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imomusPlanning for Ocky Milk -- codenamed, at that point, The Friendly Album -- begins in March 2005. I've just got back to Berlin Friedrichshain (and Hisae, and the rabbit) after two months as a sound artist in residence at the Future University in Hokkaido. Japanese ideas infuse the record's concept: "I want to make something as static, as friendly, as consensual, as self-effacing, as Japan itself. It will be a feminine record and a friendly record... The values of pleasure and friendliness, modesty and elegance seem more important than ever to me right now..."
By March 22nd I'm saying the album will be "a warm record all about social connectedness, with the sprightly, breezy gait of Charles Trenet, wearing a straw boater, singing Boum. It's an Asian-sounding record, a Brazilian-sounding record, it's pentatonic enka ticky-tocky dubbed by the 1970s King Tubby. And it sounds a bit like Misora Hibari." An art show in New York with Mai Ueda interrupts things, and in September I'm still cogitating. By now the concept has become to make "random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch" music. At the end of September I announce that I'm flying New York producer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Black Dice, Boredoms) to Berlin in November to work on the record with me. I lay down some Dogme-like rules of chastity which are forgotten as soon as we get to work. The record is inspired by Ozu, Caetano Veloso's experimental Araça Azul album, Webern and Harry Partch, but mostly by the sensation of having your back scratched.
With Rusty hunched behind his laptop or cross-miking his Sennheisers, we soon get some songs in the bag. By the end of November 2005 Devil Mask, Buddha Mind, Dr Cat, Moop Bears, Bonsai Tree, Pleasantness, 7000 BC, Permagasm and Ex-Erotomane have been recorded (in that order). They're odd, stilted, experimental. Rusty returns to New York and I negotiate my first novel in Paris and announce that I'll spend three months of 2006 in New York, appearing at the Whitney Biennial. By the end of December I'm heading off to Osaka (Hisae has been temporarily barred from Germany), where I'll finish the album with a mic and a laptop running Garageband. At this point I'm a bit iffy: "Some days I think what I've done so far is utterly wonderful, other days I think it's rubbish." But Hisae's deportation has given me the record's most emotional songs: Hang Low, Zanzibar and Nervous Heartbeat.
In Osaka, slightly anxious about the lack of strong conventional pop songs on the record, I record Frilly Military and Dialtone (reworkings of songs I wrote for Kahimi Karie and Emi Necozawa), The Birdcatcher (an unrecorded song written in the mid-90s) and Count Ossie In China. Finally I add I Refuse To Die, an outtake from the Otto Spooky sessions. The record is done. James Goggin's sleeve -- a saga in itself -- gets finished in June, and the record comes out in October 2006.
So how does Ocky Milk sound to me now?
Moop Bears: Although this says it's Moop Bears, the first minute is from Devil Mask, Buddha Mind. It sounds like some sort of electroacoustic sound poem, and reminds me that in Hokkaido, where I'd been field-recording raw sounds with my students, music had been strictly banned. So this is almost like someone recording music one note at a time, as pure sound, as a way of dipping a toe back into the water of composition. The lyrics -- spoken, not sung -- are a continuation of the google pop experiments of the previous album: "Wood: to the Chinese house where that gruel is tasty", for instance, is a google-translated line from the diary of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, whose benign spirit I was interested in channeling. The pop song starts, a nursery rhyme about "moop bears". It's based on Boum by Charles Trenet, reversed. Trenet's french, backwards, suggested all sorts of half-heard imagery, which vaguely might relate to the Bush regime. The song ends in a John Talaga meltdown, linking the sound to the previous two installments of the O trilogy.
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Frilly Military: A sleek production for a song I wrote in Tokyo in 2001 for Kahimi. Something about this -- the fact, perhaps, that it's more psychologically disturbed than the fluffy pop sheen would suggest, and the fact that it's so melodic and catchy -- reminds me of Ashes to Ashes. There's some auto-tune effect on the vocals, and Talaga holds the instrumental under water for a few seconds, before it bursts up for air.
The Bird-Catcher: Another older song. The lyrics for this one came from a catalogue of Japanese books. Again there's a bit of a Scary Monsters feel here; the "ahh... ahh... ahh" sounds on the chorus, for instance are like Fashion's "do... do... do..." bits. There's a sense of some kind of emptiness given some delicate pop polish. Something gently schizoid, prettified. So far, the album is a bit more scary than friendly.
Nervous Heartbeat: It has the grandeur of a national anthem, thanks to a slowed, warped Teresa Teng sample at the start, then becomes an auto-tune language lesson, building through a tropical sensuality, "climbing" to give us another, higher view of the big riff. Again, direct emotion is avoided; I prefer to sing these textbook lines about Japanese onomatopoeia as if they were the tenderest love song ever written. Real sentiment peeps through the restraint, as "when will I see you again?" leads into a final iteration of the Teng motif. It's very directly a song about missing Hisae, whose visa has been unexpectedly revoked.
Dialtone: Another song written in 2001 in Tokyo, refurbished, glossed up and slowed down. This works so much better here than on the Mashroom Haircat mini-album I made with Emi Necozawa, with my zonked-out lyrics and the disturbing imagery, book-ended by deceptively calm Nazi radio call-signals. Here too, rather than friendliness, what comes across is a schizoid darkness, even a violence, framed and phrased with a poignantly inappropriate poppy production as if it were light and happy. So it's a bit like hearing David Bowie singing "we're legally crippled, it's the death of love" in a light, Easy Listening chorus in Up The Hill Backwards. Which makes the lady with "eyes clear as dialtone", suspicious that her lover might have a secret, a distant cousin of the woman with "an 'orror of rooms" and blue eyes with "nobody home" in Scary Monsters.
Hang Low: I remember wanting to write a song that sounded Chinese. The lyrics express the friendly theme: "I set my heart on being good, very friendly". I was reaching for the feel of an Italodisco number I'd heard in a cafe in Venice while teaching in September at a Fabrica workshop called Teach Me Stories. Here's the fragment as I originally recorded it; I later learned the song was Valerie Dore's 80s hit Get Closer. Something about it reminded me of the record Serge Gainsbourg made with Bambou (an oriental lilt over 80s tragidisco), and I liked the pathos in the almost-bad singing. My own song ends up in quite a different place, but there's a similar sense of yearning in the aviation-themed lyrics. I always feel sentimental and frail on planes.
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Permagasm: This seems to be a love song to a mysterious person, known only as "Hiawatha". The lyrics are google-translation poetry again, but take us (accidentally?) to Borneo and Mongolia. Strophe and antistrophe, a reference to the Chinese version of Pop Idol (Inner Mongolian Cow Sour Yoghurt Super Girl), then some 80s drums sampled from Seona Dancing, Ricky Gervais' first group! The permagasm idea edges closer to the impossible dream of permanent pleasure, the thing the album aspires to, but is being diverted from, in subtle ways, at every step.
Pleasantness: A spookily sensual torch song. I was inspired by a Japanese enka song used in a Shiseido commercial: Kosetsu Minami's Yume Hitoyo ("one night's dream"). The lyrics again come from inadequate mechanical translation of Rinko's diary, so there's a weird tension between direct emotion and mediation via gobbledygook: "the scorch of stripes entering uniformly the favourite food". I actually love this awkward automatic poetry, and I love the synthetic landscape this lyric creates in my brain. "A coffee in the firs, life with clarinet..."
[Error: unknown template video]
Devil Mask, Buddha Mind: Back to the tone poem that opened the album, and, in a sense, to the Spooky Kabuki tone poem that opened Oskar Tennis Champion. The lyrics are some sort of Buddhist chant.
7000 BC: The idea here is to wander and stumble tentatively through a collection of hesitant songs-being-composed (I suppose we're all "people being composed" throughout our lives too), leaving the false starts and hesitations in. For me, it has something of The Incredible String Band's whimsical gentleness (and some of the endlessly-divergent structure of A Very Cellular Song too) in it. The lyrics are scribblings from notebooks I'd been keeping: stuff about pistachio trees in Asia Minor, the Calcutta literary scene glimpsed in early Satyajit Ray films, and the Jamaica-and-Tibet theme, which somehow relates to the Ted Bafaloukos film Rockers, which I'd been watching obsessively in my wooden house in Hokkaido earlier in the year.
Zanzibar: There's a play here of conviction and randomness which is related to Bowie's Station To Station and Low albums. How do you turn hazy, mystical, intuitive imagery into some sort of commitment? How do you turn nothing into something? Fragmentation into coherence? Throwing away drama, this is the drama you're left with, and it's poignant. I remember improvising this song -- with its Greensleeves-like chords, Bowie-esque imagery and grotesquely slowed pace -- and being surprised at how the poetry just "arrived", yet made sense to me when it was there.
Count Ossie in China: Count Ossie was an early reggae mystic. Now, a lot of reggae lyrics, to the uninitiated, sound like nonsense poetry, so singing about "small forest to the north" (googlespawn again) fitted the genre.
Dr Cat: This is a very catchy little ditty arranged almost entirely with field recordings. The chorus applies the Pitchfork ratings system to friends instead of records. The verses relay some funny optical text scanning mistakes made by someone keeping a collection of Brian Eno interviews. Since there's already something George Formby-ish in the melody, it's entirely appropriate that we then head into...
I Refuse To Die: This was recorded for Otto Spooky, but the album got too long and it got left off. George Formby plays the uke here. Unlike most of the other songs on the album, which offer odd, evocative poetry, this has a theme, and a universal one at that: not wanting to die. It's great to perform live, at the end of a set.
Ex-Erotomane: I'd been sitting on this lyric since 2003 -- I remember writing it, channeling Gainsbourg, sitting on a doorstep near the Pyrenees metro station in Paris, on my way to a party. Instead of an "ex-fan des Sixties", my narrator is an ex-libertine. I suppose, like Corkscrew King on Otto Spooky, this is about that middle-aged theme, the decline of libido. A requiem for the penis. Not that mine was dead; it was still getting me into quite a bit of trouble, in fact. But I like to get Cohen-ishly, darkly-humourously morbid towards the end of my albums; Joemus does the same, with The Man You'll Never Be and The Vaudevillian, and Otto Spooky did it with The Artist Overwhelmed. I like the sound collage at the end here, and the way everything gets swirled back into the single guitar note the album started with.
My overall feeling about Ocky Milk now is that it's a murky, peculiar, sensual album. I don't think it achieves the friendliness that I started out hoping to capture, and if it aimed to scratch your back, well, the person doing the scratching is some kind of schizoid vampire with a personality composed mostly of scrambled, obscure cultural references and poor web translation. The album's evasion of coherence at every turn reminds me of Captain Beefheart's prayer: "Oh Lord, please fuck my mind for good!" But with the mind fucked by editing, by randomising, by google poetry, and by spontaneous improvisation, emotions can take over. And Ocky Milk is surprisingly coherent emotionally. What emerges is a mysterious new form of half-lit tenderness. Tenderness in another world, which is a beautiful one (laced with terror, but "what's beauty but terror we're still just able to bear?").
You can hear pop music defiantly edging its way back through the sound experimentation -- a development that will lead to the blippy-boppy Joemus, the next Momus album, and the decade's last.
By March 22nd I'm saying the album will be "a warm record all about social connectedness, with the sprightly, breezy gait of Charles Trenet, wearing a straw boater, singing Boum. It's an Asian-sounding record, a Brazilian-sounding record, it's pentatonic enka ticky-tocky dubbed by the 1970s King Tubby. And it sounds a bit like Misora Hibari." An art show in New York with Mai Ueda interrupts things, and in September I'm still cogitating. By now the concept has become to make "random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch" music. At the end of September I announce that I'm flying New York producer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Black Dice, Boredoms) to Berlin in November to work on the record with me. I lay down some Dogme-like rules of chastity which are forgotten as soon as we get to work. The record is inspired by Ozu, Caetano Veloso's experimental Araça Azul album, Webern and Harry Partch, but mostly by the sensation of having your back scratched.
With Rusty hunched behind his laptop or cross-miking his Sennheisers, we soon get some songs in the bag. By the end of November 2005 Devil Mask, Buddha Mind, Dr Cat, Moop Bears, Bonsai Tree, Pleasantness, 7000 BC, Permagasm and Ex-Erotomane have been recorded (in that order). They're odd, stilted, experimental. Rusty returns to New York and I negotiate my first novel in Paris and announce that I'll spend three months of 2006 in New York, appearing at the Whitney Biennial. By the end of December I'm heading off to Osaka (Hisae has been temporarily barred from Germany), where I'll finish the album with a mic and a laptop running Garageband. At this point I'm a bit iffy: "Some days I think what I've done so far is utterly wonderful, other days I think it's rubbish." But Hisae's deportation has given me the record's most emotional songs: Hang Low, Zanzibar and Nervous Heartbeat.
In Osaka, slightly anxious about the lack of strong conventional pop songs on the record, I record Frilly Military and Dialtone (reworkings of songs I wrote for Kahimi Karie and Emi Necozawa), The Birdcatcher (an unrecorded song written in the mid-90s) and Count Ossie In China. Finally I add I Refuse To Die, an outtake from the Otto Spooky sessions. The record is done. James Goggin's sleeve -- a saga in itself -- gets finished in June, and the record comes out in October 2006.
So how does Ocky Milk sound to me now?
Moop Bears: Although this says it's Moop Bears, the first minute is from Devil Mask, Buddha Mind. It sounds like some sort of electroacoustic sound poem, and reminds me that in Hokkaido, where I'd been field-recording raw sounds with my students, music had been strictly banned. So this is almost like someone recording music one note at a time, as pure sound, as a way of dipping a toe back into the water of composition. The lyrics -- spoken, not sung -- are a continuation of the google pop experiments of the previous album: "Wood: to the Chinese house where that gruel is tasty", for instance, is a google-translated line from the diary of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, whose benign spirit I was interested in channeling. The pop song starts, a nursery rhyme about "moop bears". It's based on Boum by Charles Trenet, reversed. Trenet's french, backwards, suggested all sorts of half-heard imagery, which vaguely might relate to the Bush regime. The song ends in a John Talaga meltdown, linking the sound to the previous two installments of the O trilogy.
[Error: unknown template video]
Frilly Military: A sleek production for a song I wrote in Tokyo in 2001 for Kahimi. Something about this -- the fact, perhaps, that it's more psychologically disturbed than the fluffy pop sheen would suggest, and the fact that it's so melodic and catchy -- reminds me of Ashes to Ashes. There's some auto-tune effect on the vocals, and Talaga holds the instrumental under water for a few seconds, before it bursts up for air.
The Bird-Catcher: Another older song. The lyrics for this one came from a catalogue of Japanese books. Again there's a bit of a Scary Monsters feel here; the "ahh... ahh... ahh" sounds on the chorus, for instance are like Fashion's "do... do... do..." bits. There's a sense of some kind of emptiness given some delicate pop polish. Something gently schizoid, prettified. So far, the album is a bit more scary than friendly.
Nervous Heartbeat: It has the grandeur of a national anthem, thanks to a slowed, warped Teresa Teng sample at the start, then becomes an auto-tune language lesson, building through a tropical sensuality, "climbing" to give us another, higher view of the big riff. Again, direct emotion is avoided; I prefer to sing these textbook lines about Japanese onomatopoeia as if they were the tenderest love song ever written. Real sentiment peeps through the restraint, as "when will I see you again?" leads into a final iteration of the Teng motif. It's very directly a song about missing Hisae, whose visa has been unexpectedly revoked.
Dialtone: Another song written in 2001 in Tokyo, refurbished, glossed up and slowed down. This works so much better here than on the Mashroom Haircat mini-album I made with Emi Necozawa, with my zonked-out lyrics and the disturbing imagery, book-ended by deceptively calm Nazi radio call-signals. Here too, rather than friendliness, what comes across is a schizoid darkness, even a violence, framed and phrased with a poignantly inappropriate poppy production as if it were light and happy. So it's a bit like hearing David Bowie singing "we're legally crippled, it's the death of love" in a light, Easy Listening chorus in Up The Hill Backwards. Which makes the lady with "eyes clear as dialtone", suspicious that her lover might have a secret, a distant cousin of the woman with "an 'orror of rooms" and blue eyes with "nobody home" in Scary Monsters.
Hang Low: I remember wanting to write a song that sounded Chinese. The lyrics express the friendly theme: "I set my heart on being good, very friendly". I was reaching for the feel of an Italodisco number I'd heard in a cafe in Venice while teaching in September at a Fabrica workshop called Teach Me Stories. Here's the fragment as I originally recorded it; I later learned the song was Valerie Dore's 80s hit Get Closer. Something about it reminded me of the record Serge Gainsbourg made with Bambou (an oriental lilt over 80s tragidisco), and I liked the pathos in the almost-bad singing. My own song ends up in quite a different place, but there's a similar sense of yearning in the aviation-themed lyrics. I always feel sentimental and frail on planes.
[Error: unknown template video]
Permagasm: This seems to be a love song to a mysterious person, known only as "Hiawatha". The lyrics are google-translation poetry again, but take us (accidentally?) to Borneo and Mongolia. Strophe and antistrophe, a reference to the Chinese version of Pop Idol (Inner Mongolian Cow Sour Yoghurt Super Girl), then some 80s drums sampled from Seona Dancing, Ricky Gervais' first group! The permagasm idea edges closer to the impossible dream of permanent pleasure, the thing the album aspires to, but is being diverted from, in subtle ways, at every step.
Pleasantness: A spookily sensual torch song. I was inspired by a Japanese enka song used in a Shiseido commercial: Kosetsu Minami's Yume Hitoyo ("one night's dream"). The lyrics again come from inadequate mechanical translation of Rinko's diary, so there's a weird tension between direct emotion and mediation via gobbledygook: "the scorch of stripes entering uniformly the favourite food". I actually love this awkward automatic poetry, and I love the synthetic landscape this lyric creates in my brain. "A coffee in the firs, life with clarinet..."
[Error: unknown template video]
Devil Mask, Buddha Mind: Back to the tone poem that opened the album, and, in a sense, to the Spooky Kabuki tone poem that opened Oskar Tennis Champion. The lyrics are some sort of Buddhist chant.
7000 BC: The idea here is to wander and stumble tentatively through a collection of hesitant songs-being-composed (I suppose we're all "people being composed" throughout our lives too), leaving the false starts and hesitations in. For me, it has something of The Incredible String Band's whimsical gentleness (and some of the endlessly-divergent structure of A Very Cellular Song too) in it. The lyrics are scribblings from notebooks I'd been keeping: stuff about pistachio trees in Asia Minor, the Calcutta literary scene glimpsed in early Satyajit Ray films, and the Jamaica-and-Tibet theme, which somehow relates to the Ted Bafaloukos film Rockers, which I'd been watching obsessively in my wooden house in Hokkaido earlier in the year.
Zanzibar: There's a play here of conviction and randomness which is related to Bowie's Station To Station and Low albums. How do you turn hazy, mystical, intuitive imagery into some sort of commitment? How do you turn nothing into something? Fragmentation into coherence? Throwing away drama, this is the drama you're left with, and it's poignant. I remember improvising this song -- with its Greensleeves-like chords, Bowie-esque imagery and grotesquely slowed pace -- and being surprised at how the poetry just "arrived", yet made sense to me when it was there.
Count Ossie in China: Count Ossie was an early reggae mystic. Now, a lot of reggae lyrics, to the uninitiated, sound like nonsense poetry, so singing about "small forest to the north" (googlespawn again) fitted the genre.
Dr Cat: This is a very catchy little ditty arranged almost entirely with field recordings. The chorus applies the Pitchfork ratings system to friends instead of records. The verses relay some funny optical text scanning mistakes made by someone keeping a collection of Brian Eno interviews. Since there's already something George Formby-ish in the melody, it's entirely appropriate that we then head into...
I Refuse To Die: This was recorded for Otto Spooky, but the album got too long and it got left off. George Formby plays the uke here. Unlike most of the other songs on the album, which offer odd, evocative poetry, this has a theme, and a universal one at that: not wanting to die. It's great to perform live, at the end of a set.
Ex-Erotomane: I'd been sitting on this lyric since 2003 -- I remember writing it, channeling Gainsbourg, sitting on a doorstep near the Pyrenees metro station in Paris, on my way to a party. Instead of an "ex-fan des Sixties", my narrator is an ex-libertine. I suppose, like Corkscrew King on Otto Spooky, this is about that middle-aged theme, the decline of libido. A requiem for the penis. Not that mine was dead; it was still getting me into quite a bit of trouble, in fact. But I like to get Cohen-ishly, darkly-humourously morbid towards the end of my albums; Joemus does the same, with The Man You'll Never Be and The Vaudevillian, and Otto Spooky did it with The Artist Overwhelmed. I like the sound collage at the end here, and the way everything gets swirled back into the single guitar note the album started with.
My overall feeling about Ocky Milk now is that it's a murky, peculiar, sensual album. I don't think it achieves the friendliness that I started out hoping to capture, and if it aimed to scratch your back, well, the person doing the scratching is some kind of schizoid vampire with a personality composed mostly of scrambled, obscure cultural references and poor web translation. The album's evasion of coherence at every turn reminds me of Captain Beefheart's prayer: "Oh Lord, please fuck my mind for good!" But with the mind fucked by editing, by randomising, by google poetry, and by spontaneous improvisation, emotions can take over. And Ocky Milk is surprisingly coherent emotionally. What emerges is a mysterious new form of half-lit tenderness. Tenderness in another world, which is a beautiful one (laced with terror, but "what's beauty but terror we're still just able to bear?").
You can hear pop music defiantly edging its way back through the sound experimentation -- a development that will lead to the blippy-boppy Joemus, the next Momus album, and the decade's last.