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Notoriously deviant, at least in his songs, Momus, a.k.a. Nick Currie, has never
been one for critics or listeners to easily typecast. His unpredictable
repertoire has included an electronic baroque-themed album (The Little Red
Songbook (Le Grand Magistery Records), spontaneously inspired by a piece of
baroque music found on the Encarta electronic encyclopedia), Ping Pong (also on
Le Grand Magistery) an album of sad and sadistic "love songs," and a host of
singles that have ranged from lounge act grooves to electric-guitar-heavy
ballads about heroin to kitchy songs about single urbane women desperate to get
pregnant. He's also been responsible for writing a good chunk of the backing
music for Japanese TV commercials, most notably for the makeup foundation
"Menard."
So while Momus' newest release, Folktronic (Le Grande Magistery), comes as a
surprise to many familiar with Momus' recording past, it really shouldn't--the
real surprise would be if he released two albums in a row that sounded more than
passingly similar. Folktronic records Momus' voyage into Americana--
specifically, America folk music. "I guess I'd just arrived in New York City--I
moved to America from the UK in March of 2000--and I began to go out and
experience a bit of night life, and everybody downtown or across the
Williamsburg in Brooklyn were having these weird parties for their
friends, sort
of contests where they were wearing hand-made costumes and singing songs about
superheroes and things," explains Momus by phone from his New York residence.
"It struck me that this was a new form of folk art, a type of urban folk art
because these people all had jobs, they weren't trying to make a living from
their music. A lot of these people were working in, say, Web design, and stuff
like that, but they were making this weird folk artiness in their spare time. So
it seemed to me that you could juxtapose that cutting-edge technology with the
really primitive, funky kind of mountain music--or perhaps it's more proper to
call it skyscraper music, since it's from Manhattan."
Cosmik: How did the Folktronia exhibit come about? What
was it, exactly?
 Momus: That was really a continuation of the
Folktronic
album.
I was approached by
this relatively new gallery in Chelsea-LFL-to originally to just play some songs
in their gallery. But then they said, what the hell, why don't we do a whole
month-long show? So I just extended the ideas for the Fakeways Institute and the
Folktronic album into this gallery show. I actually had a couple of teepees and
some hay bales and an electronic walk-through mountain landscape. People could
come in and they could see these flash presentations of the new songs, and then
they could sing them in a little teepee with a hard disc recorder in it, in a
kind of Chinese whispers fashion, where it was a bit like karaoke, and a bit
like Chinese whispers, where you misremember lyrics or you improve lyrics, or
you do some kind of oral improvisatory thing of passing the songs down to some
other generation slightly changed. So it was trying to approximate the oral
tradition, the years of traditional and anonymous songwriters, because those
were really the big songwriters, before the copyright age. Part of my theory
was that we're living in a post-copyright age, especially with the advent of
things like Napster. I mean, things have probably changed a bit since last year.
Folktronic is very much the sound of 2000, the ideas of 2000. Napster kind of
got squashed since then, and a lot of things have changed. But these were the
ideas that I was excited by then.
Cosmik: So did people at the Folktronia exhibit
approach
the songs very seriously?
 Momus: Oh, no. They were just having fun. The
songs
from
the exhibit can actually be
heard as MP2 files on the
Momus Web site, and were
officially released as a mini-CD in Japan with the Folktronic CD. It's a cross
between--it sounds a bit like Laurie Anderson in some places, or it just sounds
like some crazy karaoke party in others. It's very comical, because there are
like six voices, all at once, or many more on some of the songs, singing all
their own different readings of the songs, with totally different lyrics,
putting raps from other songs into the middle and that kind of stuff.
Cosmik: It's funny how in the cities people gravitate
towards
folkish, country-themed iconography, while in the country, people tend to
gravitate
towards more urban themes.
Momus: Well, the grass is always greener on the other
side.
It may be some kind of
protective mechanism people have in their psychology in order to incorporate the
other. People are scared of being too far away from their roots, or from the
urban mentality, if they're country folk. I guess it's the kind of playful thing
that goes on in art, where you actually try to compensate for being out of touch
with what other people are doing or thinking.
Cosmik: I know you tend to release albums that kind of
go
against what is currently considered critically popular, especially in the UK.
How
have critics reacted to this album?
 Momus: In the UK, it actually got really good
reviews.
I mean, Time Out London said it was my best album of the five or six years--they
said it was sort of like David Lynch returning to form with The Straight Story,
although I think he's even truer to form with Mulholland Drive. I don't think
NME
reviewed it at all, but we're kind of traditional enemies anyway. Hell, they
don't
have any readers anymore--no one reads the NME. But generally, the daily papers
and music
magazines in the UK have reviewed it very favorably. There is a traditional
British respect for American folk imagery. Bob Dylan was, if anything, probably
bigger in Britain than he was in the States, or Beck, for instance. People in
England love that kind of slightly cynical and calculating if urban take on the
American rural folk roots mythology. So I guess I was in that tradition.
Cosmik: Has there been a contrast between that and how
U.S.
presses have reviewed the album?
Momus: No. It's definitely gotten pretty positive
reviews.
I mean, only a couple of slightly hostile reviews have come out. I think
Pitchfork.com
was a little negative, although they still have it seven out of ten stars. But
nobody really
trashed it. Nobody's said that Momus has no right to make these wild parodies
about national music. Nobody was quite fascist enough to say I had no right to
mess with these formulas-because that's what America is all about. And it really
struck me quite strongly that this fakeness is a truly American virtue--this
whole notion that you can just arrive here from anywhere in the world and
reinvent yourself and make yourself into something larger than life and faker
than life and faker than real, and yet, at the same time, part of your formula
for becoming fake is pretending you're real. You have to pretend you're totally
authentic. Just like all the diners that are pretending to be authentically
Mexican, or Chinese, or whatever? They're not, really, but it's a very American
tradition to be fake. So that's why I think the album's gone down so well,
because it's continuing that tradition of the immigrant claiming these false
roots.
Cosmik: Would you say this is a more manly album than
some
of your previous releases?
Momus: I sing in a more gruff voice on some of the
tracks.
I think, yes, I was patterning myself after some of the rougher folk heroes,
patched kind of a
gruff, bandit-kind of growl into some songs.
 Cosmik: How has it been like to play concerts
with the
way things
are in the world right now? Are audiences any different?
Momus: Well, I sort of sat down and just thought about
what on Earth you can do
after September 11 and I thought I'd either have to go into feeling people's
pain and doing 24-minute versions of "What Would Death be Like" --I've got a lot
of miserable songs which I could easily revise, brush down. But I don't really
know if that would help anyone. So I kind of opted for light and happy and
funny, particularly because I'm touring with Stereo Total, who are just a real
tonic of a band, very full of joy and laughter and pleasure and pop music, so
I've basically put together that kind of concert.
Cosmik: I read that you recently had your penis cast by
Cynthia Plaster Caster.
Momus: Actually, it wasn't that recently. It was back
in '98, but there's been a
documentary which they spent a year or so making that is now doing the rounds of
all the film festivals called "Plaster Caster," and that's got me in it, so it's
become a fresh kind of thing because of the documentary.
Cosmik: Is it still on display?
Momus: The penis? No, no. Her exhibition on Broadway
was last year, I guess August
or something of last year. As far as I know, it's not a touring show.
Cosmik: Did she give it back?
Momus: No. She keeps them all in a bank vault. If
you're famous, you're in the bank
vault. If you're just kind of a Joe Schmoe, you're in her lounge.
Cosmik: When it was on display, did you ever stand next
to the casting and introduce
yourself as the subject?
[Cynthia, not necessarily with Momus' cast.]
Momus: Oh, absolutely. I was there like a shot,
standing next to my cast very
proudly--no, not that proudly, because I was put in a case right next to Jimi
Hendrix. Sorry, it wasn't Jimi Hendrix, it was Anthony Newly, who's actually
very well endowed. I wasn't even very excited by the experience. I know you
should be excited, putting your penis into a thermos flask full of lukewarm
putty, but for some obscure reason, I didn't find it a great turn-on, so I'm
only sort of moderately hard, and the resulting cast isn't that impressive. But
I kind of thought it was a nice symbol of rock and roll declining into self-
parody and tongue-in-cheek decadence 30 years on from, say, Jimi Hendrix, who
obviously meant it and was very... firm. Firm in his resolution. But people like
me are ironic and humorous and all the rest of it, and you can't really be that
firm in your resolution when you're going in ten different directions at the
same time and some of them are self-parody and some of them are genre parody.
What does it all mean anymore? Can rock and roll still get a hard-on? That's the
real question.
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