My noughties 3: Oskar in Tokyo
Nov. 25th, 2009 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus2003's Oskar Tennis Champion is my first proper album of the new decade, if you see Folktronic as a belated summary of 90s themes. Oskar draws its power from two collaborations with women artists: the Milky album Travels with a Donkey I made with my ex-wife Shazna in New York in early 2002, just before leaving for Tokyo, and the Mashcat mini-album Mashroom Haircat, recorded with Emi Necozawa when I arrived in Japan. What these records share with Oskar is the genre-collision I began to call vaudeville concrete; they were the kind of record that might have emerged if Georges Brassens had worked with Pierre Schaeffer, or Tom Lehrer had studied with Stockhausen.
It's a powerful combination. On the one hand you have the conservative, enduring, folksy appeal of strong narrative lines, universal timeless themes, stories, content. On the other radical, innovative Modernism, and with it a certain elitist formalism, futurism, the shock of the new, the untried, the experimental. How to reconcile them? Well, one method is to do what the brilliant physical, textural cine-clown Jacques Tati did in Mon Oncle and Playtime; present an exaggeratedly pure and dogmatic Modernism whilst making a folksy satire on it. Another might be to do the vaudeville in the songwriting and lyrics, and the concrete in the music by, for instance, bringing in a formalist collaborator -- here, John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh, the "reproducer" with a license to "fuck things up" musically. In fact -- as the pre-mixed, pre-reproduced Oskar Originals show -- Talaga improved the record no end.
I take the title of Oskar Tennis Champion from an early Tati short. The album is recorded in Tokyo, where I've moved after being shocked by 9/11. The destruction of the WTC hangs over Oskar Tennis Champion, thematically, like a low-flying passenger jet. How could it not? I saw them, those jets, with my own eyes. Well, one of them, with one eye. So how does 9/11 impact on the Oskar album? Because this is a record in which Modernist utopia slips on a banana skin, and 9/11 was modernity slipping on a very big banana skin (religion, the irrational, resentment, the guerilla resistance, self-appointed nemesis, call it what you will).
You know those Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd films where the clown is dangling from the clockface of a 1920s skyscraper, or saved only by the position of an open window when a whole facade crashes down? The collapse of the graph-paper rationality of the World Trade Center seemed like one of those moments -- as in a Tati film, modernity had been challenged by something absurd, insignificant, clumsy, stubbornly human. The irrational, the uncontrollable, a slight change in plan leading to clumsy catastrophe, and slapstick about clumsy catastrophe. In retrospect, it's particularly interesting to me that this theme plays out in Oskar so much on the level of a comedy of gesture and sonics, just as it does in Tati's Playtime:
[Error: unknown template video]
The retro-Modernist side of the equation involved delving back into the theories of the Russian formalists, and particularly Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, which I finessed into a concept I called disorienteering. Needless to say, living in Tokyo without speaking Japanese was, itself, a form of disorienteering for me, a time of being pleasantly lost, and a series of irrational episodes played out in a relentlessly Modernist cityscape. The irrational defamiliarization on display in Oskar was a "logical" and "natural" choice for someone in those circumstances.
There's a ton of documentation of the making of Oskar on the Momus website, but let's move on to a track-by-track play-through.
Spooky Kabuki: This sprechgesang-soundscape establishes the ostranenie pretty quickly: an unreliable narrator, a pirate, tells us that "some fear us, others admire us" and asks (or commands) us to follow him into unknown realms, before hissing "Trust me, you're lost!" The relativism, unreliability and estrangement are mirrored by the music, which melds my Cantonese Opera samples with John Talaga's edits and additions, creating a maelstrom, a whirling storm, a tempest which may wreck us on Prospero's Island, or land us in Japan.
Is It Because I'm a Pirate?: The pentatonic scales, Chinese and Japanese instrumentation and vocal mannerisms of these first two tracks remind me that my initial idea was to make an entire album of ostranenie-pop modeled on the Cantonese Opera I heard playing in the kitchen at Vanessa Weng's dumpling restaurant on Eldridge Street in New York. Then when I got to Japan I went to Nadiff and bought a fistful of CDs of avant garde classical music on the Fontec label, records in which trad Japanese instruments were used in avant ways, and sampled those to create my virtual instruments. Here the pirate-narrator of the first track becomes a more comedic character, and one of the album's main themes -- Political Correctness and Identity Politics -- comes to the fore. The pirate is trying to date a waitress, and tells her not to be prejudiced by stereotypes of piracy which, in fact, he lives up to in every detail. "When not slitting throats of the people on boats I am warm and surprisingly sensitive", the pirate tells her. The story is partly based on a minor flirtation I was trying to have with Kei, a very beautiful waitress at the Organic Cafe who really did say "I like your eyepatch!" (though it's Shizu who voices the line here).
Multiplying Love: A slight return to the Analog Baroque style (harpsichords, through-composition) of Little Red Songbook, but with more glitching going on. The moral is a "modest proposal", a defence of polyamory. Shizu and I had an open relationship of sorts; I was allowed to flirt. But I felt guilty about it, and this song is a deliberately feeble justification: "If love is good, as most agree, loving two must be twice as good..." It's logical, but there's a banana-skin just waiting in the argument.
Scottish Lips: Based on the title of a Jean Arp painting I'd seen in a Surrealism exhibition at Tate Modern, this song continues the PC-identity politics theme. As a Scot in Tokyo, I am exotic, objectified, sexualised (in the song I claim to be, anyway, just as the pirate claims to be stereotyped as a pirate in track 2). I chide the listener for doing this, and try to redirect attention to my other attributes -- my cooking skills, for instance. Oh, the unreliable narrator was only joking about that, he can't cook! Okay, then, how about my spirit and mind? It's a song about the futility -- and the arrogance -- of trying to micromanage people's responses to you. This is still a live favourite; I like the concision and the spareness. The melody resembles Waltzing Matilda, and the backing track has some nice Kreidler drum samples in it. And the song introduces Scottishness (and a Scottish accent), a theme that'll crop up later in the album (The Laird of Inversnecky) and later in the decade (Summerisle, Joemus). It took Tokyo to rustle out my inner Scot!
My Sperm is Not Your Enemy: This is comedy lieder, really. I was listening to a lot of Schubert and Schumann. Not that they'd have written songs about sperm -- not directly, anyway. This is a faux-feminist song which proclaims (over synthetic fanfares) that "who controls the sperm of man controls the world". It's a mock-heroic, tongue-in-cheek defense of bukkake, the spermtastic splatterfest porn subgenre invented in Japan. It's sperm-manipulation as feminist empowerment: "All the presidents and kings, they control gold, you control these pearls..." When Shizu heard it she shouted "It is our enemy! It is!"
Oskar Tennis Champion: The title track tells the tale of a certain Uncle Oskar, an enthusiast for Modernism who encounters a series of slapstick misfortunes on his way to Le Corbusier's Radiant City. The soundscape -- very Pierre Schaeffer-over-oompah -- samples freely from a sonic art project called Made in Sumida, in which Japanese artist Momoyo Torimitsu recorded the sound of family-scaled industrial workshops up and down Tokyo's Sumida River; print shops, paint shops. The Bauhaus steps on a rake, but where's Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos when you need them? Uncle Oskar eventually becomes Modernism's King Kong, its nemesis. It's a funny song, but 9/11 (more slap, less schtick) overshadows it.
A Little Schubert: The Germanic lieder influence continues in a lyric I wrote in English then translated via Babelfish into deliberately-bad German. If the music could have digital errors in it (Kim Cascone's The Aesthetics of Failure), well, so could the lyrics! This is Glitch-German. The theme is the consoling effect of music in the face of various failures, and above all the inevitability of that final technical malfunction, death.
The Laird of Inversnecky: A refreshing pop song about 20th century Scottish vaudeville, boasting rather lovely chords and melody. The lyric amalgamates various Scottish actor-comedians, from Harry Gordon (inventor of the Laird of Inversnecky, the Reverend I.M. Jolly, and so on) via Rikki Fulton to Stanley Baxter. The names of music halls, comedians, and their characters create a nostalgia which is estranged by the Japanese setting: we're in 21st century Tokyo here, not 20th Century Portobello, Glasgow, Aberdeen or the Isle of Bute. In the background, Bladerunnerish, you can hear the calls of yakimono street vendors.
The Last Communist: The Modernist Utopia theme takes on a Soviet tinge (Shklovsky, after all, was a Soviet critic). The narrator is "the last communist", a kind of caretaker keeping a building -- and a set of ideals -- alive, waiting for communism to come back into favour (he's also the "first communist"). The song happened thanks to the ostranenie of web translation: I was reading Emi Necozawa's web diary, translating it with very inadequate software, and she mentioned a building with a very "high-so" atmosphere. The web translation thought this was "high Soviet"; in fact, Emi meant "high society". I liked the idea of a compound that was preserving "high Soviet" ideals, or perhaps incubating them for a future society. The unused lyrics page reveals that this song was originally going to be called Reading Karl and Groucho Marx.
Pierrot Lunaire: This is a song I wrote in New York for Emi Necozawa during my Alberto Camerini phase. The arrangement here is so different from the one I use live that it sounds like a different song -- it's in waltz time, then bursts into disco 4/4. It brings out the pathos of the lyric, which I think is me getting inside Shizu's view of me (her in Tokyo, me in New York) and expressing her frustration: "And the puppet girls kiss you up there on the moon, they must know I miss you, please come back soon..." The frustrating thing about this puppet, though, is that he has no heart, and nobody seems quite sure who controls the string that leads to his cock.
Beowulf (I Am Deformed): I perform this so often now -- usually at the beginning of my live set -- that it's odd to hear it here in context. You could see it as a continuation of the "mischief with political correctness" theme: this avenging hero is deformed, a cripple with an appalling set of disabilities. As Talaga deforms the music, the narrator lists his defects, his physical glitches, while demanding the cruel audience to "Stop laughing!" He has come to save Denmark... and he is deformed. I got the idea from a clip of an old french vaudevillian singing a comedy number about his own ugliness. And from having to listen to Beowulf at university, in a language lab, in Old English.
Electrosexual Sewing Machine: Musically this owes something to Sakamoto's Thatness and Thereness. Lyrically, it's Maeterlinck -- he wrote a play in which twelve blind people are stumbling about in a forest. A lot of these songs are actually about me coming to terms with the fact that my eye won't get better (this was now clear) and that I'm now "partially sighted" and somewhat freakish.
A Lapdog: Shizu took me to dinner with a very beautiful girl called Akiko. I tried to impress with talk of the Situationists, but she was much more impressed by a chihuahua nearby. When I saw this, I "froze her out" -- sent her to Antarctica, figuratively speaking. The song (slightly inspired by an Ivor Cutler poem called Antarctica, in which Mr Cutler wanders in a place like a penguin house, and startles the whole of Antarctica by pissing in a corner of the ice shelf) then imagines poor Akiko wandering lost in a freezing landscape, the chihuahua, now dead, poking its little head out from between her buttons.
Lovely Tree: This is a song I wrote for the Milky album. It came to me in a dream, pretty much entire. It has a Blake-like simplicity, but I think it's actually what I wanted my ex-wife Shazna to say to me, as we parted and I grew old: "Keep, lovely tree, your leaves in winter time". Talk of wasteland and snow reminds me that there's a perceptive Amazon customer review that points out how much of this album is set in cold landscapes.
Palm Deathtop: A close friend -- and ex-girlfriend -- of mine, Rika, committed suicide in New York City in 2002. This song refers to that, one of the saddest and most shocking events in my life (I've lost very few people). It's also about the fact that the artist and illustrator Jorge Colombo told me he kept a list of dead friends on his Palm Pilot. I imagined an app -- "new vaporware" -- dedicated specifically to keeping track of which friends are alive, which dead.
Ringtone Cycle: After a silence there follows a reprise, by Adam Bruneau (the other half of American Patchwork signings The Super Madrigal Brothers), of some of the musical themes of the album. It's as if Oskar Tennis Champion has become a game on the Nintendo DS. These are poignant and lovely, and remind you that this album has some great melodies popping out all over the place. It also reminds me of how important the young artists I'd signed to my label (and the tour we made across the US that year) were to my musical transformation. They rejuvenated me. I should also mention Robert Duckworth, who introduced me to the work of some of the Parisian people I'd work with soon (Hypo, o.lamm); Reika Yamashita, who educated me, in her Nishi-Ogikubo bedsit, about Haruomi Hosono, Miharu Koshi and Carsten Nicolai; Digiki, who remixed Beowulf; and Florian Perret, who made the excellent sleeve and also worked with me, that year, on a project for LA MoCA, an absurdist animated lecture called Suffusia: A Beautiful Life. Laurent Baudoux, Keiko Uenishi, Hirono Nishiyama and Nobukazu Takemura also influenced the record.
Overall, in retrospect, I think Oskar Tennis Champion is a very ambitious and exciting album, funny, provocative and serious, bursting with ideas but also able to be moving and personal, oblique yet also politically thoughtful, provocative and, artistically, richly suggestive. Rather than Folktronic (which is where many of my American listeners took their leave of me), this is the record which would map out my noughties, texturally, conceptually, thematically. I'm actually very proud of it. It also doesn't sound sonically dated to me; I think that by this point I'd arrived at a style that was completely my own. At the same time, the glitch and "aesthetics of failure" stuff does root it in the early 21st century.
Buy Oskar Tennis Champion from Cherry Red (UK) or Darla (US).
It's a powerful combination. On the one hand you have the conservative, enduring, folksy appeal of strong narrative lines, universal timeless themes, stories, content. On the other radical, innovative Modernism, and with it a certain elitist formalism, futurism, the shock of the new, the untried, the experimental. How to reconcile them? Well, one method is to do what the brilliant physical, textural cine-clown Jacques Tati did in Mon Oncle and Playtime; present an exaggeratedly pure and dogmatic Modernism whilst making a folksy satire on it. Another might be to do the vaudeville in the songwriting and lyrics, and the concrete in the music by, for instance, bringing in a formalist collaborator -- here, John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh, the "reproducer" with a license to "fuck things up" musically. In fact -- as the pre-mixed, pre-reproduced Oskar Originals show -- Talaga improved the record no end.
I take the title of Oskar Tennis Champion from an early Tati short. The album is recorded in Tokyo, where I've moved after being shocked by 9/11. The destruction of the WTC hangs over Oskar Tennis Champion, thematically, like a low-flying passenger jet. How could it not? I saw them, those jets, with my own eyes. Well, one of them, with one eye. So how does 9/11 impact on the Oskar album? Because this is a record in which Modernist utopia slips on a banana skin, and 9/11 was modernity slipping on a very big banana skin (religion, the irrational, resentment, the guerilla resistance, self-appointed nemesis, call it what you will).
You know those Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd films where the clown is dangling from the clockface of a 1920s skyscraper, or saved only by the position of an open window when a whole facade crashes down? The collapse of the graph-paper rationality of the World Trade Center seemed like one of those moments -- as in a Tati film, modernity had been challenged by something absurd, insignificant, clumsy, stubbornly human. The irrational, the uncontrollable, a slight change in plan leading to clumsy catastrophe, and slapstick about clumsy catastrophe. In retrospect, it's particularly interesting to me that this theme plays out in Oskar so much on the level of a comedy of gesture and sonics, just as it does in Tati's Playtime:
[Error: unknown template video]
The retro-Modernist side of the equation involved delving back into the theories of the Russian formalists, and particularly Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, which I finessed into a concept I called disorienteering. Needless to say, living in Tokyo without speaking Japanese was, itself, a form of disorienteering for me, a time of being pleasantly lost, and a series of irrational episodes played out in a relentlessly Modernist cityscape. The irrational defamiliarization on display in Oskar was a "logical" and "natural" choice for someone in those circumstances.
There's a ton of documentation of the making of Oskar on the Momus website, but let's move on to a track-by-track play-through.
Spooky Kabuki: This sprechgesang-soundscape establishes the ostranenie pretty quickly: an unreliable narrator, a pirate, tells us that "some fear us, others admire us" and asks (or commands) us to follow him into unknown realms, before hissing "Trust me, you're lost!" The relativism, unreliability and estrangement are mirrored by the music, which melds my Cantonese Opera samples with John Talaga's edits and additions, creating a maelstrom, a whirling storm, a tempest which may wreck us on Prospero's Island, or land us in Japan.
Is It Because I'm a Pirate?: The pentatonic scales, Chinese and Japanese instrumentation and vocal mannerisms of these first two tracks remind me that my initial idea was to make an entire album of ostranenie-pop modeled on the Cantonese Opera I heard playing in the kitchen at Vanessa Weng's dumpling restaurant on Eldridge Street in New York. Then when I got to Japan I went to Nadiff and bought a fistful of CDs of avant garde classical music on the Fontec label, records in which trad Japanese instruments were used in avant ways, and sampled those to create my virtual instruments. Here the pirate-narrator of the first track becomes a more comedic character, and one of the album's main themes -- Political Correctness and Identity Politics -- comes to the fore. The pirate is trying to date a waitress, and tells her not to be prejudiced by stereotypes of piracy which, in fact, he lives up to in every detail. "When not slitting throats of the people on boats I am warm and surprisingly sensitive", the pirate tells her. The story is partly based on a minor flirtation I was trying to have with Kei, a very beautiful waitress at the Organic Cafe who really did say "I like your eyepatch!" (though it's Shizu who voices the line here).
Multiplying Love: A slight return to the Analog Baroque style (harpsichords, through-composition) of Little Red Songbook, but with more glitching going on. The moral is a "modest proposal", a defence of polyamory. Shizu and I had an open relationship of sorts; I was allowed to flirt. But I felt guilty about it, and this song is a deliberately feeble justification: "If love is good, as most agree, loving two must be twice as good..." It's logical, but there's a banana-skin just waiting in the argument.
Scottish Lips: Based on the title of a Jean Arp painting I'd seen in a Surrealism exhibition at Tate Modern, this song continues the PC-identity politics theme. As a Scot in Tokyo, I am exotic, objectified, sexualised (in the song I claim to be, anyway, just as the pirate claims to be stereotyped as a pirate in track 2). I chide the listener for doing this, and try to redirect attention to my other attributes -- my cooking skills, for instance. Oh, the unreliable narrator was only joking about that, he can't cook! Okay, then, how about my spirit and mind? It's a song about the futility -- and the arrogance -- of trying to micromanage people's responses to you. This is still a live favourite; I like the concision and the spareness. The melody resembles Waltzing Matilda, and the backing track has some nice Kreidler drum samples in it. And the song introduces Scottishness (and a Scottish accent), a theme that'll crop up later in the album (The Laird of Inversnecky) and later in the decade (Summerisle, Joemus). It took Tokyo to rustle out my inner Scot!
My Sperm is Not Your Enemy: This is comedy lieder, really. I was listening to a lot of Schubert and Schumann. Not that they'd have written songs about sperm -- not directly, anyway. This is a faux-feminist song which proclaims (over synthetic fanfares) that "who controls the sperm of man controls the world". It's a mock-heroic, tongue-in-cheek defense of bukkake, the spermtastic splatterfest porn subgenre invented in Japan. It's sperm-manipulation as feminist empowerment: "All the presidents and kings, they control gold, you control these pearls..." When Shizu heard it she shouted "It is our enemy! It is!"
Oskar Tennis Champion: The title track tells the tale of a certain Uncle Oskar, an enthusiast for Modernism who encounters a series of slapstick misfortunes on his way to Le Corbusier's Radiant City. The soundscape -- very Pierre Schaeffer-over-oompah -- samples freely from a sonic art project called Made in Sumida, in which Japanese artist Momoyo Torimitsu recorded the sound of family-scaled industrial workshops up and down Tokyo's Sumida River; print shops, paint shops. The Bauhaus steps on a rake, but where's Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos when you need them? Uncle Oskar eventually becomes Modernism's King Kong, its nemesis. It's a funny song, but 9/11 (more slap, less schtick) overshadows it.
A Little Schubert: The Germanic lieder influence continues in a lyric I wrote in English then translated via Babelfish into deliberately-bad German. If the music could have digital errors in it (Kim Cascone's The Aesthetics of Failure), well, so could the lyrics! This is Glitch-German. The theme is the consoling effect of music in the face of various failures, and above all the inevitability of that final technical malfunction, death.
The Laird of Inversnecky: A refreshing pop song about 20th century Scottish vaudeville, boasting rather lovely chords and melody. The lyric amalgamates various Scottish actor-comedians, from Harry Gordon (inventor of the Laird of Inversnecky, the Reverend I.M. Jolly, and so on) via Rikki Fulton to Stanley Baxter. The names of music halls, comedians, and their characters create a nostalgia which is estranged by the Japanese setting: we're in 21st century Tokyo here, not 20th Century Portobello, Glasgow, Aberdeen or the Isle of Bute. In the background, Bladerunnerish, you can hear the calls of yakimono street vendors.
The Last Communist: The Modernist Utopia theme takes on a Soviet tinge (Shklovsky, after all, was a Soviet critic). The narrator is "the last communist", a kind of caretaker keeping a building -- and a set of ideals -- alive, waiting for communism to come back into favour (he's also the "first communist"). The song happened thanks to the ostranenie of web translation: I was reading Emi Necozawa's web diary, translating it with very inadequate software, and she mentioned a building with a very "high-so" atmosphere. The web translation thought this was "high Soviet"; in fact, Emi meant "high society". I liked the idea of a compound that was preserving "high Soviet" ideals, or perhaps incubating them for a future society. The unused lyrics page reveals that this song was originally going to be called Reading Karl and Groucho Marx.
Pierrot Lunaire: This is a song I wrote in New York for Emi Necozawa during my Alberto Camerini phase. The arrangement here is so different from the one I use live that it sounds like a different song -- it's in waltz time, then bursts into disco 4/4. It brings out the pathos of the lyric, which I think is me getting inside Shizu's view of me (her in Tokyo, me in New York) and expressing her frustration: "And the puppet girls kiss you up there on the moon, they must know I miss you, please come back soon..." The frustrating thing about this puppet, though, is that he has no heart, and nobody seems quite sure who controls the string that leads to his cock.
Beowulf (I Am Deformed): I perform this so often now -- usually at the beginning of my live set -- that it's odd to hear it here in context. You could see it as a continuation of the "mischief with political correctness" theme: this avenging hero is deformed, a cripple with an appalling set of disabilities. As Talaga deforms the music, the narrator lists his defects, his physical glitches, while demanding the cruel audience to "Stop laughing!" He has come to save Denmark... and he is deformed. I got the idea from a clip of an old french vaudevillian singing a comedy number about his own ugliness. And from having to listen to Beowulf at university, in a language lab, in Old English.
Electrosexual Sewing Machine: Musically this owes something to Sakamoto's Thatness and Thereness. Lyrically, it's Maeterlinck -- he wrote a play in which twelve blind people are stumbling about in a forest. A lot of these songs are actually about me coming to terms with the fact that my eye won't get better (this was now clear) and that I'm now "partially sighted" and somewhat freakish.
A Lapdog: Shizu took me to dinner with a very beautiful girl called Akiko. I tried to impress with talk of the Situationists, but she was much more impressed by a chihuahua nearby. When I saw this, I "froze her out" -- sent her to Antarctica, figuratively speaking. The song (slightly inspired by an Ivor Cutler poem called Antarctica, in which Mr Cutler wanders in a place like a penguin house, and startles the whole of Antarctica by pissing in a corner of the ice shelf) then imagines poor Akiko wandering lost in a freezing landscape, the chihuahua, now dead, poking its little head out from between her buttons.Lovely Tree: This is a song I wrote for the Milky album. It came to me in a dream, pretty much entire. It has a Blake-like simplicity, but I think it's actually what I wanted my ex-wife Shazna to say to me, as we parted and I grew old: "Keep, lovely tree, your leaves in winter time". Talk of wasteland and snow reminds me that there's a perceptive Amazon customer review that points out how much of this album is set in cold landscapes.
Palm Deathtop: A close friend -- and ex-girlfriend -- of mine, Rika, committed suicide in New York City in 2002. This song refers to that, one of the saddest and most shocking events in my life (I've lost very few people). It's also about the fact that the artist and illustrator Jorge Colombo told me he kept a list of dead friends on his Palm Pilot. I imagined an app -- "new vaporware" -- dedicated specifically to keeping track of which friends are alive, which dead.
Ringtone Cycle: After a silence there follows a reprise, by Adam Bruneau (the other half of American Patchwork signings The Super Madrigal Brothers), of some of the musical themes of the album. It's as if Oskar Tennis Champion has become a game on the Nintendo DS. These are poignant and lovely, and remind you that this album has some great melodies popping out all over the place. It also reminds me of how important the young artists I'd signed to my label (and the tour we made across the US that year) were to my musical transformation. They rejuvenated me. I should also mention Robert Duckworth, who introduced me to the work of some of the Parisian people I'd work with soon (Hypo, o.lamm); Reika Yamashita, who educated me, in her Nishi-Ogikubo bedsit, about Haruomi Hosono, Miharu Koshi and Carsten Nicolai; Digiki, who remixed Beowulf; and Florian Perret, who made the excellent sleeve and also worked with me, that year, on a project for LA MoCA, an absurdist animated lecture called Suffusia: A Beautiful Life. Laurent Baudoux, Keiko Uenishi, Hirono Nishiyama and Nobukazu Takemura also influenced the record.
Overall, in retrospect, I think Oskar Tennis Champion is a very ambitious and exciting album, funny, provocative and serious, bursting with ideas but also able to be moving and personal, oblique yet also politically thoughtful, provocative and, artistically, richly suggestive. Rather than Folktronic (which is where many of my American listeners took their leave of me), this is the record which would map out my noughties, texturally, conceptually, thematically. I'm actually very proud of it. It also doesn't sound sonically dated to me; I think that by this point I'd arrived at a style that was completely my own. At the same time, the glitch and "aesthetics of failure" stuff does root it in the early 21st century.
Buy Oskar Tennis Champion from Cherry Red (UK) or Darla (US).
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 03:17 pm (UTC)You didn't intend to keep making the same thing over and over and I imagine you in 2003 possibly wrestling with the notion that this is the record that might drive you further into obscurity, vindicating you of your pop career but at the same time forcing everyone to recognize your innovation and inabilty to give a shit what anyone thinks.
And unlike Madonna or anyone else with too much money, this was truly the work of someone looking to create something fresh without the drive of a possbile mega-tour or 30 Million dollar royalty behind it (though a few of your secret admirers would go on to retire 30 years early with your sound, whom they shamelessly cut and pasted into something. . . lobotomised)
Not too say this is a bad record for me, but when I'm on the street or at her place it can't color any given situation like "Philosophy. . ." or Ping Pong" might.
Also your fascination with pirates on this record pre-dates the entire worlds fascination with them nowadays! Another innovation. n__n
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 03:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 03:29 pm (UTC)Then again, this vindication exists only in a parallel world, the self-vindicating world of Click Opera. In the real world The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand and The White Stripes took all the prizes. Pop music history will tick the box beside their offerings and say it was "the right thing to do at the right time".
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 03:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 04:00 pm (UTC)"Pierrot Lunaire" is one of my all time fave momus tracks!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 04:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 04:17 pm (UTC)Jeremy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 04:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 04:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 05:01 pm (UTC)I think the main criticism is that it's a weakened combination. Go avant or go pop. Otherwise we can take the edge off both. In a way it's a British response to change – like those painters who painted St Ives harbour with a semi-cubist feel. Paint boats or go bravely cubist – why play around in the middle? (Although with a title about a tennis champion it's not as if this fact is hidden!)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 05:25 pm (UTC)My understanding of Cubism is that it never left representation behind. "Going bravely Cubist" would be about how you represented the boats, not whether they were there. No boats (or bulls, or bottles, or women, or whatever) = abstraction (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kline, Rothko...). Cubism is the refraction of reality, not its abandonment.
Frank
Date: 2009-11-25 05:27 pm (UTC)The songs on Oskar are tantalising. Seemingly well written (and I appreciate the experimental ideas), they are ultimately spoiled by the muddy sound. I bought Otto, but the sound was even muddier and so I have not bought Ocky or Joemus.
Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-25 05:44 pm (UTC)Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-25 05:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 06:27 pm (UTC)Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-25 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 07:25 pm (UTC)Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-25 07:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 08:07 pm (UTC)I'd like to get on with doing art again, start DJing, learn programming drum'n'Bass, learn Esperanto, try living and working in both Norway and Australia.
I am working on a new album, though it is hard to get back at the same pace when I've almost been absent doing music for more than 2 years since my last computer crashed. Some family trouble is making things less enjoyable as well.
Oh, aesthetics of failure, failed design, I had some fun moments with that! :)
I barely log into LJ these days. Never knew if I was missed either. Still hoping for you to come and preform in Sweden again though!
re: madonna
Date: 2009-11-25 08:21 pm (UTC)re: norway
Date: 2009-11-25 08:23 pm (UTC)momus the mannerist
Date: 2009-11-25 08:27 pm (UTC)its sold out
Date: 2009-11-25 08:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 08:44 pm (UTC)Is this re-appraisal of the noughties, a way of defining the next musical path you might take ? More collaborations, perhaps? They seem to invigorate you. The next record is with Hypo? What about the one with Holger Hiller? I guess when you are no longer a blogger you will have time to write both books and songs! An audiobook might be an interesting direction....
Richard
Re: its sold out
Date: 2009-11-25 08:50 pm (UTC)Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-25 09:18 pm (UTC)By the way, I have no axe to grind here and I don't want to be hurtful to anyone, least of all Momus, who I like very much. It only makes me happy me that you, and evidently lots of other people like you, find these albums such a rewarding listening experience, because it makes future albums from Momus, hopefully minus muddiness, more likely.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 09:25 pm (UTC)Stephen Parkin
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 09:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 09:51 pm (UTC)Mehmet
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 11:07 pm (UTC)-John Flesh
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-25 11:19 pm (UTC)I'll always be grateful to this record for introducing me to Flesh ... I think I bought Shakestation a week later. Weirdly, I'm listening to The Day The Circus Came To Town as I type this and am longing to hear it reproductively deformed... Have you heard the brilliant Super Madigal version of She's Leaving Home?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-26 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-26 12:32 am (UTC)Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-26 02:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-26 02:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-26 09:05 am (UTC)What music software do you use?
x
Reactions
Date: 2009-11-26 09:24 am (UTC)Of course, this was a time when I deliberately put music on to put me to sleep. The albums that became my sleeping albums (albums that, today, I listen to energized) were "Philosophy ...", Cibo Matto's two albums and Modest Mouse's "The Moon and Antarctica." But these were deliberate choices in a way.
"Oskar" I put on in a stereo and sat down to listen on a couch. While I loved "Is It Because I'm A Pirate" (still one of my favorites, actually), the middle drew my eyes closed. I remember waking up to the Ringtone Cycle, but somewhere in the middle of it.
It wasn't until much later that I began to enjoy the rest of the album. It was so drastically different from your other works and, as many have stated, I lament the differences. But I look forward to seeing these noughtie (heh, heh, naughty) albums taking on new life with these discussions and by continuing to listen to them off and on.
And I finished Book of Jokes. I was disappointed, though amused. [Amused = I laughed from time to time. Disappointed = I wanted a stronger plotline with fewer detours, though I recognize the purpose of said detours].
-Edge
Re: Reactions
Date: 2009-11-26 09:54 am (UTC)Re: Frank
Date: 2009-11-26 11:36 am (UTC)I would like to echo everything Frank says.
This particular post brought out the same feelings he expresses. The descriptions of the songs here are incredibly seductive to me, but I know that the music doesn't give me as much.
I Love Momus.
But the muddiness (however intentional, complex and refined it is) makes it difficult to hear or appreciate the lyrics (which Momus does better than anyone) and the melodies (which, again, Momus does beautifully)...
Should I take time to really listen to glitch music and static, I would perhaps be able to appreciate the production, it might even bring the music to heights that music played "straight" would not, but this is not time that I am willing to give. It is not just that it is too much to get into, but also that I don't feel that this particular field of music is large or interesting enough. I have learned to appreciate classical music, techno and folk because there is a lot of interesting things to be found there, but glitch music is simply too narrow and the artists (Momus being the shining exception) never seem interesting...
If Momus were a writer, it would be as if he decided to start writing in talagog. It might be beautiful, but learning talagog is just not worth it for me. Static/talagog doesn't fit into my life.
The static, is, to me, all that keeps Momus from being the Baudelaire to Stephen Merritts Oscar Wilde...
And who doesn't prefer Baudelaire?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 04:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 09:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 06:37 pm (UTC)Dominik
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-28 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-30 09:06 am (UTC)