click opera

The underclass wants to become the overman!

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:50:18 GMT

I've discovered a connection between two battles I find myself fighting on Click Opera: the battle against people who think I should pay more attention to the downside of Japan, and the battle against purveyors of a 1980s-style identity politics focused on victimhood.

The connection became clear to me when I answered this anonymous comment in the early hours of this morning:

Momus' perception of Japan seems to be skewed by the fact that his mates are all successful creatives or else trust-fund kids; I mean, how many Japanese does he know who've been hospitalised through overwork, for example? I can count four among my Tokyo friends just off the top of my head, unfortunately. That's a side of this country subject to wholesale sweeping-under-the-carpet on this blog, unfortunately.

Now, I could have answered this by saying that I know very few trust fund kids, somewhat shun the ones I do know, and would much rather have dinner -- as I did on Monday night -- with a group of recent immigrants to Japan from Malaysia, people who get up at 6 in the morning to scour the markets for food ingredients for the Malaysian restaurants they cook in. Or I could have answered that Hisae's family, with whom I'm staying here in Osaka, are mixed Japanese-Korean. Hisae's mother runs a small clothes store on an arcade, importing items from China and Korea. (Neither Hisae's mum nor the Malaysians, by the way, complain about overwork.)

Instead, I wrote a mini-manifesto, between the lines of which anyone attuned to these things can clearly read the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche:

The fundamental premise of this blog is that you get to the essence of a culture via its talents, not its problems. Ability, as Joseph Beuys put it, is the true human capital. Now, of course there's a place for examinations of the stumbling blocks a culture faces on the way to its achievements. But I think the Dogs and Demons approach -- examining Japan through its problems -- does not get to the heart of Japan's amazing achievements, and its massive success. Problems are distractions from the essence of something, someone, or some place, not a key to understanding it.

The useful thing about this statement is, I think, that it expresses -- in the words of Joseph Beuys -- the single most powerful idea of Marxism: that ability, not money, is the true human capital. But there's also a Nietzschean element in the thought, an emphasis on contention, striving and ambition. The underclass wants to become, if you will, the overman. Problems and distractions cannot bend it from a historic act of will: the fulfillment of (in Marxist terms) its historic destiny to enjoy the fruits of its labour, and take the ascendent position warranted by its productive abilities.

Now that's what I call a left wing position! That's the long march! That's the shining future that justifies present austerities and struggles! Unfortunately, I think a lot of power has been sapped from the radical tradition by what I'd call "problem narcissism": the tendency to make problems, obstacles, or deficiencies the key to identity, and a destination in themselves, rather than mere distractions from the goal of dominance-through-ability. The result is the PC identity politics landscape we all know so well, with its emphasis on victimhood, on symbolic reparation and tokenistic compensation, on "respect" based on the hiding of (unchallenged) stigma via policed language, and, worst of all, on the built-in presupposition (so damaging) that all difference is bad difference, and must therefore be suppressed and spun out of view.

Anon's critique raises the spectre of class war in its association of success with "trust fund kids and successful creatives", but it's a phoney class war. As Beuys and Marx (and Nietzsche, for that matter) agreed, creative ability is absolutely key to all human ability. For Beuys, "everyone is an artist". Anon wants to say that rich and privileged people are the only artists, and that normal people are basically victims, falling by the wayside.

Of course victimhood is an important part of Marx and Beuys' thinking: Beuys said "Show your wound!" and Marx covered the problems of 19th century workers in enormous detail. The important thing is that Marx didn't end with that suffering, victimhood and failure. Marxism is a praxis dedicated to putting those who work, those who create, those who control the ultimate human capital of ability, in the place they deserve: the place of power, will, success and determination. Marx would have been appalled by the "problem narcissism" of identity politics, which -- like a sick man proposing you identify him entirely with an illness which is nevertheless unmentionable -- proposes the gaining of respect for "identifying deficiencies" ("deficiencies" mapped spuriously to identities based on difference: being a woman, being black, being gay) as the ultimate goal of radical politics.

Just as Japan reportage which looks at perceived problems (themselves, all too often, seen through an ethnocentric lens focused on "bad differences") rather than its core creative abilities as a nation misses the essence of Japan -- the Japanese people's extraordinary will matched to their great abilities -- so 1980s-style identity politics defines identity as a series of shortcomings, sees them as "bad differences" from the norm, and demands respect for them in terms which merely underline its bad faith; the perception it shares with its enemies is that it perceives difference as deficiency. And so political struggle gets turned into a series of semantic negotiations in which supposedly-bad differences are spun, if not into good differences exactly, at least into a series of respectful silences, compensations, tips of the hat, correct terminology (according to an endlessly-turning treadmill powered by stigmas which are never, themselves, challenged, probably because the stigmas encode the victimhood so essential to the whole enterprise) and "appropriate language".

I fundamentally reject the idea that this is a progressive politics. As I've said, this negotiation simply encodes more subtly the prejudice it seeks to rebuff. Progressive politics, for me, has to go back to Marx's basic, positive, clear and forceful idea (it was William Morris's too) that ability is the true human capital. We have to stop associating creativity with privilege or class. All human beings are creative. That, rather than problems or victimhood, is what's at the core of an individual, a class, a nation, and the species itself.

Good morning, akachan!

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:30:28 GMT

Kahimi Karie -- musician, singer, blogger, essayist for Mayonaka (she has a text in the current issue), star... and now mother! At the end of last week Kahimi (who earlier this year married tap-dancer Kazunori Kumagai) gave birth to a baby daughter.

On our way to eat with friends (a big group of Malaysians and Japanese, plus one Malaysian-Japanese baby) at an Okinawan restaurant in Osaka last night, we saw copies of the new Crea magazine, hot off the presses, and featuring these photos of Kahimi pregnant. The pictures (by Mika Ninagawa) join images of Nobuko Hori and Isshiki Sae as compelling visions of Japanese fertility at a time when the nation's birth rate is sputtering. They're also deeply beautiful.

Later, when we all got a bit merry at the Okinawan restaurant and started singing karaoke, it seemed completely appropriate for me to pick this hit song I wrote for Kahimi in 1995. Good morning, akachan!

Ume Kayo and the etiquette of disinhibition

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:07:10 GMT

I'm a little too jet-lagged at the moment to claim to be whirling up the Japanese archipelago like a cultural typhoon, but I do have some early interests. Mayonaka is publisher / gallery Little More's regular magazine, and the current edition sees an inspired teaming of their regular designer Kazunari Hattori with conceptual manga man Yuichi Yokoyama, who's taken photographs of children and dropped them into his characteristic halftoned, colourblended backgrounds, or inserted his oddly abstract baseball-capped figures into their midst.

Mayonaka is the most inspiring magazine I see on the Japanese racks at the moment, and Little More are little wonders. On Saturday night the gallery's biggest star, 28 year-old photographer Ume Kayo, appeared in a panel talk at Osaka's AD&A Gallery.

We've met Ume Kayo before on Click Opera, in a somewhat gossipy context. In My disappearing little dick she appeared as (nudist, bohemian, photoblogger) Patrick Tsai's love interest. Pat Pat (name-checked on the Joemus album for his rock-diving exploits) was, at the time of telling, heading to Japan to pay court to Kayo, having been "thunderstruck" by her at a french photography biennial. The quest for Kayo's favour seems to have failed; Pat Pat is now with someone else.

I missed the Kayo appearance on Saturday, preferring to sleep deeply, catching up timezones one by one. But Hisae went with her friend Kazumi and reported that Ume Kayo had spoken of her influences: a Japanese wildlife photographer famous for his shots of bathing monkeys, and Ninomiya-san from Johnny's idol group Arashi, and more specifically his erect boy-nipples. (Here Hisae could totally identify.)

A cursary leaf through Ume Kayo's three photo books in, say, your local branch of Tsutaya will give you the impression that her favourite subject is people goofing around. Her first book, Umeme, won the Kimura Award and scored sales of over 100,000 copies for Little More, her publisher. That was mostly Ume and her friends goofing around, giggling at the sight of a bald man with a grain of rice on his head, and so on. The next book, Danshi, sold "only" 40,000 copies and focused on schoolboys goofing around in playgrounds. Her latest, Granpa, is a tender study of Ume's grandfather goofing around.

Last night I drank a lot with some of Hisae's Osaka friends and ended up doing synchronised enka dancing and thinking -- as you do when drunk and jet-lagged -- about how different socities organise inhibition and disinhibition. I must say I admire both; a semi-legenday character like Pat Pat impresses me for his mad Baal-Byron exploits, his disinhibited impulsiveness (although only a certain tweeness saves that stuff from Dash Snow-style tragedy). But ultra-shy, ultra-quiet, inhibited people impress me too. I really identify with their interiority, their withdrawal.

I wouldn't do anything as crude as align Japan with either inhibition or disinhibition. Clearly, though, this country has very distinctive ways of organising when and how you transition from one state to the other. From the extremes of one state to the other. For Japanese people can be the most massively reserved, autistically detached people in the world. And yet, as a drunken night of enka singing -- or the photographs of Ume Kayo -- demonstrate, they can be super-disinhibited when etiquette calls for it. And that -- the fact that there's an etiquette of disinhibition just as there's an etiquette of inhibition -- is an interesting paradox in itself.

Hecuba, Singh, Osaka

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:57:16 GMT

I'm in Osaka, jet-lagged but happy, eating sashimi and about to go soak in a sento.

The sequence of views from my Airbus window this morning was fascinating. First Mongolia, snowy moonlit high plains in the grey of dawn, looking like the surface of the moon. Then China, flat and vast. The rivers and quays around Beijing are shaped by man, and the ground sparkles with new, silvery industrial buildings. Smoke stacks throw plumes.

Then there's the extraordinary promontory of Dalian, with crinkly red mountains and affluent cities; the last part of China before the Yellow Sea and North Korea. Our route, as the crow flies, should take us through North Korea, but we fly carefully around it. We don't want to be mistaken for spies.

South Korea is amazingly slender, and Seoul ( on the seatback route map) surprisingly close to the DPRK border, and not far from Pyong Yang. Through little fluffy white clouds I see Seoul's high, boxy apartment blocks. I've been watching a Korean TV show on the plane entertainment system; tidy mother and messy mother swap apartments. The Korean flats shown are in exactly these big boxes, much larger than Japanese living spaces, with gigantic sofas and hypertrophic plasma TVs with Dolby cine-surround speaker systems. The rooms are all lit with overhead fluorescent light. The tables are low, like Japanese ones, but the colours are completely different from Japanese colours.

There's a little turbulence over the Sea of Japan, but soon we're descending over Fukuoka. Japan looks like an enchanted land, so different from the lugubrious, hostile and vast landscapes the plane has traversed so far. Suddenly there are wooded mountains with little clouds nestled in nooks and temples poised on top. There are the sandy-beached islands of the Seto Inland Sea, which we'll be investigating in January. There are shiny new bridges linking the echanted Pacific isles to each other. There are sudden cities (that's Shikuoka, and here comes Osaka) poured into the plains between forested mountains. This whole thing shouldn't really be here: the archipelago has pushed a series of volcanic heads out of the sea, but they remain dreamlike and somehow enchanted.

Soon we land on the artificial island which is Kansai International airport, and I'm marveling at... Well, I'm grumbling at the fact that striking Finnish baggage handlers have ensured that our luggage wasn't on the flight. But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion.

The luggage claim girl smiles sweetly, the currency exchange man fans and flick-counts my yen like a magician, and on the train to Tennoji a trainee steward is being choreographed by a supervisor through her duties, and making white-gloved gestures as precise and attentive as those of the man who guided our airbus to its docking bay, then bowed deeply to the Finnish plane.

The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known. And yet somehow this "poetry" is deeply effective; as I've been reading in my complimentary copy of the Financial Times, Japan is still vastly powerful: the four dominant blocks of our time, says the paper, are the US, Japan, Europe and China, with India and Brazil far behind. So this island that just pops out of the sea like a volcanic afterthought to continental Asia somehow continues to pack enormous civilisational clout.

Anyway, I didn't intend to string my first impressions out quite so far. I was going to say "here, jet-lagged, happy" then point you to two articles of mine which have just appeared: Discovering a new band in real time, a piece in Playground investigating a Californian band called Hecuba (photo above), and 800 Words with Alexandre Singh, my conversation with a young British lectures-based artist living in New York, published by Art in America.

Saison Culture

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:33:26 GMT

Today I'm flying Finnair to Japan. It's been a couple of years, but that's okay; I like to leave long enough between trips for Japan's unfamiliarity and difference to gather afresh. Even if it's just for a few precious hours, I want to feel like a Japan virgin again.

If every time feels a little like the first time, what did the first time feel like? Well, I landed in Japan in 1992 and 1993 into a very particular time, place and culture. Anthropologists of 20th century Japanese subculture call the thing I encountered "Parco-Saison Culture". Press them for more precision and they'll distinguish those terms: the Parco Culture period actually lasted from 1975 to 1985, and the Saison period from 1983 to 1993. So technically, I arrived in "late Saison Japan". All the artifacts I saw and bought (Poison Girlfriend CDs, Sony Walkmans, copies of CUTiE magazine) are technically Late Saison Japan artifacts, bought from late Saison stores (Wave Records, Libro books). Even unrelated phenomena -- the Animal of Airs shop Hibiki Tokiwa kept in Aoyama, the Nadiff bookstore -- had close family ties to the Saison empire. Nadiff, for instance, was started by the manager of the Libro bookshop inside the Ikebukuro branch of Parco. In British terms, that's as if Magma had started life as a spin-off from Selfridges.

The Japan I witnessed in the early 90s consisted of a small hill between Shibuya Station and Yoyogi Park. Here was my hotel, the Tobu. Here was chic department store Parco, and the club where I played my concerts, the Quattro, located (it seemed bizarre at the time) atop a department store and reached by escalators which traversed the deserted sales floors after closing time. Here also were LOFT and OIOI, the Parco art gallery, the record store Wave, and the arty basement bookshop Libro (Saison Culture loves Italian names, clearly). Not far off was Muji, another specialty store owned by Seibu.

I didn't know it at the time, but my first Japan visit was circumscribed almost entirely by a world conceived and invented by one man, Seiji Tsutsumi. A novelist, award-winning poet, and one-time member of the Japanese communist party, the young Seiji inherited the department store business from his father. Yasujiro Tsutsumi founded the Seibu empire in 1912. Typically for Japan, it consisted of a department store (Seibu) and a railway line to bring people to it (the Seibu line). Seiji's half-brother Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, a much tougher cookie, inherited ten times as much as Seiji did when the old man died in 1964, and by 1990 Yoshiaki was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in the world, thanks to property and transport holdings in bubble-era Tokyo. But Seiji was the artistic one. He retired in 1991, but the Japan I first encountered bore his mark the way quattrocento Florence bore the imprint of the renaissance princes. (Like the princes, these magnates were financially corrupt, allied to the mafia, and autocratic, but that's another story, and one Seiji was well out of by the time the prison sentences were being handed down.)

While his half-brother (and rival) did business the way businessmen all over the world do, refined and cultivated Seiji got to work creating something rather more poetic; a cultural environment in Shibuya, a blend of art and commerce. A department store doesn't need an excellent art bookstore in the basement, its own culture magazine (Bikkuri House, which published 130 issues between 1974 and 1985, and whose readers were called "housers"), a concert venue, or a well-curated gallery. It doesn't need to commission arty postmodern posters and adverts from the likes of Eiko Ishioka, or music from Sakamoto and Hosono. But Seiji wanted Parco-Saison culture to have these facilities, and he had the power to make it happen. It's something we still see today -- look at the way Soichiro Fukutake, CEO of the Benesse Corporation, is revitalising the islands of the Seto Inland Sea with cultural patronage, art tourism, museums by international architects, and a series of commissions.

Seiji Tsutsumi left such a mark on shoppers that one blog account measures the separate impacts he had on a succession of Japanese generations, from the Baby Boomers and the Apathetics to the Juniors and the Blanks, and across a succession of cities (Parco brought Saison Culture to Sapporo in 1990, so the capital of Hokkaido lived its Saison a little later than Tokyo).

The YouTube clips reveal Parco's interest in sophisticated visual culture. I saw some of these commercials on my hotel TV during my first trips to Tokyo, but I didn't catch the earliest, purest phase of them. Art director Eiko Ishioka, for instance, was headhunted to make posters and TV spots for Parco in the late 70s after working for Shiseido. According to The Postmodern Arts by Nigel Wheale (Routledge, 1995): "In 1978 she directed a one-minute TV commercial to promote Parco, a new Japanese department store. The ad showed Faye Dunaway wearing a black dress against a black background, peeling and eating a hard-boiled egg. The department store name was faded up for the last few seconds of the action, and a low-key voice-over uttered a sentence in broken English: "This is film for Parco." The ad was highly successful, and Eiko rationalized its effects in terms of performance art: eating an egg was a totally "global act" done by rich and poor, advanced and developing peoples."

Much later, in 2001, I signed a deal with the Parco label Quattro (located directly across the road from the Loft store on the same Shibuya hill) and made a record for them with Emi Necozawa. It was deeply uncommercial, and sold almost nothing, but the label didn't seem to care. Perhaps that huge empire -- "Saison Culture" -- gave them a certain stability, even if it was achieved by sleight of hand. Four years later the police raided Seibu, and accusations of insider dealing and falsification of share ownership flew. The company was acquired by the owners of 7-Eleven. But Parco still stands on top of that hill in Shibuya. And although the money this time comes from a British University rather than Quattro-Parco concerts, the credit card that paid for my plane tickets carries the Saison logo.

My noughties 5: Ocky Milk, or getting your back scratched by a vampire

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:02:23 GMT

Planning 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.

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.

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..."

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.

A new report on evil

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:51:32 GMT

I know from my correspondence that many of the readers of this blog are young and idealistic, and would like to dedicate their lives to tracking down evil and doing their bit in eradicating it. I sense their fervour to be "sleuths and slayers of evil". For these readers, today is a red-letter day. Because today -- via a source I cannot endanger by revealing -- I have unexpectedly received a quantity of statistics on evil, statistics I believe to be entirely accurate. They certainly confirm many hunches I've had about the location and habits of evil. The main thing they confirm is that evil is counter-intuitive: that it would be foolish to expect evil to be accompanied by thunderclaps and sinister music. Instead, the avid evil sleuth must seek it in much more subtle -- and much more banal -- places.

I'll start with some of the most interesting statistics revealed in the secret research:

Over 70% of all evil in the world is contained in things that we all do. This is probably the report's most important finding, and a great time-saver for the "evil sleuth". Basically, it means that when you're tracking down evil, you probably shouldn't waste your resources investigating freaks, weirdos, eccentrics, people who dress up as women, clowns, minority immigrant communities, would-be-dictators who live in hollowed-out volcanoes, and so on. Evil-doers are much more likely to be someone who lives next door and seems like "a pretty decent bloke all round".

Evil people probably strike us as trustworthy: It goes without saying that shifty, criminal-looking types are at a very big disadvantage when it comes to getting away with crime: everybody is watching them like a hawk. No, like successful confidence-tricksters, evil people need to inspire trust, to lull us off our guard. They're more likely to be popular than unpopular -- everybody loved Bernie Madoff! Which brings us to...

Insiders: Evil-doers are massively more likely (88%, according to the secret report) to be insiders than outsiders. In other words, they are completely integrated into the infrastructure. They are, to all intents and purposes, legitimate. Throughout November sociologist Laurie Taylor broadcast three very courageous and revealing programmes about white-collar crime in Britain. The overwhelming impression these programmes give is that white-collar crime happens on a scale which makes car thieves, drug-dealers and other criminals who clog up prisons look like jaywalkers. And yet white-collar crime is almost never punished. That's because it's so integral to the system we live in that it passes for legitimacy, and for normality.

All that isn't behind us now: There's a tendency to think that evil is something that happened in the past, but doesn't happen now. The research knocks this over completely: of all the evil ever committed, it tells us, a stunning 56% of it is still happening right now. It's just not happening where you expect. The trouble for an aspiring evil sleuth is that humanity, massively, has a tendency to close barn doors after the horses have bolted. We're always looking back, trying to "prevent" the last crisis rather than thinking laterally and forward to prevent the next one. For instance, armed police currently patrol Akihabara because a man killed seven people there in a freak incident last year. But lightning doesn't strike twice. Clearly, the police should be patrolling the district where the next freak incident will occur. Now, that could be anywhere. But we have one resource-saving tip: it probably won't be Akihabara again. No need to send men there, then.

Evil is a habit: A good deal of the literature of evil focuses on premeditated acts the perp knows to be evil. (This is also what the law considers the most evil type of evil.) Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, decides to kill an old pawn broker to see what it feels like to be evil. Sure, it makes an interesting story, but in the real world evil doesn't work like that. The research shows that a whopping 92% of all evil currently being perpetrated in the world is an unintended and often unacknowledged side-effect of what we think of as perfectly normal, innocuous behaviours, like driving cars or eating food. What's more, rather than intentional acts, evil tends to be a habit. It's what you do when you're on auto-pilot.

Evil is obedience: It's hard to overcome those formative years in which your parents tried to convince you that you were being "naughty" when you disobeyed. But the evidence proves that more evil occurs through obedience than through disobedience. There's a good reason for this: the disobedient really have to think through what they're doing, because they're probably going to be punished for it. Disobedient acts are therefore subject to all sorts of cost-benefit analysis and moral scrutiny that obedient acts aren't. Disobedient acts are generally more intelligent acts.

Over here, not over there: When President Bush outlined an "axis of evil", all the nations named were, unsurprisingly, quite far away from the place where Bush made the speech. Using new evil-location technology developed by Google (the company whose motto is, of course, "Don't Be Evil!"), the report reveals that the world's greatest source of evil was located in the same room as Bush while he gave the speech. The technology isn't yet able to locate specific individuals, but my bet would be on Dick Cheney.

There are no evil opinions, only evil framings: We have a tendency to judge people's evil levels by their expressed opinions: "Oh, he believes x, he's an evil cunt." Tempting though this is to believe (if it were the case, evil sleuths would just have to sit around in bars all day waiting for people to express evil opinions), it's barking up the wrong tree. Evil resides in the way the question is framed, not the opinion you express once you accept the framing. For instance, people arguing whether the term "prawny" (I just made it up) is needlessly offensive or justifiably offensive to prawns both agree that it's offensive. They're therefore "on the same page" with the idea that being a prawn is generally A Bad Thing. Evil resides in their agreement, rather than their disagreement. If you're keen to find it, look for it not in their conscious, calculated, publicly-stated opinions, but in the things they both take for granted.

Evil can be controlled: There's good news built into the finding that evil is close to home. An evil that is inside us is an evil that we can alter, if we only allow ourselves to see it, assume responsibility for it, and consciously change it. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Jackson said: "I'm looking at the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways."

I was going to say "Go forth, young sleuths of evil, and change the world!" But you can probably achieve more by staying at home with a mirror.

Ban the minaret!

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:46:33 GMT

Ban this, ban that! No, we don't mean business! We the Swiss would never ban that! No, ban the poor, ban the different! Ban and stigmatize the things the poor and the different do, the shapes they wear and build! Don't ban the rich! Court the rich! Attract them by enabling capital, incentivising business, indemnifying the banks, making their risk public and their profit private! But minarets, veils, burkas -- ban, ban, ban! Ban in the name of freedom! Ban in the name of feminism! Ban in the name of national identity! Ban in the name of fear!

On Sunday, the Swiss voted in a referendum to ban the construction of new minarets. Existing minarets can stay, but new ones cannot be built. The measure will now pass into Swiss law. A particular building shape is now forbidden. A 4% minority of the Swiss population -- also, and not coincidentally, its poorest 4% -- has been told that its buildings "endanger Swiss security". Banners held up banners in front of models of minarets that declared: "That is not my Switzerland".

In late 2004, France banned the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools. Alain Badiou wrote at the time: "France has astonished the world. After the tragedies, the farce."

"France has finally found a problem worthy of itself: the scarf draping the heads of a few girls. Decadence can be said to have been stopped in this country. The Muslim invasion, long diagnosed by Le Pen and confirmed nowadays by a slew of indubitable intellectuals, has found its interlocutor. The battle of Poitiers was kid's stuff, Charles Martel, only a hired gun. But Chirac, the Socialists, feminists and Enlightenment intellectuals suffering from Islamophobia will win the battle of the headscarf."

Badiou demolishes, in this splendidly angry, numbered text, the arguments that banning the headscarf is either a feminist or enlightenment gesture: "Either it's the father and eldest brother, and "feministly" the hijab must be torn off, or it's the girl herself standing by her belief, and "laically" it must be torn off. There is no good headscarf. Bareheaded! Everywhere! ...Everyone must go out bareheaded.

"One will never go into raptures enough over feminism's singular progression. Starting off with women's liberation, nowadays feminism avers that the "freedom" acquired is so obligatory that it requires girls (and not a single boy!) to be excluded owing to the sole fact of their dressing accoutrements."

Badiou is quite clear about what really underlies the ban.

"In truth of fact, the Scarfed Law expresses one thing and one thing alone: fear. Westerners in general, the French in particular, are but a shivering, fearful lot. What are they afraid of? Barbarians, as usual. Those from within, i.e. the "young suburbanites"; those from without, i.e. "Islamist terrorists." Why are they frightened? Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent. They are guilty of having renounced and attempted to annihilate -- ever since the 1980s -- every kind of emancipatory politics, every revolutionary form of Reason, and every true assertion of something else. Guilty of clutching at their lousy privileges. Guilty of being but old children playing with their manifold purchases. Yes, indeed, "in a long childhood, they have been made to age." They are thus afraid of everything a little less aged. A stubborn young lady, for instance."

This is confirmed in European coverage of the Swiss minaret ban: "The Belgian newspaper Le Soir noted that some people found minarets "scary," and added, "There is a strong chance that if there was a vote in Belgium, a majority of citizens would be against it too."

The only thing that would prevent the Germans enacting similar bans would be the all-too-resonant similarity to the persecution of a religion in their 20th century history. And the EU's human rights stance. Here's the EU's human rights commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, righteously hammering Sarkozy as well as the Swiss (Sarkozy is currently leading a debate on whether the burka should be banned in France; his own stated position is that the burka "is not welcome"):

"In a statement on the Swiss vote, Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, warned against narrowly defining national identity and pinpointed France's debate as a potential "trap of promoting one single identity, which defines who is included and, by extension, who is excluded."

Badiou points out that Islam is, in France, the religion of the poor. This is its real crime; to be associated with the economic underclass. Meanwhile, symbols of France's real mass religion -- business -- go unchecked in French schools:

"Isn't business the real mass religion? Compared to which Muslims look like an ascetic minority? Isn't the conspicuous symbol of this degrading religion what we can read on pants, sneakers and t-shirts: Nike, Chevignon, Lacoste... Isn't it cheaper yet to be a fashion victim at school than God's faithful servant? If I were to aim at hitting a bull's eye here -- aiming big -- I'd say everyone knows what's needed: a law against brand names. Get to work, Chirac. Let's ban the conspicuous symbols of Capital, with no compromises."

In a great lecture reprinted in the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt asks What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? "We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it," Judt says. "Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?"

The short answer: we are afraid of difference, and reluctant even to try to imagine it. As Badiou puts it in his Hard Talk interview: "We have no great and clear idea of another world."

My noughties 4: Otto Spooky, googlepop

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:21:45 GMT

"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).

Clips and snaps of Berlin Japanophilia

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:46:36 GMT

The new edition of Berlin "electroniclivingaspects" culture mag De:Bug is out, and it's a Japan Special.

A writer called Timo Feldhaus came round and interviewed me about Japanophilia for the issue, and later Mary Scherpe took some portraits in Jan's apartment round the corner, sitting on his tatami mats:

I think De:Bug used a different photo from the same session for the article (I haven't actually seen the paper copy yet). Mary is one of the founders of streetsnap style blog Stil in Berlin, which has just launched as a free paper magazine too.

Being a Japanophile, I'd have to say Drop Japan is probably my favourite street style blog at the moment.

On Friday night at Madame Claude there was a fantastic chance to see Ben Butler and Mousepad supporting Oorutaichi, the future of music. He turns out to live remarkably close to Hisae's family home in Tennoji, Osaka, so we're hoping to drop in on him in Japan when we visit (we fly on Friday).

Oorutaichi's set in the Madame Claude cellar was wonderful -- shrieky and tribal -- but I just want to note here how great Ben Butler and Mousepad now are live. The group consists of Joe Howe and his friend Bastien. Here's Joe with his girlfriend Emma, both wearing some "Jewish" glasses Hisae made for me, with locks of her own hair hanging off the arms (I'm wearing them in the Oorutaichi snap too):

Ben Butler and Mousepad sound like a blend of YMO, Herbie Hancock and Synergy. Who's Synergy, I hear you ask? I didn't know either until I watched this clip on Joe's blog:

Synergy is someone called Larry Fast, who made music for Commodore computer games in the 80s, I guess.

And here's a snatch of Ben Butler and Mousepad on Friday night playing their most YMO-ish number:

Ben Butler and Mousepad Live at Mme Claude's (mp3 file)

More on their MySpace page. If you want to book Ben Butler and Mousepad (festivals! weddings! bar mitzvahs!), email marie@julietippex.com.

Rise and fall of the city of Dubai

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:10:30 GMT

Read today's papers and you'll find that there's another major financial crisis brewing, as banks like HSBC and the home of my own overdraft, RBS (now 84% owned by the British taxpayer) find themselves dangerously exposed to debt defaults, mostly in the construction industry, in the bling-bling dictatorship, Dubai.

Like everything else in Dubai (its highest building -- not, incidentally, the skyscraper sporting the huge portrait of the enclave's resident dictator, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum --is 40% taller than the next nearest rival), the debt crisis is one of elephantine proportions: $14 billion of syndicated loans to Dubai World are said to be looking very iffy indeed, and the total debt is estimated by some at about $90 billion, and others as far beyond that.

It would be tempting just to shrug this off, if it weren't for the fact that the Dubai hype reached even my post-materialist ears. Members of my family have been to Dubai, my bank lends my overdraft interest to the state's construction firms, my book editors are visiting with a view to writing books about the speculative bubble and the fascinating way in which it's burst.

"Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as Dubai?" asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?" The answer is partly that negative comment was actually a crime in Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum told critics to "shut up" and media was closely controlled to exclude anything which might damage investments or stop the influx of rich foreigners and investors.

It's also undoubtedly true that a rising tide, even if it doesn't quite float all boats, brooks no opposition. Dubai's population of 1.37 million (2006) is comprised of a small conservative Muslim indigenous population, and 85% expatriates, most of whom are low-paid construction and service workers from India and the Philippines. The bling state rides -- I suppose we should say "rode" -- on the back of unorganised, unregulated labour.

The people close to me -- editors, writers I know here in Berlin -- were interested in Dubai not just as a speculative bubble and a sort of Brechtian fable (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny played out in a 21st century which seems to have forgotten the 1920s), but because they're close to architect Rem Koolhaas, who was preparing to unleash his own sort of bubble on the city. Truly the architecture it deserved, you might say, but will now never get.

Here's a fairly superficial and, I'd say, immoral TV documentary by Piers Morgan about Dubai:

Watching that, my first reaction is "You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to live in a place like that!" It looks like everything I hate and avoid in the cities I know: endless anaemic shopping malls with ludicrously inflated prices, vapid celebrities and self-made, flabby entrepreneurs, absolutely zero culture you'd want to spend any time with (unless you're really into Kylie shows punctuated with "the world's largest fireworks display"), Sunday Times Rich List types with parasitic hangers-on, people with dyed blonde hair who talk about money and drink champagne, people who've never encountered a single interesting idea (let alone an idea critical of the kind of world they inhabit) in their lives, bubble-headed people floating about in a bubble economy.

Burst, Dubai, burst! And take your dictator with you! But don't take my bank, my sister, my editor, or the entire world financial system down into hell with you, please.

The late, mannerist years of identity politics

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:53:34 GMT

1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)

2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.

3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.

4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.

5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.

6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?

7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."

8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."

9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:

"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."

10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:

a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism

11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".

12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:

"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.

13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.

14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.

15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.

16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".

17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".

18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.

In a parallel world, I'm a gekigaka!

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:22:57 GMT

Monday's International Emmy Awards saw a win for Japan in the Comedy category. NHK's production of Hoshi Shinichi's Short Shorts presents "one author's tales of strange worlds, told with an odd accent, grownup fairy tales". Shinichi, who died in 1997, wrote over a thousand of these "short shorts", stories just three or four pages long. He's often called a sci-fi writer, but most of his fictions are earthbound, and concern parallel worlds where strange things happen. Here, for instance, is the tale of Mr Teal, a space travel insurance agent whose life is so mechanised that nobody notices he's dead:

And here's the tale of a woman brought to hospital by her boyfriend, who tells the staff she thinks she's a fox, because the last thing she said was kon, which is the bark of a fox in Japanese. In fact, she was starting to say kondo, which means "next time", and was trying to warn him that next time he cheated on her she'd leave him.

This is a very odd one. A young girl has a much older lover, who keeps her in the lap of luxury, in a room with strange white flowers and a fountain bath. He goes away on a trip, leaving her (totally naked) in the care of his butler. The servant has to relay the news that the old man has died in a car accident, but the young girl already knows it somehow:

There are times I wish I could draw well. I think manga, or the visual novel (The Crib Sheet prefers the term gekiga, or "drama pictures"), has the capacity to be a much higher artform than written-word-only novels. Just about anybody can write, but not so many can write and draw with talent. So it seems unfair that we generally rank visual novels lower than literary novels.

Japan tends to observe this hierarchy less. When Tomoko Miyata was visiting Berlin recently, she told us that her favourite writer is the mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge. He's still alive, but hasn't made any new manga since 1986. Here are a couple of rather remarkable films I found on YouTube, in which a fan has animated still Tsuge manga in a superbly weird, almost psychedelic style:

I think it's the capacity of drawing to evoke -- better than photography, film, or the written word -- parallel worlds which both resemble our world and don't that I like so much. That plus the fact that a single auteur-creator, sitting at a kotatsu table, can produce these worlds with very few resources except time, effort, skill and imagination. And possibly the fact that the manga industry has something abject and underground about it, rather like the world of indie record labels (the Wikipedia entry on gekiga basically says they were to Japan what rock was to the US). Is it too late for me to learn to draw and switch careers?

My noughties 3: Oskar in Tokyo

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:50:08 GMT

2003's Oskar Tennis Champion is my first proper album of the new decade, if you see Folktronic as a belated summary of 90s themes. Oskar draws its power from two collaborations with women artists: the Milky album Travels with a Donkey I made with my ex-wife Shazna in New York in early 2002, just before leaving for Tokyo, and the Mashcat mini-album Mashroom Haircat, recorded with Emi Necozawa when I arrived in Japan. What these records share with Oskar is the genre-collision I began to call vaudeville concrete; they were the kind of record that might have emerged if Georges Brassens had worked with Pierre Schaeffer, or Tom Lehrer had studied with Stockhausen.

It's a powerful combination. On the one hand you have the conservative, enduring, folksy appeal of strong narrative lines, universal timeless themes, stories, content. On the other radical, innovative Modernism, and with it a certain elitist formalism, futurism, the shock of the new, the untried, the experimental. How to reconcile them? Well, one method is to do what the brilliant physical, textural cine-clown Jacques Tati did in Mon Oncle and Playtime; present an exaggeratedly pure and dogmatic Modernism whilst making a folksy satire on it. Another might be to do the vaudeville in the songwriting and lyrics, and the concrete in the music by, for instance, bringing in a formalist collaborator -- here, John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh, the "reproducer" with a license to "fuck things up" musically. In fact -- as the pre-mixed, pre-reproduced Oskar Originals show -- Talaga improved the record no end.

I take the title of Oskar Tennis Champion from an early Tati short. The album is recorded in Tokyo, where I've moved after being shocked by 9/11. The destruction of the WTC hangs over Oskar Tennis Champion, thematically, like a low-flying passenger jet. How could it not? I saw them, those jets, with my own eyes. Well, one of them, with one eye. So how does 9/11 impact on the Oskar album? Because this is a record in which Modernist utopia slips on a banana skin, and 9/11 was modernity slipping on a very big banana skin (religion, the irrational, resentment, the guerilla resistance, self-appointed nemesis, call it what you will).

You know those Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd films where the clown is dangling from the clockface of a 1920s skyscraper, or saved only by the position of an open window when a whole facade crashes down? The collapse of the graph-paper rationality of the World Trade Center seemed like one of those moments -- as in a Tati film, modernity had been challenged by something absurd, insignificant, clumsy, stubbornly human. The irrational, the uncontrollable, a slight change in plan leading to clumsy catastrophe, and slapstick about clumsy catastrophe. In retrospect, it's particularly interesting to me that this theme plays out in Oskar so much on the level of a comedy of gesture and sonics, just as it does in Tati's Playtime:

The retro-Modernist side of the equation involved delving back into the theories of the Russian formalists, and particularly Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, which I finessed into a concept I called disorienteering. Needless to say, living in Tokyo without speaking Japanese was, itself, a form of disorienteering for me, a time of being pleasantly lost, and a series of irrational episodes played out in a relentlessly Modernist cityscape. The irrational defamiliarization on display in Oskar was a "logical" and "natural" choice for someone in those circumstances.

There's a ton of documentation of the making of Oskar on the Momus website, but let's move on to a track-by-track play-through.

Spooky Kabuki: This sprechgesang-soundscape establishes the ostranenie pretty quickly: an unreliable narrator, a pirate, tells us that "some fear us, others admire us" and asks (or commands) us to follow him into unknown realms, before hissing "Trust me, you're lost!" The relativism, unreliability and estrangement are mirrored by the music, which melds my Cantonese Opera samples with John Talaga's edits and additions, creating a maelstrom, a whirling storm, a tempest which may wreck us on Prospero's Island, or land us in Japan.

Is It Because I'm a Pirate?: The pentatonic scales, Chinese and Japanese instrumentation and vocal mannerisms of these first two tracks remind me that my initial idea was to make an entire album of ostranenie-pop modeled on the Cantonese Opera I heard playing in the kitchen at Vanessa Weng's dumpling restaurant on Eldridge Street in New York. Then when I got to Japan I went to Nadiff and bought a fistful of CDs of avant garde classical music on the Fontec label, records in which trad Japanese instruments were used in avant ways, and sampled those to create my virtual instruments. Here the pirate-narrator of the first track becomes a more comedic character, and one of the album's main themes -- Political Correctness and Identity Politics -- comes to the fore. The pirate is trying to date a waitress, and tells her not to be prejudiced by stereotypes of piracy which, in fact, he lives up to in every detail. "When not slitting throats of the people on boats I am warm and surprisingly sensitive", the pirate tells her. The story is partly based on a minor flirtation I was trying to have with Kei, a very beautiful waitress at the Organic Cafe who really did say "I like your eyepatch!" (though it's Shizu who voices the line here).

Multiplying Love: A slight return to the Analog Baroque style (harpsichords, through-composition) of Little Red Songbook, but with more glitching going on. The moral is a "modest proposal", a defence of polyamory. Shizu and I had an open relationship of sorts; I was allowed to flirt. But I felt guilty about it, and this song is a deliberately feeble justification: "If love is good, as most agree, loving two must be twice as good..." It's logical, but there's a banana-skin just waiting in the argument.

Scottish Lips: Based on the title of a Jean Arp painting I'd seen in a Surrealism exhibition at Tate Modern, this song continues the PC-identity politics theme. As a Scot in Tokyo, I am exotic, objectified, sexualised (in the song I claim to be, anyway, just as the pirate claims to be stereotyped as a pirate in track 2). I chide the listener for doing this, and try to redirect attention to my other attributes -- my cooking skills, for instance. Oh, the unreliable narrator was only joking about that, he can't cook! Okay, then, how about my spirit and mind? It's a song about the futility -- and the arrogance -- of trying to micromanage people's responses to you. This is still a live favourite; I like the concision and the spareness. The melody resembles Waltzing Matilda, and the backing track has some nice Kreidler drum samples in it. And the song introduces Scottishness (and a Scottish accent), a theme that'll crop up later in the album (The Laird of Inversnecky) and later in the decade (Summerisle, Joemus). It took Tokyo to rustle out my inner Scot!

My Sperm is Not Your Enemy: This is comedy lieder, really. I was listening to a lot of Schubert and Schumann. Not that they'd have written songs about sperm -- not directly, anyway. This is a faux-feminist song which proclaims (over synthetic fanfares) that "who controls the sperm of man controls the world". It's a mock-heroic, tongue-in-cheek defense of bukkake, the spermtastic splatterfest porn subgenre invented in Japan. It's sperm-manipulation as feminist empowerment: "All the presidents and kings, they control gold, you control these pearls..." When Shizu heard it she shouted "It is our enemy! It is!"

Oskar Tennis Champion: The title track tells the tale of a certain Uncle Oskar, an enthusiast for Modernism who encounters a series of slapstick misfortunes on his way to Le Corbusier's Radiant City. The soundscape -- very Pierre Schaeffer-over-oompah -- samples freely from a sonic art project called Made in Sumida, in which Japanese artist Momoyo Torimitsu recorded the sound of family-scaled industrial workshops up and down Tokyo's Sumida River; print shops, paint shops. The Bauhaus steps on a rake, but where's Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos when you need them? Uncle Oskar eventually becomes Modernism's King Kong, its nemesis. It's a funny song, but 9/11 (more slap, less schtick) overshadows it.

A Little Schubert: The Germanic lieder influence continues in a lyric I wrote in English then translated via Babelfish into deliberately-bad German. If the music could have digital errors in it (Kim Cascone's The Aesthetics of Failure), well, so could the lyrics! This is Glitch-German. The theme is the consoling effect of music in the face of various failures, and above all the inevitability of that final technical malfunction, death.

The Laird of Inversnecky: A refreshing pop song about 20th century Scottish vaudeville, boasting rather lovely chords and melody. The lyric amalgamates various Scottish actor-comedians, from Harry Gordon (inventor of the Laird of Inversnecky, the Reverend I.M. Jolly, and so on) via Rikki Fulton to Stanley Baxter. The names of music halls, comedians, and their characters create a nostalgia which is estranged by the Japanese setting: we're in 21st century Tokyo here, not 20th Century Portobello, Glasgow, Aberdeen or the Isle of Bute. In the background, Bladerunnerish, you can hear the calls of yakimono street vendors.

The Last Communist: The Modernist Utopia theme takes on a Soviet tinge (Shklovsky, after all, was a Soviet critic). The narrator is "the last communist", a kind of caretaker keeping a building -- and a set of ideals -- alive, waiting for communism to come back into favour (he's also the "first communist"). The song happened thanks to the ostranenie of web translation: I was reading Emi Necozawa's web diary, translating it with very inadequate software, and she mentioned a building with a very "high-so" atmosphere. The web translation thought this was "high Soviet"; in fact, Emi meant "high society". I liked the idea of a compound that was preserving "high Soviet" ideals, or perhaps incubating them for a future society. The unused lyrics page reveals that this song was originally going to be called Reading Karl and Groucho Marx.

Pierrot Lunaire: This is a song I wrote in New York for Emi Necozawa during my Alberto Camerini phase. The arrangement here is so different from the one I use live that it sounds like a different song -- it's in waltz time, then bursts into disco 4/4. It brings out the pathos of the lyric, which I think is me getting inside Shizu's view of me (her in Tokyo, me in New York) and expressing her frustration: "And the puppet girls kiss you up there on the moon, they must know I miss you, please come back soon..." The frustrating thing about this puppet, though, is that he has no heart, and nobody seems quite sure who controls the string that leads to his cock.

Beowulf (I Am Deformed): I perform this so often now -- usually at the beginning of my live set -- that it's odd to hear it here in context. You could see it as a continuation of the "mischief with political correctness" theme: this avenging hero is deformed, a cripple with an appalling set of disabilities. As Talaga deforms the music, the narrator lists his defects, his physical glitches, while demanding the cruel audience to "Stop laughing!" He has come to save Denmark... and he is deformed. I got the idea from a clip of an old french vaudevillian singing a comedy number about his own ugliness. And from having to listen to Beowulf at university, in a language lab, in Old English.

Electrosexual Sewing Machine: Musically this owes something to Sakamoto's Thatness and Thereness. Lyrically, it's Maeterlinck -- he wrote a play in which twelve blind people are stumbling about in a forest. A lot of these songs are actually about me coming to terms with the fact that my eye won't get better (this was now clear) and that I'm now "partially sighted" and somewhat freakish.

A Lapdog: Shizu took me to dinner with a very beautiful girl called Akiko. I tried to impress with talk of the Situationists, but she was much more impressed by a chihuahua nearby. When I saw this, I "froze her out" -- sent her to Antarctica, figuratively speaking. The song (slightly inspired by an Ivor Cutler poem called Antarctica, in which Mr Cutler wanders in a place like a penguin house, and startles the whole of Antarctica by pissing in a corner of the ice shelf) then imagines poor Akiko wandering lost in a freezing landscape, the chihuahua, now dead, poking its little head out from between her buttons.

Lovely Tree: This is a song I wrote for the Milky album. It came to me in a dream, pretty much entire. It has a Blake-like simplicity, but I think it's actually what I wanted my ex-wife Shazna to say to me, as we parted and I grew old: "Keep, lovely tree, your leaves in winter time". Talk of wasteland and snow reminds me that there's a perceptive Amazon customer review that points out how much of this album is set in cold landscapes.

Palm Deathtop: A close friend -- and ex-girlfriend -- of mine, Rika, committed suicide in New York City in 2002. This song refers to that, one of the saddest and most shocking events in my life (I've lost very few people). It's also about the fact that the artist and illustrator Jorge Colombo told me he kept a list of dead friends on his Palm Pilot. I imagined an app -- "new vaporware" -- dedicated specifically to keeping track of which friends are alive, which dead.

Ringtone Cycle: After a silence there follows a reprise, by Adam Bruneau (the other half of American Patchwork signings The Super Madrigal Brothers), of some of the musical themes of the album. It's as if Oskar Tennis Champion has become a game on the Nintendo DS. These are poignant and lovely, and remind you that this album has some great melodies popping out all over the place. It also reminds me of how important the young artists I'd signed to my label (and the tour we made across the US that year) were to my musical transformation. They rejuvenated me. I should also mention Robert Duckworth, who introduced me to the work of some of the Parisian people I'd work with soon (Hypo, o.lamm); Reika Yamashita, who educated me, in her Nishi-Ogikubo bedsit, about Haruomi Hosono, Miharu Koshi and Carsten Nicolai; Digiki, who remixed Beowulf; and Florian Perret, who made the excellent sleeve and also worked with me, that year, on a project for LA MoCA, an absurdist animated lecture called Suffusia: A Beautiful Life. Laurent Baudoux, Keiko Uenishi, Hirono Nishiyama and Nobukazu Takemura also influenced the record.

Overall, in retrospect, I think Oskar Tennis Champion is a very ambitious and exciting album, funny, provocative and serious, bursting with ideas but also able to be moving and personal, oblique yet also politically thoughtful, provocative and, artistically, richly suggestive. Rather than Folktronic (which is where many of my American listeners took their leave of me), this is the record which would map out my noughties, texturally, conceptually, thematically. I'm actually very proud of it. It also doesn't sound sonically dated to me; I think that by this point I'd arrived at a style that was completely my own. At the same time, the glitch and "aesthetics of failure" stuff does root it in the early 21st century.

Buy Oskar Tennis Champion from Cherry Red (UK) or Darla (US).

Warsaw walky-talky

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:46:17 GMT

I used to do travelogue podcasts fairly regularly. They're collected here, but there hasn't been a new one since January 2007, because the recorder I used to use stopped working. But in Warsaw I made a nice big juicy long one in which I rave about the city's Stalinist architecture, interview my fellow artistes at the Song Is You festival, look at some art, throw some bouncy balls down a street, get a headache, eat cold herring in apple sauce, and run into members of design group Åbäke.

Warsaw Podcast (mp3 file, 67 mins 22 secs, 33MB)

Above you see some of the details referred to in the walky-talk -- a decorated communist-era building (now a Pizza Hut) near the Central Square, some funerary patisserie (that's what the window looked like to me, anyway). Below you see the forecurl style I was sporting as a tribute to Kantor (excellent video of The Dead Class under that link), and a local Victorian-style dandy.

And finally some of the pretty, Disneyfied architecture of the old town, and Kajsa and Benjamin from Åbäke.

People in gold suits

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:36:09 GMT

Who should I run into at breakfast this morning in the Hotel Metropol, Warsaw, but Kajsa and Benjamin from Abake? Swedish Kajsa is the cover star of my Ocky Milk album, and French Benjamin is also part of music fashion label Kitsune. They told me they'd come to Warsaw to visit the artist Pawel Althamer, and started describing his Common Tasks project to me.

Like Abake (who mount socially-oriented conceptual projects like repairing park benches or setting up plant exchange schemes, and describe it as "design"), Althamer makes social interventions. For Sculpture Munster he made a path leading into the middle of a barley field, for instance. Common Task involves him dressing up a group of his Warsaw neighbours (he lives in a somewhat Stalinist tower block) in sci-fi gold suits and flying them (sometimes in a gold-painted Boeing 737) to various utopian locations: the Atomium in Brussels, Brasilia, or to Mali to meet the Dogon tribe.

Listening to Kajsa and Benjamin describing this over breakfast, I experienced "comparative visit envy". I'd come to Warsaw to sing (dressed up in a pair of spectacles with forecurls attached, as it happens). They'd come for a studio visit with this very interesting artist.

But actually Pawel Althamer had been a part of my visit too. As you'll hear when I post an hour-long podcast of my Warsaw wanderings tomorrow, I spent a while in front of a video of his yesterday at the CSW art museum. In 1997 Althamer selected a group of homeless people and got them to undress, hold hands, and dance naked in a ring in an empty white cube gallery space. I spent a minute or so describing the flabby bodies as they crossed the screen one by one. I didn't realise they were tramps; what interested me was how their middle-aged sag made it difficult to tell men and women apart.

A decade later Althamer would have dressed his tramps in gold foil and sent them on a golden plane to witness wonders.

Stretchmarks on a rock cabbage

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:37:09 GMT

Krautrock - the Rebirth of Germany is a BBC4 documentary on the mystical electronic music British rock critics dubbed "Krautrock" (which is a bit like calling Alberto Camerini a "Woprocker"). Directed by Ben Whalley, the film is a companion to the one I linked the other day about UK synthpop, Synth Britannia.

Does anyone else see the influence of Adam Curtis here? The voice-over sounds a bit Curtis-like, and Whalley has a similar approach to selecting and editing clips. Whenever I think of Adam Curtis I think of the artist Luke Fowler's documentaries, which seem to have headed even further out in the same direction. Like Curtis, Fowler selects dramatic, texturally-interesting clips -- glimpses of radical sixties and seventies subcultures. Whalley does the same thing: his very short clip of Kraftwerk dancing, for instance, is masterfully placed as a glimpse that leaves you wanting more.

If documentaries move more in this direction it's not hard to imagine them employing an interesting and successful rule Fowler sets himself to keep his textures consistent, and his subjects consistently mythical: never show people as they look today. Watching these documentaries, it's hard not to be distracted by counting the lines on Iggy Pop's stomach or regretting the fact that a surviving member of Popol Vuh who looks as if he's undergoing chemotherapy is lighting up cigarettes on camera. We could say that all documentaries about cool and charismatic subcultures are doomed to a basically bathetic narrative structure (it's nature's very own bathos, but that shouldn't excuse it) when they balance young, good looking, cool people against the prunes they inevitably become. The viewer is forced into playing a constant game of Spot the Difference, rather than experiencing the full revelation of an aesthetic revolution at its peak. The end result is a sort of temporal embourgeoisement. "Don't worry," this narrative structure seems to say "we all go slack and paunchy in the end. Even the visionaries."

Then again, there is a fascination in discovering that venues which are part of past legend are also part of your regular experience. Before watching this documentary I didn't realise that the Zodiak Arts Club, a Berlin experimental arts centre founded by Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster, is what I know today as HAU2, part of the Hebbel-am-Ufer theatre complex in Kreuzberg where we watched the Tokio Shibuya theatre season last month.

There are other niggling critiques you could make of the Krautrock doc. The presence of Iggy Pop and the absence of Eno, for instance, is odd. Julian Cope could usefully have popped up at some point. They could have employed a critic to sift bad records of the period from good. Kraftwerk is arguably over-familiar and part of a different genre.

Then there's the questionable scene-setting at the beginning, where footage of 1968 student disturbances in Berlin is played while the script tells us that pop music in Germany at the time was Schlager, which said nothing about "the reality of what was happening on the streets". If the documentarists are trying to set up a "Punk swept away Prog" sort of scenario, they're barking up the wrong tree. First of all, Schlager is still with us; its audience of working class Germans in kniepes doesn't overlap with the Krautrock audience at all. Secondly, Krautrock has as little relevance to urban political uprisings as Schlager has; it's a music of mystical introspection, for the most part recorded in country barns.

Grousing aside, though, this is a very interesting film, and I'd like to see BBC4 continue to employ Ben Whalley. They should also think about screening Luke Fowler's film about Cornelius Cardew, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, though, because Fowler shows how a documentary about a visionary artist can, itself, be visionary art. It's a good deal more uplifting than counting Iggy Pop's stretchmarks.

A judgment of Paris

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:55:54 GMT

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.

Electronic harlequins

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:24:02 GMT

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

Let's improve Western documentaries about Japanese street style!

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:28:49 GMT

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!

Warszawa, Berlin

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:44:52 GMT

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.

My noughties 2: The Heliogabalus of Orchard Street

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:00:48 GMT

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.

Appalachia: I'd call this Cornelius-influenced "ring modulation baroque". I remember playing it live for the first time at Tonic, and Arto Lindsay shouting at the soundcheck "Momus, it's distorted!" Which is funny if you know Arto's noise history. This was supposed to sound like Actress, but didn't.

Smooth Folk Singer: The brutally simple sampling style here (I think it's a Leadbelly groove) owes something to Dymaxion, who'd recently worked with Takako Minekawa. There's a 90s-style campy irony here which grates a bit now, lots of Stylophone, and you can hear New York City police sirens in the background. It's Adorno meeting Stephin Merritt, with a backbeat. I recall thinking this record was going to be hugely popular in America, as big a seller as 69 Love Songs. It wasn't.

Mountain Music: The American Indian museum at Battery Park was a big influence; I bought some CDs of ethnic fiddle music which get used a lot, meshed with the Country Music patterns on my Technics KN600. Inspired by the same museum, Shizu started making beadwork samplers with "digital" pine trees on them (shapes that translated easily to Jack Howell's Flash programming when Folktonic became Folktronia, an exhibition at Zach Feuer's gallery in Chelsea). A bit later, concept-country band Big and Rich would mine the same seams. I recall Rednex being important too. Trashy country-inflected chart pop, Beck, Bruce Haack...

Simple Men: John Cage percussion accompanies a ditty which sites in Appalachia Adorno's ideas about our projection of "soul" onto the poor. The history of the recording of folk music in America is the history of Jews descending from the cities to pass amongst -- or pass for -- yokels (hello Robert Zimmerman!). It's a bit like Thomas Jerome Newton's limo sweeping by astonished hillbillies in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Two incredibly incompatible cultures (opposite Gini-spectrum ends) gawping at each other.

Finnegan the Folk Hero: But if you allow that fakeness, you allow folk to update itself. Why shouldn't folk be as relevant to the 2000 NASDAQ crash as the 1929 stock market crash and the depression which followed it? Are only red states allowed to folk? What about blue ones? And what about web designers down on their luck, are they to go unsung?

Protestant Art: I pit the sensibility described in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ("Keep your receipts!") against the excesses of the New York art world. This was a time of NEA scandals; people didn't want their hard-earned tax dollars spent on Piss Christs and scato-AIDS performances. It's Charles Ives, Grandma Moses and the Nazis versus Ron Athey, Karen Finlay and Chris Ofili! Which side are you on?

US Knitting: And what if your sense of American folk comes via American TV? From Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons? As I speculate in the Fakeways documentary, "For a generation whose knowledge of the world comes through media, there's no gap between media pastiche and sincere self-expression, whatever that is." Why shouldn't you learn American Gothic values from TV, or some other artform? Thornton Wilder's Stage Manager in Our Town, doesn't he owe something to Brecht? And this song, is it pastiching Dylan's John Wesley Harding album, or David Ackles' American Gothic? Can we feel, here, the results of several coast-to-coast Momus tours, and the rush of American rural landscapes against a car windscreen?

Jarre in Hicksville: Here we reach a more poignant Outsider Pop, Avant Pop, or Unpop. I'm sampling Patterns of Plants by Mamoru Fujieda, so things take a more introverted, Japanese turn. The theme is how electronics destroy indigenous culture of small towns: "They've built themselves a synthesiser, smashed their old guitars". This is pomo meta -- music about music, song about songs. It's a bit clever-clever, a bit touching too. The Harry Partch feel is nice.

Taperecorder Man: Recounts Dylan's electric "betrayal" of his folk roots at the Newport Folk Festival, but makes it a backstage battle between Alan Lomax and Dylan, resulting in the apocryphal moment when "folk musique concrete" is invented. Here the theme and the sound meld quite well; it really is the blues reworked by Raymond Scott, with Alan Lomax samples thrown in and lots of fake crackle.

Little Apples: I play on the emotions in a certain kind of cerebral country song -- Country Roads, Virginia on my Mind -- stretching wordy, alienated verses into weirdly irregular shapes. There are millennial tech references (Bryce, the Apple G4 Cube) and samples from Alberto Camerini, an obscure Italian synth pierrot. Sci-fi banjos, geodesic domes, and a sort of appealing melancholia missing earlier on the record.

Robocowboys: Gary Numan in a spaghetti western! Cowboys singing along to Texas Instruments! The lonely crowd! The paradox of an individualism where "everybody does it like no-else can" and "alienation's a kind of belonging". Should've been a single!

Psychopathia Sexualis: The most obviously Krafft-Ebing inspired song on the album. High IQ academics study bestial Anytown USA residents. A German sexual analysis of America, a scientific take on irrational sexuality and religion: "Evening Reverend, how's your sister, your lovely sister your wife?" A typical American town... with transparent walls.

Folk Me Amadeus: Here the album's main theme ends; this really sums it all up. Amidst Falco references and the riff from Europe's The Final Countdown, I update the tale of 1960s folk rock: "My children were fair and wore stars in their hair, now they're bald, watch TV and buy New Age CDs". But -- and it's a sort of redemption -- "the lack of deeper meaning's getting deeper all the time". Cotton-Eye Joe by Rednex actually has me crying by the end of the song, garlanded by the poignant bleeps of Palm Pilots.

Handheld: And speaking of Palm Pilots, here's a love song to one of the critters. There's an influence from Japanese concepto-pop here; Cornelius and Delaware. And of course from Holger Hiller's Moog reading of Hindemith's Wir Bauen Ein Stadt. The folk theme has ended; we're back to baroque. The robot voice is done well -- if only the whole album had been sung like this! I'm not too happy with the sound of my voice elsewhere.

The Penis Song: The theme has now gone; we pull out all the stops -- and all the dick jokes. This is basically Robb Wilton or Georges Brassens-style bawdy variety, designed to be a live favourite. Monty Python looms large, and maybe a certain kind of campy Williamsburg cabaret.

Heliogabalus: A return to classic Momus and classical themes. I'd been watching I Claudius on DVD. And there's an echo of Oscar Wilde in the line about "the mantle of the evil always claimed by joyless vultures to explain the strange allure of other cultures". You can hear that I was mostly hanging out with gay people in New York.

Going for a Walk with a Line: From here on the album is in medieval-prog mode (although this number is more of a rap), so it's a reversion to my 1999 style. That fact makes it feel like the record is moving backwards in time, not forwards; like it's the end of a 90s logic, not the beginning of a noughties logic. Here we have the Dufay Collective influence, Paul Klee, Germanic spirituality, lots of BBC Radiophonic Workshop references. I like the introversion, the dreamy imagination. Seeing the Prinzhorn Collection of art by the mentally ill at the Drawing Centre influenced this. The Nazis' Entartete Kunst show made no distinction between Klee and the lunatic asylum. Something of the atmosphere in this track also informs the German radiophonic piece about me, 700 Minuten Beim Flaneur. So I guess this actually does point forward to my "German period".

The Lady of Shallott: This is a demo of the Kahimi Karie track from 1999, with inserts of the studio recording. It's musically more interesting than most of Folktronic, deeper somehow. Kate Bush, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...

Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan: Manhattan imagined from London via Eno's late 1970s stay here. Splicing between demos and originals, I'm still learning editing, as you can hear. These songs rarely got mentioned by reviewers, but they're by far the best on the record, though outside the concept. There's more than mere jokiness. Mentions NY Chinatown before I lived there! The snows of Villon are falling on Manhattan as rain.

Pygmalism: This -- in some ways my masterpiece -- melds Kubrick's 2001, Bladerunner and Pymalion. It's typically "overdetermined" -- there's really way more going on than anyone has a right to expect from pop music. The perfect end to an imperfect record.

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.

Peter Principle saves Japan

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:55:02 GMT

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.

A license to look strange, with the blessing of Bless

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:44:24 GMT

"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.

i had a dream where I hung out with momus...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:36:15 GMT

Did I ever appear in one of your dreams?

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