My noughties 4: Otto Spooky, googlepop

[imomus]

"It is not necessary that you leave the house," wrote Franz Kafka, perhaps anticipating Google. "Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." Otto Spooky is an odd album, a treasure trove of worthless things found whilst googling, or, as I wrote at the time, "the record David Bowie would have made if he'd worked on Lodger with ex-members of The Incredible String Band instead of ex-members of Roxy Music".

Otto Spooky is the first Momus album made in Berlin (and arguably the only one, since Ocky Milk was half made in Osaka and Joemus half made in Glasgow), the first post-blog album (Click Opera already existed, and in fact was financing these songs via a donation system). It's an album made in an age of iPods and Web 2.0 applications. I think of it as a neo-Elizabethan googlepop record: an aleph-album, with google as "the place from which everything in the world can be seen simultaneously". It's an album on which everything is visible and nothing matters. It's rich but lost, observant but dizzy. Digital form has become a rush, a torrent leading us anywhere and everywhere and nowhere. From Elizabethan England to Tripoli to Eritrea to Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay, the album melts and flows, carried along by John Talaga's mind-warping transitions and the constant sound of water.



"The 2005 Album From Momus" was recorded in my apartment on the Stalin-esque Karl-Marx-Allee between April and July 2004 and provisionally entitled The Artist Overwhelmed By The Grandeur Of Ancient Ruins, a title from Henry Fuseli, the early Romantic painter of irrational nightmares. I was 44, and I'd moved to Berlin the year before after a somewhat nomadic three years in New York and Tokyo. By 2004 I was living with a fashion student called Ayako, writing for Vice magazine and various design publications, getting more interest from art mags than music publications (Modern Painters gave me four pages in 2003), rummaging in Berlin's flea markets, lusting after its hipster scenester girls, visiting art shows.



The year before I'd made a record with Anne Laplantine. Summerisle (not a regular Momus album, and therefore not included in the sequence here) referenced The Wicker Man and -- without bandwagon-jumping -- fitted quite neatly into the then-trendy Wicker Folk or Weird New Folk meme. Appropriately enough, Otto Spooky opens with a couple of tracks which sound as if they're mining the same meaning-seams as Summerisle -- experimental folk music -- slightly more articulately. But, as spring 2004 turns to summer, things diverge... and keep diverging, endlessly, exhaustingly. In April I record (and blog about; click the links) Jesus in Furs, Life of the Fields, Robin Hood, and Corkscrew King. In May I write Sempreverde, Klaxon, Bantam Boys, The Water Song, Cockle Pickers, Your Fat Friend, Belvedere and Lute Score. Things are rounded off in June with the composition and recording of Mr Ulysses, The Artist Overwhelmed and, finally, I Refuse To Die. In the summer I head off to Japan and Hong Kong.



Sempreverde
This is folk music from space. Against burbling electronic sounds from Pauline Oliveros and a medieval-ethnic drone, the computer voice from Handheld sings a version of Greensleeves, but with lyrics about some kind of drug which, when released in your bloodstream, creates a flood of Shinto-sex imagery. The ideas of Swiss "semantic architect" Nold Egenter are in here somewhere. This song already lives up to the "spooky" bit of the album title.



Life of the Fields
Riding a cycle of 5ths and some Marc-Bolan-esque imagery, this is a pleasant, mysterious song about Shinto fertility, John Barleycorn, "the old religion". It's actually based on an Indian TV commercial for a product called Bolgard which guarantees a healthy "life of the fields" by eradicating the bol-weevil. The commercial created a Green Giant-like "lord of the fields" who seemed to me to be the modern version of an ancient agrarian deity. It's interesting that it's only in horror films like The Wicker Man that British people can now revisit their pagan past. Or, I guess, in rock festivals.

Corkscrew King
One day my flatmate-and-lover Ayako said to me: "You are like bakatono!" I asked who that was, she told me about Japanese comedian Shimura Ken, and I wrote the song. When I recorded it, Aya made funny noises in the background. Yeats and impotence is also in there somewhere. When I released it on Click Opera, Yahoo Japan picked it up and hundreds of Japanese trying to download it crashed my web server for a day or so (Kenny Goldsmith from ubu.com stepped into the breach). The song is oddly frail, with its easy listening chords. A little limp, perhaps?

Klaxon
A song -- in French -- about the un-PC machismo of immigrants, who slap each other silly in the heat of Tripoli. I sampled a how-to site about Islamic scales and made my own instruments. This was the last album to use trad sequencing and sampling (my old Akai S2800 broke down soon after). The organs and violins and weird processing recall the Lodger album -- a song like Yassassin, for instance, isn't far from this. John Talaga's transitions really add something.

Robin Hood
The track was suggested to me by a Christine Rebet art show called Robin Hood. This has more bite -- musical and political -- than anything so far. It's the Beowulf theme taken further -- another disabled hero, this time tied up nude "in the boot of an Opel Corsa". The style is heavy folk, recalling Steeleye Span or Fairport Convention. The guitar solo reveals just how literally this album is "googlepop" -- when I needed a guitar solo, I'd literally google "guitar solo sample" and paste together whatever turned up in the results.



Lady Fancy Knickers
This is a hold-over from the Oskar Tennis Champion album. The lyrics are from art magazine reviews; I really like the gently disorienting effect reading about things you can't see has. The drums are mid-80s Hosono samples. Bamboo pop turns into Mongol horsemen. Googlepop; whatever comes to mind can be there at the click of a mouse. All places and periods are simultaneously present. Talaga's transitions are like the songs' murky subconscious. Everything gets regurgitated, distorted, sent on an acid trip, melted, Salvador Dali'd. This contributes to the idea that all form is now completely malleable.

Lute Score
The melody comes from a German kids' record found in a market, played with oud samples. I speed the verses up a bit more each time. The lyrics are a bit like Going For A Walk With A Line; they're poetic fragments from a notebook, including instructions for absurd new arcade games. Some of the lines describe paintings by Philip Guston. The song reveals a love of being lost and being peripheral, of staying eternally childish.

Belvedere
A glimpse of a fascist and pedophile New Republic. I often think that my voice and accent are too reasonable and middle class-sounding, so it's important to sing something outrageous to counterbalance that. This recalls the propaganda all children are subjected to, and all humans are subjected to by the media / politics / news. The nanny state in a parallel world where nanny fiddles kiddies, and kiddies shop their parents to the party. Actually, not that far from the Pioneers of East Berlin who, mere decades before, would have been walking up and down the very street where the song was composed.

Your Fat Friend
Ah, this takes me back to 2004! Political incorrectness, Vice magazine, bulletin board wars! The fat friend theme actually started as a Vice article by a friend of a friend. The music here is a sample of classical piano music time-stretched on the sampler. I was doing things to get around the boringness of sequencers. There's a nice Flash video somewhere by The Lady Pat. Ah yes, here.

Mr Ulysses
By this time the album begins to get a bit wearying. "Anything goes" has turned into "who cares?"; sure, this may be googlepop, but who could spend much time watching someone else google? Rain and the blues do refresh things a bit here, though. There are traces of my friend Roddy Schrock's enthusiasm for African music. The lyrics describe a sexual encounter with God. The automatic-writing aspect recalls Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. That sense of someone who just can't resist tapping out another verse on the typewriter, just to see what occurs in the wording. The result is a bit like one of Tom Waits' periodic attempts to recapture the first time he heard John Lee Hooker. The mystery of it.



The Water Song
More Eno than Bowie, this revisits the Afro art rock of Talking Heads circa 1980. Or WOMAD and Peter Gabriel. World pop. Can you be lost in the world? How do you get things to go double foreign? See Africa from Berlin? Spin things backwards? Diverge endlessly, never come back to earth?

Jesus In Furs
A terse, camp rant against Mel Gibson's Christian film. There's a relation with my first album, Circus Maximus, which took as its motto: "One man's martyrdom, another man's matinee." Pain here is seen as a grotesque aberration, a glitch in the scheme of things. Religion, of course, doesn't see it that way. Religion sees pain as integral and essential.



Bantam Boys
This is Shakespearean pastiche, so it joins Momus-Shakespearean songs like Minty Fresh off Stars Forever. "O Africa and Orient, bring gifts, spigot weed and egg of the teal"... The internet gets mapped, here, to the first age of English imperial exploration / exoticism / import. Wondrous people are brought from other lands, the exotic dandy eunuch "bantam boys". There are also private references to the Franco-Japanese art-fag hipster-scenester girl I was enamoured with at the time: "Your legs were lovely; the synth, bring the synth!"(See Lord Whimsy's Flash animation for the song here.)

Cockle Pickers
A half-spoken, half-sung Brechtian-Chinese tragic epic frieze based on a true story about UK immigrants. I re-use the Chinese samples I made for the Oskar album. This, like Bantam Boys, is through-composed, and I was literally making the songs up as I went along. I'd like to make a theatre production of this one day. That's what I did next, actually; I made music for student theatre, with Kaori Mitsushima, later in 2004.

The Artist Overwhelmed
Classical music slowed by editing to the most funereal pace and -- very Alvin Lucier, this -- acoustically softened via my favourite technique at the time; running the whole track through SoundEdit 16's crude tempo algorithms. Like Google Translate, this software got its distinctive flavour, that year, from its complete incapacity to do what it claimed it could. It ended up doing something completely different, and interesting. The lyrics recount a gay holiday in Italy, in which the iPod-sharing couple (they're listening to Gluck) admire "muscular statuary". Culture makes death the ultimate recording medium.



In retrospect, Otto Spooky feels like an oblique, exhausting album. It's like wandering in some sort of mad art biennial. The range of references is dizzying, mystifying, disorienting. The record is rich and strange, yet light and nebulous; political yet politically-incorrect. You get the impression of a cavern of junk treasure, a butterfly fluttering over jewels. A rush of information becomes a spinning globe, a kaleidoscopic blur.

This may be the weakest of my noughties albums, but if he's lost, Spooky Otto, the "artist overwhelmed", is lost in a respectable, calculated, arty, playful, gainful way. This absurdist interview, recorded at the time, may confuse you further.

Otto Spooky can be ordered on CD here (UK) or here (US).

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

it's been on the right for years, just like his politics.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If you're to the left of me, Comrade Anon, we have in common the fact that 95% of humanity is to the right of us. We ought to feel some solidarity, here in this corner of the room.

[(Anonymous)]

fair enough. on that political axis map from some time back, i scored in the bottom left, somewhere around or below gandhi's plot point, i think it was. the left wing end of the economic one, and at the bottom of the political one. something like that.