Today I want to bring together, here on Click Opera, an entry in which you the readers do most of the work, and in which images take the place of text. I'm also interested in how predictable my aesthetics have become. So what I'm proposing is a judgment of Paris; a beauty contest which is also a sifting of values (visual, aesthetic, political, semantic, sexual).

I want to see images of females, girls, women you think are totally my type. They should be wearing clothes, that's important. People without clothes are stripped of cultural referents, and we want those. They should be people who style themselves rather than have professional stylists, and they should be ordinary people, not celebrities. Street style sites like Facehunter might be a good place to source the images, or Flickr feeds. They shouldn't be people I know in real life. Be nice to me in your comments (yes, I am very old, and a bit funny looking) and be nice to the women.

At midnight CET I'll select a winning image -- the person I find most appealing, according to my own personal aesthetic code. I hope I won't have to exclaim "You never knew me!" I think by now you probably do.

Update (midnight CET): What an exciting finish! With about twenty minutes to go before the non-sexist gong sounded, this very beautiful image arrived:



While it looked for a while as if this indie musician would win, the judges -- all right, judge -- decided that she must be excluded as, possibly, a "celebrity", and, possibly, styled (though these things aren't really provable, and we don't know who the woman is).

And so this woman was chosen instead:



The judges (all right, judge) particularly liked the elegant hooded white garment, the expression of intent concentration, and the evidence of creative endeavour (carving) in the picture. Thanks to all who submitted pictures.

Yesterday I watched Synth Britannia, a fascinating BBC4 documentary about the development of synthpop in the UK from the mid-seventies on. This was a time -- I remember it well -- when music show Top of the Pops and future tech show Tomorrow's World went out back-to-back on a Thursday night, and it didn't take a huge amount of imagination to start wondering what would happen if you put them together. Kraftwerk first appeared on Tomorrow's World (promising that their next album would be played with instruments built into their suit lapels), but soon came to dominate Top of the Pops, in influence if not in person.



The rest of the documentary is here.

Now, in the parallel world where this is a national synthesiser documentary commissioned by Italian state TV network RAI, it's a much shorter film featuring just one participant: "computer harlequin" Alberto Camerini. Although he was born in Brazil, Camerini became the most Italian of the synthpoppers in the late 70s and early 80s, melding the sound of bands like Plastics and Telex with a persona straight out of the 16th century Italian theatre tradition of commedia dell'arte.

Whereas the synth bands featured in Synth Brittania influenced my very early years, the electronic artists who influenced me from the late 90s on were what you might call "retro-marginal Modernists": acts like Telex, Plastics, and Camerini. I was interested in how electronic sound negotiated with national folklore at what seemed like the edges of the world (Japan, Italy) and back in the mists of time.

The last time I discussed l'arlecchino elettronico -- in a 2001 website piece entitled Synth Pierrot -- YouTube hadn't even been invented yet. It was hard to find a still photo of Camerini online, let alone videos of him in performance on Italian TV. Now, if anything, there's rather too much, revealing the harlequin's roots as a Rod Stewart wannabe, his post-shark ska phase, his late Michelin Man period. Through it all, though, there's something rather intriguing: a man unafraid of stylistic excess, able to meld the ludic, the lunatic and the ludicrous. A man who seems likeable.

Today I've selected what is, in my view, the essential Camerini. Since he's a very visual and physical performer, you don't have to speak Italian to appreciate what's going on here. Let's start with the Rod Stewart phase, pre-electronics:


Alberto Camerini: Serenella

You can already see the admirable willingness to make himself ridiculous, the physical language and garb of the harlequin. All we need now is to add electronics. This next one may sound, to Folktronic fans, a little familiar at the start:


Alberto Camerini: Rock'n'Roll Robot

Tanz Bambolina alternates between a verse that sounds as if he's been listening to DAF and a gulpy-gaspy 50s revival chorus straight out of Grease. Visually he's Bowie in Ashes to Ashes, a matador with Flock of Seagulls hair, an "automatic clown" a retro-rock Pierrot. The audience are apparently robots too -- they applaud throughout:


Alberto Camerini: Tanz Bambolina

"You shouldn't cry" sounds more like Stiff label New Wave -- or Martha and the Muffins -- than synthpop, but I love the look:


Alberto Camerini: Non Devi Piangere

Another wonderful costume -- sort of Rollerball-influenced -- here:


Alberto Camerini: Neurox

I like the synth trumpet flourishes and time sig change in this one:


Alberto Camerini: Morgana e il Re (1981)

And here's 1982's Telex, which really does sound a lot like the Belgian band of the same name:


Alberto Camerini: Telex

Here's the very Analog Baroque Mon Ami, again about robots and marionettes and Scaramouche:


Alberto Camerini: Mon Ami

I love the little break at 1.50! Could we call this -- on the model of "bamboo music" -- "macaroni synthpop"?

Finally, The King of Plastic, which again might sound familiar in places to Momus listeners:


Alberto Camerini: Il Rei de Plastica

How does the hierarchy of deceptions go? Lies, damned lies, statistics, things we tell those we badly want to fuck, outright barefaced deceptions, the babbling of blithering lunatics, and, finally -- the most rabidly delusional of all -- assertions about individuality and free will in Western documentaries about Japanese youth culture. Just watch the first thirty seconds of this 2000-broadcast BBC documentary on Japanese fashion, for instance:



"Japanese schoolgirls," begins the script (read by Japanese voice actor Naoko Mori, but written by director Marcus Boyle) "-- studious, reserved, obedient. Across the country these sailor uniforms can be seen in thousands of classrooms. It's the ultimate symbol of Japanese conformity and self-control. But one group of girls have decided to rebel. Prim and proper is a thing of the past. The kogyaru or "black-faced girls"..."

This tried and tired journalistic formula structures itself around trusty, fusty orthodoxies about women and Japan and free will, a few flimsy binaries (then / now, conformist / rebellious, group / individual), and the projection of Western values onto Eastern people. Apparently impervious to the inherent irony of the situation, a Western male puts words into the mouth of an Asian female (the voice-over actress) about her own nation, and about female "empowerment". A small group of schoolgirls have, in this reading, "decided" to bust out of a set of strait-laced clichés better suited, in fact, to Britain's Victorian past than Japan's present. We look at them, now and see... us, then.



Here's a maxim we can try on for size: Every Western documentary that purports to be about Japanese style is in fact a documentary about the Western concept of free will. No matter how much information the visuals in these documentaries give us about the actual business of designing, making, selling and wearing clothes (and they actually give us surprisingly little), this is the theme the script typically returns to with almost obsessive insistence. That was then, this is now. Women were this, now they're that. We live like this, they live like that. School forces one behavior, the free market permits another.

In addition to market cheerleading, there is, of course, a huge amount of hidden racism here, because the "that" supposedly always just on the brink of being displaced by a new "this" contains vastly more of the cultural DNA of the society being examined than the newly-arrived, dubiously-construed "this" does. To dismiss it is therefore to dismiss the bulk of the culture. Just beneath the feelgood messages of consumerism-as-empowerment-through-individualism and the banal sub-Spice-Girls pseudo-feminism lies a deep -- if unintentional -- ethnocentricity.



Made In J-Pop is a french documentary directed by Laurent Bouit in 2007 and adapted for the Discovery Channel. It's much better than the BBC doc, with a lot more direct interviews with the Japanese protagonists. Again we have an Asian female reading a script written by a Westerner, though, producing a confusion: are we being guided around Japan by a Japanese person with specifically Japanese explanations for the things we see, or being given a series of Western projections voiced in a deceptively Japanese-sounding way? What's the difference between a journalist and an actress?

Here too we start in a "conformist" classroom where "everyone has to wear the uniform", as opposed to the low-cut jeans (for the girls) and baggy pants (for the boys) they want to wear. Ah, free will! Its absence sees you dressing like a 19th century British sailor, its presence a 20th century American cowboy! What a wonderful thing free will is, when applied to fashion! What a difference it makes! How clear it all is!

But wait -- now a Japanese person is allowed to talk directly to camera, and she's telling us with obvious pride and affection about her school uniform, pointing out the places where the school emblem is sewn! Could it be that conformity, in some circumstances, is a positive joy? And that individualism -- the state of not-belonging -- is a bit sad, something for outcasts and losers?

These documentaries have a bit of a problem in their treatment of the paradox of a so-called "individualism" which is actually expressed in "tribes". What the script-writers very much want to treat as evidence of individual will -- of "breaking out" of various social straitjackets -- is, itself, shown to be happening on a group level, the level of conformity, too. What to do about that, when your whole film is structured around the idea of rejecting groupthink?



What Western Japdocs never do explicitly in the script is talk about the rebel splinter groups depicted (kogyaru, Gothic Lolitas, Visual-kei fans) as conformists, even when the visuals show them all dressed exactly the same as each other, performing group choreography (scroll forward to 4mins 30 in the clip above). Even when conformity is being presented as an obvious joy and pleasure -- as an ecstatic choreography, in fact -- the script cannot admit this. It must present joy and pleasure as "rebellion". In groups.



These documentaries have a friend (the international market system) and an enemy (the government, society, and the education system of Japan). They are thus predisposed to treat the conformity imposed by society, the government and the educational authorities with much less charity than the conformity imposed by the market, to the extent that one is labeled "conformity" and the other -- no matter how intensively marketed, how closely aligned with actual global power flows, how remorselessly bludgeoned into the youth with means your school could only dream of -- is labeled as "rebellion". It's unfair, but that's how it is in style documentaries about Japan.

Again and again, during these documentaries, I want to shout at the screen: "Ask the Japanese!" You'd think it would be a really obvious thing to do in a street style documentary; ask the people on the street why they're wearing what they're wearing. Instead, we get scenes like the ones that follow in the Discovery doc. We see an American photographer telling some Cosplay girls on the Harajuku Bridge that the uniforms (literally!) they're wearing come "from the imagination" (and I thought they came from the shops, like school uniform does!). We get the same man explaining to the camera that because they wear school uniform "which makes everyone look the same" for five or six days a week, the tribes in question have, "on Sunday and sometimes Saturday, the chance to be completely individual... individualistic". Again, zero examination of how conforming to the codes of the school and conforming to the codes of a Cosplay tribe on Harajuku Bridge might be an expression of the exact same thing, a thing that "individual... individualistic" just doesn't describe well.



Bubbling under the surface of the script, of course, is the notion that "individual" is something the West does well, it's an attribute of the "freedom" we like to think we embody, and that Japan is just poised on the brink of discovering the things we discovered long ago, of busting out of Japanese-style conformity into Western-style individuality. "They're all on a quest for a look," trills the voice-over actress, perhaps blushing at the implied treachery to her gender and her nationality, "or, better still, a personality." This is not only deeply dismissive of Asian culture, whose collective orientation is far older and wiser than ours, it's also deeply question-begging about the extent to which our own market-driven individualism is an expression of free will.

Are consumers expressing free will when they purchase things in any country, let alone Japan? It's the question that Japan-focused documentaries raise, but never answer. It's something even experienced Western market analysts based in Japan seem to have trouble with. I'd find it vastly preferable if someone like Marxy scripted these documentaries, but even the venerable Marxy founders when confronted with The Paradox of Free Will. Recently he commented on Kensuke Kojima's view that Abercrombie and Fitch -- launching in Japan in December -- will not be a sales success. Kojima says there's a big advance media buzz about A&F's opening, but cites a decline of interest amongst Japanese consumers in the American preppy look, and its high price at a time when Japanese prefer cheap clothes and have easy access to H&M.

"It's often dangerous to say, X will fail in Japan because Japanese people don't like X," Marxy tweets on Neojaponisme, adding: "Turns out, Japanese consumers tend to buy against their own personal preferences if the media buzz is strong enough."

Take "Japanese" out of that sentence and we get: "Turns out, consumers tend to buy against their own personal preferences if the media buzz is strong enough". This is surely a basic principle of all marketing and advertising: if you can create a strong enough buzz about something, you can change people's minds about it, and make them buy it when they otherwise wouldn't have done.

The market system proposed in documentaries about Japan as the ultimate locus of the expression of individual free will is, in fact, dependent on successive collective acts of submission to peer pressure (from alongside) and sales pressure (from above). That's what these documentaries -- whose stated enemy is the government and the education system -- call "freedom". Their model is a silly and a sorry one indeed.

If you're a documentary-maker heading out to Japan to make a film about street style, I have some advice. I'm not naive enough to think you're going to deconstruct the Western concept of Free Will every time you make a statement about skirt hems. But please, I beg you to consider three very simple pieces of advice that will make your documentaries less palpably silly:

1. Whenever possible, ask a Japanese person.

2. If your script is written by a Western male, have it voiced by a Western male in the film. If it's written by a Japanese female (and I'd strongly encourage that), by all means have it voiced by a Japanese female in the film.

3. Try not to portray fundamental traits of the culture you're filming as "errors" which are "now changing".

Let's improve our documentaries about Japanese street style! We can do that! Ganbarimasu!

There's something dispiriting -- but also something exhilarating -- about being 18, leaving home, and moving north, far north, into a grim little unit in a student hall of residence. In Aberdeen it felt like being a battery hen machine-cooped in an Arctic research station. But the exciting thing was that you got a blank space, a fresh start, a chance to define who to be, to choose some values, develop some interests, assert some styles -- the more extreme, the better. One of the first things I did was personalise the door of my room in Esslemont House with this image:



It's a still from Tadeuz Kantor's production of his play The Dead Class, and I cut it out of a copy of the John Calder theatre magazine Gambit, which I'd subscribed to along with a fiction magazine called Bananas. That was my image of myself, that I was a serious young man with literary ambitions, and these magazines proved it.

I also liked the zany, grainy, artily neurotic quality the pictures had. The human actors were frenzied, but the dummies were implacable, spookily calm, frozen-faced. The images, taped to my door, projected something alien yet familiar, expressing my secret wish to be new, and yet the same. God knows, Edinburgh had enough arty stuff from Poland (Kantor was a Pole) going on at the Festival -- soon, in fact, I'd get a chance to see a Kantor production at the Murray House Gymnasium, a reminiscence of his youth entitled Wielopole, Wielopole. I'd witness his hysterical style, in which actors clutching doubles of themselves run in circles in a series of gestures influenced by the ideas of Artaud, Grotowski and Gordon Craig.



For now, though, it was enough that the images looked odd, avant garde and continental. This one reminded me of David Bowie's Lodger sleeve, in which he'd depicted himself grotesquely splatted on the ground, perhaps in allusion to Polanski's 1976 film The Tenant, in which a tranny (played by Polanski himself) jumps out of the window of his Paris apartment, repeating the gesture of the previous lodger. (It was a quotation Bowie would repeat in Jump They Say, where he also lies splatted at the foot of a building.)



The aesthetic of these grainy black and white (but spirited and zany) photos I was so recklessly pinning to my door was one I'd later recognize in Quay Brothers films. It was an atmosphere I imagined must reside, with the greatest concentration, in dim ateliers in Warsaw. And yet, even when I came to live in Berlin, and Poland lay next door, I never went to Warsaw. So far, I've just made one brief visit to Poznan, the closest city inside Poland.

That will change this weekend, though. On Sunday November 22nd I play an experimental music festival in the Polish capital entitled The Song Is You. I'll arrive there on Saturday night, in time to catch Justin Bond's performance:

The Song Is You Festival 09
Powiększenie
Nowy Świat 27
00-029 Warszawa, Warsaw
Poland

I certainly hope I'll find Warsaw full of half-lit ateliers in which people clutch at dummy doubles, but I'm ready to be educated out of my shadowy stereotypes too.

Meanwhile, if you're in Berlin there's a show this Wednesday evening (starting 8pm) at Staalplaat Working Space featuring me, Tomoko Miyata and Seiji Morimoto. It's one of the last shows Staalplaat Working Space (Flughafenstrasse 38, Neukolln, U8 Boddinstrasse) will stage, so do come down.

And while I'm mentioning Berlin gigs, don't miss Oorutaichi (plus a certain Joe Howe in his Ben Butler guise) performing at Madame Claude on November 27th. The man is the future of music.

To get totally into the themes on my 2000-recorded, 2001-released Folktronic album I should really be an urban ethnomusicologist with a robot assistant like the one you hear in my hour-long audio documentary Fakeways: Manhattan Folk, made just before the album and still the best piece of scene-setting for it. This Alan Lomax figure would probably have to start with the basic facts: Folktronic is an album made by a 40 year-old Scottish musician who moved to New York in March 2000. He records the album at 38 Orchard Street, at the Chinatown end of the Lower East Side. He's been in New York just a couple of months when he starts, but already he's absorbing a lot of the local zeitgeist, and particularly the idea that America is a nation with plastic roots where you can be whatever you want to be -- as long as it isn't authentic. He lives with his Japanese girlfriend.



Books and people influence this record. The people are new New York friends like Steve Lafreniere, a journalist who interviews me for Index magazine, the singer Stephin Merritt, or the multimedia designer (and friend of Fischerspooner) John-Robert Howell. As for the books, just as the prog-medieval direction of the Kahimi record I'd made in 1999 (most of which is glommed onto the end of Folktronic) was influenced by Paul Stump's book The Music's All That Matters, the "Fake Americana" material that comprises two thirds of Folktronic is influenced by Nicholas Dawidoff's book In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. But a much more important source is a copy of German sexologist Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis I buy at the New Museum bookshop.



In a website thought published in April 2000 I have "a great idea": "Why not make an album of folk songs about sexual fetishes, set to synthesisers? Folk songs are usually about mining disasters or clipper mutinies, but why shouldn't they be about archaic hysterical sex fetishes too? The songs should have a childish gaiety, be light and celebratory... They would play with the associations of the words Folk, Fake and Fuck. The Folk (ballads, reels, laments, shanties, forebitters) would be Fake Folk, of course, played on early monophonic synthesisers. But the Fuck would also be Fake Fuck, because that's what fetish is. It's an evasion of the 'real thing', which is fucking. It's a fake fuck... A world in which the authentic was not prioritised over the fake, and 'healthy' fucking had no precedence over fetish, would be a rather splendid one, it seems to me."



And so I set to home-recording, alone in my tiny apartment, and often naked. In proposing inauthenticity as America's authenticity, I was making Manhattan -- a city of Jews, gays, Chinese and the art world -- the centre of all authentic inauthenticity, and in proposing deviance as the most universal sexuality I was merging Alan Lomax with Alfred Kinsey. Steve Lafreniere -- who heard most of these songs before anyone else did, and was in a sense their ideal listener -- started referring to me as "the Heliogabalus of Orchard Street". Other people influenced the album: Gavin Brown, whose art gallery in the Meatpacking District featured Jeremy Deller-like garage sales and a great scenester bar called Passerby. Spencer Sweeney's distortion-noise band Actress, which I heard at Passerby, blasting over the speakers. A conceptual folk band called Centuries, who came in from Coney Island to play weird gigs in tribute to Bruce Haack and Klaus Nomi. The records of Raymond Scott, which I'd buy from Other Music or Kim's. The bizarre school operas of Ford Wright. The scene around Fischerspooner, Bobby Conn, Ukrainian and Polish folk rituals in the East Village and Williamsburg. Thrift stores and painted Easter eggs.



( So let's take a quick canter through the tracks. )

Folktronic is available on CD from this page and in the US via iTunes. John-Robert Howell's Flash console featuring some of the tracks is online here.

I'm fascinated by ideas, and how they change the lives of the people who come up with them. It seems to be an interest that runs in the family; my mother once had a flirtatious correspondence with Cyril Parkinson, a man made famous by the simple observation that work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion.



The other day I came across another such idea, one I hadn't heard before. It's called The Peter Principle, was first described by Dr Laurence Peter in 1969, and states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Basically, the principle states that people get rewarded for things they can do well by being promoted to the point at which they're doing something they can't do well. At that point the promotion stops, and there they stay.

There are some corollaries:

1. In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties.
2. Work is carried out by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
3. Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.



This has mind-boggling ramifications; it could account for a world in which everyone is basically incompetent, because they've all been promoted to "the position of first failure", and left there to keep failing.

As often happens when you encounter a new idea like this, I immediately started applying the Peter Principle to real world situations. I happened to watch a documentary called Kublai Khan's Lost Fleet, which examines how a Mongol navy with superior weaponry and 4500 ships was destroyed while attempting to invade Japan in August 1281, with the loss of 130,500 Mongol soldiers and sailors.



Now, the main reason was that, just as had happened the last time the Mongols attempted to invade Japan, a kamikaze or "divine wind", in the form of a massive typhoon, whipped up and destroyed the invading navy.

But there were other factors. Kublai Khan promoted a general called Arakhan to lead the naval invasion. He'd distinguished himself in great on-land campaigns, but on the sea he was... all at sea. In terms of the Peter Principle, as a nautical commander Arakhan had reached his "position of first failure". Not just because former successes had led to his promotion to a post he was incompetent for, but because geographically Japan was the Mongol Empire's "position of first failure".



For Arakhan, though, "failure was not an option". He couldn't head home, having failed to crack Japan, and report his failure to Kublai Khan. He'd have been killed. So the biggest single maritime loss of life in the history of the world unfolded off the coast of Takashima, produced by a timely typhoon, samurai bravery, poor boat design (in their impatience the Mongols had seized flat-bottomed river boats to supplement their navy; their indentured Chinese boat-builders had also done deliberately shoddy work on the sea boats)... and the Peter Principle.

"The typical Bless shopper," reports Unlike Berlin, "is usually from Japan, subtly dressed in avant-garde from top to bottom and thrilled to spend about 500 Euros for a handbag that can also be turned into a sweater." I've been looking into the Bless store on Berlin's Mulackstrasse for six years and, yes, usually with a Japanese person. I even know Japanese Berliners (like jeweler Naoko Ogawa) who've interned with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag's conceptual clothes company.



What I've never done -- not until yesterday, anyway -- is bought an item of clothing at Bless. As the Unlike text suggests, it's absurdly expensive. You tend to go in there as you'd go to an art gallery, to admire the ideas. Bless is a master of eccentricity. Here you'll find outrageous combinations of things: a graph-paper shirt with a hood tucked into a little packet under the collar, another one with a sari-like scarf sewn onto the back, an enormously heavy chunky-knit sweater, a sort of toddler's garment with a huge middle-section that you have to scrunch up, accordion-style, by lacing braces around tabs. They also do decorated USB cables (a big influence on Hisae's Mizutani Cable Knit Company cottage industry, now discontinued because it was taking her a month to produce each cover), stools made of hollowed-out wood, and other curiosities. It's basically all stuff you've never seen anywhere else, though once you glom onto the ideas, you could probably go and do your own knock-off for a fraction of the price.



Yesterday, six years after starting to visit Bless regularly, I actually bought my first garment from them, the... well, the thing you can see in the photo (not the shaggy hood, which would have doubled the price). It's a pair of very wide felt trousers which dangle at the bottom of a tight woolen boob tube thing. Instead of being held up by a belt of some kind, the trousers are kept in place by the boob tube clinging to your chest.

I was only able to purchase this weird garment with the justification that I'll wear it on stage when I play my first-ever gig in Warsaw next weekend at the Song Is You Festival (my gig is on Sunday evening). And because it was in the Bless Workshop sale, where prices are deeply slashed. The sale is held in a different location, up in a wilderness of housing estates at the top end of Ackerstrasse, a place usually used to construct the clothes.



It was lots of fun trying improbable outfits on there yesterday with Emma and Joe and various strangers (we all shared one big dressing room). The thing about Bless clothes is that they're so bloody peculiar that putting them on is also dressing yourself in the permission to look that odd -- Bless' blessing, if you like. It's this legitimation of complete visual eccentricity, this implicit license to deviate, that interests me. It suggests a parallel world in which we're all allowed to look like kindly monsters on the street, like characters from Maurice Sendak.

Did I ever appear in one of your dreams?



If so, today's your chance to tell the world about it.

The Noughties Were Shit, proclaims one British blog, looking back with a jaundiced eye on the decade just gone. Personally, I paid zero attention to the celebrity chefs and crappy inventions the blog marshals as evidence of the decade's inherent excrementality. Any decade is going to look like rubbish if you pay attention to celeb chefs, let's face it. And complaining about things you nevertheless fail to switch off -- and even, in fact, switch on specifically to hate and slate -- is a key symptom of The British Disease, much more likely to perpetuate crap than end it.



I want, over a series of Click Opera posts, as we approach the end of the year and the end of the decade, to look back at my noughties, and specifically the five or six albums I released. If I had to conjure a single metaphor for how the decade felt to me, back in 2000, I'd liken it to a blank piece of paper. I felt as if there were no rules, no commercial expectations. Just as I was free to travel (I spent the decade in New York, in Tokyo, then, mostly, in Berlin), I was also free to "experiment", to make things up as I went along, to improvise, to develop a sonic grammar that was mine alone; an electronic folk-lieder aimed as much at the "salons" of Chelsea art galleries as the rock circuit.

Although some of my more conservative fans -- notably Swede John Thelin, once (as "Count V") the mainstay of the alt.fan.momus newsgroup -- characterised the noughties as a time in which "Momus forgot how to write proper songs", others -- notably the Web 2.0 generation, who ranked Nervous Heartbeat and Frilly Military at least as high, in terms of YouTube views, as my old hit Hairstyle of the Devil -- liked my noughties stuff better than what had gone before. With 154,000 views this -- my 2001 collaboration with Montréal group Bran Van 3000, reggaeton vocalist Eek-a-Mouse and actress Liane Balaban -- is the most-viewed Momus-related track on YouTube:



So how did things stand with me, musically and stylistically, at the lead-in of this "fresh reel of blank tape", the decade we learned to represent with two zeroes? I think a key track -- and one I still like a lot -- is my 2000 collaboration with Dusseldorf band Kreidler, entitled Mnemorex. It's key to what comes later because, for a start, it proposes a new sort of electronic folk song:



As in the Bran Van 3000 song, I'm only responsible for the topline melody and the words and singing here, but this points the way forward -- my 2008 collaboration with Joe Howe is still very much on the same page:



Mnemorex also points forward in the sense that it's German, and references Japan (the Osaka World's Fair, also known as Expo '70), and I'll spend most of the 00s with a predominantly German-Japanese frame of reference. Even living in New York between 2000 and 2002, the records I was listening to were mostly made by Berliners like Tarwater, F.S. Blumm, Pole and Rechenzentrum. In 2000 I returned to Europe to tour Germany with Kreidler, who really deserve their own Click Opera entry; after a long absence they released a new album last month called Mosaik 2014:



I don't want to snow the blank sheet with too much data, so I'll close this scene-setting entry. Next in this series I'll cover the first proper Momus album of the new decade, my, ahem, folktronica album, Folktronic. In that entry, and the ones that follow, I'll be re-listening to my noughties albums, tracing their influences, intentions and themes, and recalling the times and places they were made in. And one reason I'll be doing this is that it's pretty safe to hazard the guess that nobody else will, though there'll no doubt be endless artistic explorations of, for instance, the UK's Top 10 bestselling albums of the decade. Here they are, just to set the scene:

James Blunt Back To Bedlam
Dido No Angel
Amy Winehouse Back To Black
David Gray Wide Ladder
Dido Life For Rent
The Beatles 1
Leona Lewis Spirit
Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Keane Hopes And Fears
Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters

I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that allows you to turn any webpage into a slideshow.

Now, turning a website into a slideshow is a bit like turning a bicycle into a record player; it's perverse, against the grain. People put images onto their websites in a certain context. When you pull them up and turn them into a full-screen sequence of three-second images, you de- and re-contextualize them. The intended narrative gets stripped away, replaced by a new narrative which can be surreal, dreamlike, or psychologically revealing. That's the theory, anyway.

It doesn't always work. News sites like the BBC, The Guardian and Google News have done something to their html to make slideshowing impossible. Stil in Berlin works, Face Hunter doesn't. But those street fashion blogs are predominantly visual already, packaged as sequences of images. So is stripes-crazy Stanley Lieber's LiveJournal.



Some blogs frustrate the desire to escape text by bringing it into their images. Hipster Runoff sprinkles its jpegs with bitmapped lettering: "ELECTROMA = POOP", the images say, or "I deserve a better life / career / job". What emerges here is the extent to which American hipsterism simply recycles American strip malls and office cubicles with a tiny justifying sparkle of irony.

Letters of Note shows images of... letters, naturally. That doesn't preclude visual interest, of course; some of them, like the Lucasfilms recruitment ad up the page, are visually pretty arresting.

The slideshow thing works better with Awful Library Books, although, like the blog itself, the interestingness of the books depicted (rooted in their otherness) contradicts the blog's whole premise, which is to encourage librarians to weed out, name and shame inappropriate, absurd or boring books from their libraries. Leave them there, I say! We need those glimpses of otherness more than we need appropriateness.



The slideshow software works well with Japanese sites like Sajiblo (which documents the refurbishment of an old building as an organic cafe) because they tend to publish quite high resolution photos at absurdly small sizes. For non-Japanese-readers the slideshow doesn't change the essential experience of these websites (they're already image sequences), it merely strips out the clutter of text.

It's worth saying that full-screening images, while it does take away the clutter of nested windows most of us have on our screen, doesn't remove the windows metaphor entirely: what, after all, is a computer screen but a proposed "window on the world"? What it does do, though, is replace an ugly, complex collision of frames with a single, apparently-authoritative one. It replaces a messy space-sequence (lots of complicated relationships between frames and text and images) with a single, simple, tidy time-sequence. The fact that that big authoritative time sequence is actually fairly random and decontextualised is what makes it so fascinating: the big images become a sort of oracle, telling us unexpected things.

Click Opera, slideshow-ified, for instance, looks like a trailer for a sexy, didactic, utopian horror film.