volumes, but it was worth it. A book where the commentary is funnier than the jokes.
Stephen Parkin
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-19 12:19 pm (UTC)Will do some leg-work and locate the Legman.