imomus

I was supposed to be featured on Paul Morley's show on BBC Radio 6 last night, but when I listened to the archived programme there was no sign of Momus. Maybe it's been put forward to next week. (Just got an e mail from the BBC: that's exactly what happened. The feature will be broadcast on Sunday 8th February at 10.30pm.) This is the kind of radio show I never usually listen to, and my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, almost every track was strong and vigorous and creative in some way. (Morley played Van Der Graaf Generator, Pixies, XTC, Rapture, Peaches, Von Bondies, Laura Nyro, some gorgeous Robert Wyatt tracks off 'Schleep'...) On the other hand, something crucial was lacking. The success of everything was oppressive. The familiarity of most of the stuff -- whether the new stuff like Peaches and Von Bondies, or the old stuff like XTC and My Bloody Valentine -- bothered me. It was as if everyone agreed what good pop music was, and that therefore pop music was dead. I got the feeling that for Momus to fit into this programme, Momus would certainly have to seem dead too. There would be a fixed idea of what Momus represented, probably resembling a slightly less alive version of the Divine Comedy. It could only sound like some kind of obituary. (I've been exchanging e mails with the BBC and with various rock encyclopaedias this last week. They ask coroner-type questions. Date of birth, family history, education, records... you keep expecting them to ask for a date of death too.)

I thought of the values I keep banging on about, the values deep in my Utopian essays and deep in my Aquarian guts:

* I privilege the strange over the familiar.
* I privilege the potential over the actual.
* I privilege getting things wrong over getting things right.
* I favour the elsewhere over the here.
* I want everyone to do different things rather than everyone do the same thing.

These values can doom me to short relationships, because this month's 'strange' might be next month's 'familiar'. For instance, I was attracted to the Transmediale because of the presence of what I might call 'the class of 2001': a bunch of groups and labels I discovered that year: DAT Politics, the Ski-pp label, Noriko Tujiko, Discom, Microstoria... Although their performances were strong (especially the Tujiko Noriko / Lionel Fernandez collaboration), all seemed less strange. The musical language no longer seemed like a precarious and inventive balancing act, more like an established, pedigreed grammar of sound. The baby had learned to walk, to dance, and to do skateboard tricks. The trouble with skateboard tricks is that, however much they make you applaud, however much they tickle your adrenal glands, they can end up seeming glib. They make you long to remember the original precariousness inherent in walking, the simple danger Laurie Anderson pointed out in Walking and Falling. And I don't just mean 'Let's go back to the fundamentals', an argument which leads to New Rock. No, there must be a sense of freshness, of vulnerability, of blunder and experimentation. This 'Finished Music' remembers what's good about music, what works, what gets 'em every time; we who love 'Unfinished Music' must try to forget all that. We need some sense of 'Music Year Zero'.

I want to hear the audience cheering less at the end of each piece. I want to hear a great scratching of heads and beards! In the end, at Transmediale, my imagination was captured by the unknown groups playing in the back lounge. A group from Rotterdam called Coolhaven, for example, who did a sort of weird laptop opera about David Hasselhoff, very much in the style of Guten Morgen, Hose (Ein Kurzoper), the 1984 sprachgesang opera about trousers by Holger Hiller and Andreas Dorau. (Speaking to a friend of the band I learned that they are big fans of Dorau, so the link is probably deliberate.)

Researching Coolhaven, I found they have a link to one of my favourite musicians, Pierre Bastien, who also lives in Rotterdam. Bastien makes mechanical instruments which function like pre-electronic sequencers. Click the photo to hear one of them, Orchestre Thermodynamique.

Bastien's album Mecanoid was released on the Aphex Twin's label Rephlex. I heard a scary story about Richard James last night from Donna Summer, aka Jason Forrest, Jason has just come back from Moscow. I am about to play in Moscow (March 19th, Caviar Lounge), so I wanted to hear all the Moscow stories. Well, Jason told me Aphex Twin fell sick when he was there, and the ambulance, instead of taking him to hospital, took him way out into the countryside and threatened to leave him there to die unless he paid them a ton of money. Jason also advised me not to take any taxis in Moscow. He'd hailed one near the Kremlin, ridden for a few minutes, and been charged $150. At first he demanded to be taken to the police, but the driver seemed so sure they would back him that Jason just paid. His advice is: 'The more official people seem in Moscow, the more corrupt they are. Trust ordinary people, not officials.'