MOMUS - Ocky Milk  CD (American Patchwork: AMPATCH007: 708527100721)  $12.00

EXCLUSIVE.  Picasso, so they say, had to learn to paint like an adult before he could start scrawling like a child. Maybe the same is true for indie veteran Momus, because on his new album "Ocky Milk" he's gone far beyond the literary singer-songwriter fare of his 90s records (think Tom Lehrer with a laptop). The new record is strange, twilit stuff. Pop songs get fed through Google translation engines then crooned underwater, absurd vaudeville numbers about death accompany a Bonnie Prince Charlie car commercial shot in Japan. The weirdest thing, though, is just how relaxing it ends up feeling. Like having your back scratched as you fall asleep. Ocky Milk is the new album from Momus. "I'm planning my next album, The Friendly Album," Momus wrote on his blog Click Opera back in March 2005. "And 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. It will -- it should -- contain the deep sensuality of Renaissance lute music, or bossa nova. You should be able to put it on and just let it hover in the background all the way through, structuring your contentment in a self-effacing, classical, cool and elegant way. I don't know if I'm capable of making music that serene and sensual, but I want to try. Perhaps it'll turn out terribly banal, 15 takes on Don't Worry, Be Happy! But that's a risk worth running. Because the values of pleasure and friendliness, modesty and elegance seem more important than ever to me right now. In a world dominated by "aggressive normality", perhaps evoking strange kindness is the most subversive, interesting and challenging thing an artist could do." By September 2005 that idea had evolved. The record was now codenamed The Shepherd and was going to contain elements of Torch, or rather, the sentimental drinking music known in Japan as Enka. "Pentatonic Bucolic Torch," Momus called it. "Something about the relaxed sensuality, combined with an undertone of aching hunger, appeals to me," he wrote. Torch would offset the pastoral friendliness of the original idea, make it more dynamic, yearning... and strange: "Torch tends to derive its emotional power from retreating always to familiar tricks, treading well-worn paths. But when we hear Torch in a foreign language using unfamiliar scales and chord sequences (and I'm also interested in Thai Torch, and Arabic Torch), it has this odd and interesting combination of weirdness and aggressive normality going on. How could you reproduce that fragile combination, give the listener the impression of padding along a well-worn path through an unfamiliar landscape?" With those two ideas in place, in November Momus flew Brooklyn producer Rusty Santos (he recorded Animal Collective's Sung Tongs) over to Berlin to start work on the album. For a month they recorded songs of all tempos, shapes, and sizes. After Rusty went back to New York, Momus continued on his own, completing the album during a two- month stay in Osaka, where he added the sound of real Enka singers recorded in the alleys of Shinsekai, the shabby but warm-hearted entertainment district around the Osaka Tower. The album was then extensively tweaked during a three-month stay in New York, where Momus was working as an Unreliable Tour Guide in the Whitney Biennial (an extension of the unreliable narrator device used in so many of his early songs). Throughout the spring John Talaga, the brilliant sound manipulator from Michigan, worked on electronic transitions, solos and structural alterations; split apart even as it was bound together, the record was suddenly wrapped in a subtle maelstrom of melting sound. Finally, in early summer 2006, Ocky Milk (named after Ocky the Milkman, a character in Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milk Wood) was complete. The finished record has a hermetic, poetic feel, mysterious and serene, with surreal lyrics that sound like they've been misheard or mistranslated, and music that blurs idioms and cultures: a segue from permagasm to pleasantness. Ocky now takes its place as the third record in what you could call Momus' Berlin Trilogy, a sequence of albums that began with 2003's vaudeville Modernist "Oskar Tennis Champion" and contined with 2005's "Otto Spooky" (a sort of Shinto-inspired World Music). Please enjoy this friendly, mysterious album! Reviews: Momus' site | Expatia interview | Textura | Erasing Clouds | Treblezine

MOMUS - Otto Spooky  CD (American Patchwork: AMPATCH006: 708527100622)  $12.00

EXCLUSIVE.  'Otto Spooky' is the new album from Momus, otherwise known as Scotsman Nick Currie -- perhaps the world's most infamous singer of electronic folk songs. Momus is old, but he keeps fresh by moving around the world -- since the late 90s he's lived in London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo, and he's currently to be found housed in the communist opulence of the Karl Marx Allee in East Berlin. It's here, in the spring and summer of 2004, that Momus recorded 'Otto Spooky'. 'Fake folk', 'Future Folk' or 'Analog Baroque', call it what you will; it's Burl Ives duetting with Bruce Haack, Bertolt Brecht teamed up with Ekkehard Ehlers. 'Otto Spooky' is 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. It's the record Paul Klee would have made if he'd gone for a walk with a song instead of a line. It's an underground film about Robin Hood scored by Renaldo and the Loaf. It's a travelogue in the sort of psychedelic folk style that sentimental computers use when they sing around camp fires, high on Liquid Crystal Diodes. 'Otto Spooky' shares its flavor of gentle pagan sensuality (there's a wink in the direction of cult British horror film 'The Wicker Man') with the record Momus recorded in 2003 with French computer folk musician Anne Laplantine, 'Summerisle'. But 'Summerisle' was very much Anne's record -- strange, haunting, nonsensical, random, abstract. 'Otto' is more narrative-based, more pop. In fact, it makes more sense to see it as the follow-up to 'Oskar Tennis Champion', the slapstick Modernist album Momus made in Tokyo in 2002. 'Oskar' and 'Otto' have in common vigourous sonic reworkings by John Talaga of Michigan -- quite simply the world's greatest neo-Dada sound designer. On 'Oskar' John 'reproduced' the tracks, taking them to pieces and building them back up from scratch; here he's confined himself to 'Song Morphs', dramatic transitions between the songs. They're designed to pleasantly disorient the listeners, swinging them giddily from one carousel to the next; from A to B via Z. Because this is a Momus album, and Momus is nothing if not a storyteller, there's lore galore. The first track, a sort of update on 'Greensleeves' set in a perspex Japanese garden, sees a computer singing 'I'm going to rape you', then, when his partner agrees, fretting 'Don't say okay because then it's not rape!' That's followed by an eerie paen to spring, then there's a tribute to Japanese comedian Ken Shimura and his famous character, the lustful but impotent 'idiot king' Baka Tono. Next comes a song in Arabic scales, sung in French, in which a Tripoli taxi driver explains the joys of giving your spouse a good slap in the face. Before the song called 'Lady Fancy Knickers' (which seems to be about insulating tape, but turns into a thundering of Mongol horsemen's hooves) there's the song which sees Robin Hood exchange his bow and arrow for a wheelchair and colostomy bag after a serious beating from his less scrupulous rival, Dooh Nibor. Then there's the song describing a video game in which you compose lute scores and shoot off panda's heads. (Naturally.) There's the song from a children's TV show from some fictional, frightening fascist republic, the ode to fat girlfriends, the blues song describing, apparently, a sexual encounter with God, the song about divining for water in an obscure African language, the sarcastic demolition of the faith of Mel Gibson ('Jesus in Furs'), the Elizabethan eunuch song about the joys of walking with a bassoon in the rain, the recitative telling the true story of the drowning of a team of immigrant Chinese cockle pickers off the coast of England, and, finally, the stately tale of two homosexual archeologists who meet Death in Italy. (Death, by the way, has the voice of the demonstration record that used to come with every Edison phonograph. But you knew that already, didn't you?) Odd. Spooky. Utterly 'Otto'. Madly and magnificently Momus. Tracks: 1. Sempreverde 2. Life of the Fields 3. Corkscrew King 4. Klaxon 5. Robin Hood 6. Lady Fancy Knickers 7. Lute Score 8. Belvedere 9. Your Fat Friend 10. Mr Ulysses 11. Water Song 12. Jesus In Furs 13. Bantam Boys 14. Cockle Pickers 15. The Artist Overwhelmed

MOMUS - Oskar Tennis Champion  CD (American Patchwork: AMPATCH005: 708527100523)  $12.25

EXCLUSIVE.  Born in Scotland, and a veteran of UK indie labels like 4AD, Cherry Red and Creation, the musician, essayist, traveller, scenester and artist known as Momus began releasing his 'analog baroque' electronic chamber pop records in the US in the late 1990s. He moved to New York in 2000 in order to host a regular multimedia cabaret event at the Knitting Factory called 'Electronics In The 18th Century' and ended up staying two years, during which time he documented the early days of Fischerspooner in an audio documentary broadcast on WFMU, held a one man art show in a Chelsea gallery, released an album of 'glitch folk' called 'Folktronic', wrote essays for magazines like Index, Metropolis and Black Book (as well as his extensive website) and started a record label called American Patchwork, inspired by the late Alan Lomax. In early 2002, fleeing terrorism, recession and the Bush administration, Momus relocated to Tokyo. The album 'Oskar Tennis Champion' was recorded in the Nakameguro district where artists like Cornelius and Kahimi Karie -- both Momus collaborators -- continue the style formerly known as Shibuya-kei (now termed 'Nakame-kei'). 'Oskar Tennis Champion' was originally going to be a combination of musique concrete and the oriental theatre music of kabuki and Cantonese opera, but soon, under the influence of Jacques Tati's film 'Playtime', it went in a different direction, focusing on the juxtaposition of electroacoustic avant sound with vaudeville-style stories and slapstick. This direction was rehearsed in albums Momus co-wrote and produced for Mashcat (Japanese singer Emi Necozawa) and Milky (his ex-wife Shazna) for Japanese labels. This trilogy of albums ('Mashroom Haircat', 'Travels With A Donkey' and finally 'Oskar Tennis Champion', the only one available outside Japan) represented Momus' need to reconcile a love of new experimental laptop groups like Scratch Pet Land, DAT Politics and Discom with his own particular evolution of the traditional song format -- a unique mix of pastiche and unreliable narration, role playing, kulturkritik, comedy, provocation and devil's advocacy. Although Momus has guested as a vocalist on the recordings of many artists, from Kreidler to Bran Van 3000 and the 6ths, he tends to keep his own recordings very much to himself. 'Oskar Tennis Champion' marks a radical departure from this work habit: the entire album has been tweaked, mangled, glitched up and remixed by a young 'reproducer' based in Bay City, Michigan: 22 year-old John Talaga, who also makes records under the name Fashion Flesh and forms one half of the Super Madrigal Brothers, the American Patchwork signings who dominated the Darla sales chart through 2002 and wowed audiences on Momus' summer 2002 American Patchwork tour. John's work put the album into more radical sonic territory than Momus albums usually inhabit, fulfilling his ambition to make something that satisfies his inner Georges Brassens as well as his inner Pierre Schaeffer. The themes of the songs on 'Oskar Tennis Champion' are as diverse, ambiguous and playful as ever: here are politically-correct pirates and disabled epic heroes, 20th century Scottish vaudeville turns, Bauhaus design enthusiasts who fall victim to slapstick pratfalls, victims of bukkake reconstrued as controllers of sperm (and therefore the future of man), sentimental Schubert fans and optimistic communists, puppets and pierrots who rap about Henry Darger, blind guides who abandon their wards, sexual sewing machines and pretty Japanese girls who wander in Antarctica with tiny frozen lapdogs poking out of their coats. Business unusual, then, as usual. Momus website: www.demon.co.uk/momus Essays about the making of 'Oskar Tennis Champion': www.demon.co.uk/momus/makingoskar1.html 'Oskar Tennis Champion' lyrics: www.demon.co.uk/momus/oskarlyrics.html

SUPER MADRIGAL BROTHERS - Shakestation  CD (American Patchwork: AMPATCH-003: 708527100325)  $12.00

EXCLUSIVE.  Momus writes: 'I discovered Adam Bruneau (alias Oliver Cobol) when the young Georgian sent me an intriguing record called '8 Bit Christmas' towards the end of 2001. I was with my friend Toog in New York when we heard it, and it became our favourite record: melodic, cute, full of nostalgia for the artificial landscapes of 1980s computer games. At about the same time, on tour in Detroit, I met John Talaga (alias Sir John Fashion Flesh) and heard the amazing, radical deconstructions of his group Fashion Flesh. In Tokyo I'd been talking with Sony about making a Playstation game about Shakespeare, and suddenly I realised that these young unknown musicians were perfectly qualified to make this concept into an amazing pop record for my label, American Patchwork. And so Super Madrigal Brothers came into being. Adam, the 'new-fangler', made 8 bit versions of renaissance tunes, and John, the 'mangler' deformed them. Encompassing both sugar and spice, melody and dub, the results have exceeded my wildest expectations. I truly believe this record to be the 'Switched On Bach' of the gaming generation.'

GONGS, THE - Rob Reich  CD (American Patchwork: AMPATCH-004: 708527100424)  $12.00

EXCLUSIVE.  Momus writes: 'On tour with Stereo Total in November 2001, I found myself with a day off in Cleveland. I'd heard about the legendary liberal arts college at Oberlin, so off we went. It was Halloween, and we were lucky enough to see a performance from The Gongs, an experimental folk group comprising electronic music majors Peter, Clara, Stefan and Grisha. There was a log hanging from the ceiling with gongs tied to it. There were old window frames between the audience and the group, who were playing very quietly and with amazing intensity. On the floor were modular analogue synths, at the back an ancient radiogram served as amp. A girl in a bunny costume stalked the stage, banging gongs ritualistically or harmonising gently with Peter as he sang his odd backwoods poetry, plucking at home-built stringed instruments; banjos, chuckies and guys. At the end, the group climbed into boxes and were wheeled offstage. I had never seen anything so great in my gig-going life. It was Devo crossed with Harry Partch. I had to have them for my label. I adore the record they've made. They will be famous. Perhaps not on this planet, though.'

PHIILIIP - Pet Cancer  CD (American Patchwork: AMPATCH001: 708527100127)  $12.00

EXCLUSIVE.  American Patchwork is a new musical gallery/label curated by Nick Currie aka Momus. Phiiliip is a twenty year old American currently living in Berlin. He makes all his music himself with a computer. Imagine if Beck really were a heady mess or if The Grifters were poor urban and black and fronted by Syd Barrett. Fun. Groovin'. Pet Cancer was recorded in New York City. PHIILIIP Philip Guichard was born in between the releases of "Lodger" and "Scary Monsters." He was raised funneling between Seattle and Olympia, which gave him more than enough time to marinate in the Pacific Northwest's natural nothingness. Time was bided writing fiction and recording music. Two books were written including "The Fevered Sea," which will soon be published in anthology edited by Dennis Cooper for Black Ice Books. Between the ages of 16 and 19 he made an ill-advised decision to write for publications, including "The Evergreen Review," "The Village Voice," "The New York Press" and "The Stranger." His mistake: overestimating the reader. From the age of 14 upwards Philip was writing and recording songs, eventually amassing more than 1000 songs and 100 albums. As he found increasingly convincing ways to occupy his time otherwise, the production halted to a more filtered and discriminate trickle. At the age of 18 Philip was handed an unexpected boon in the form of a covert CD which contained several secrets which he then proceeded to steep himself in. After one year of self-training, he holed up and made concrete the consolidated songs inside his head. Recorded in Seattle during Summer 2000, remixed and upholstered in New York through to 2001, "Pet Cancer" finally sees the dark of day. In addition to the release of "Pet Cancer," Phiiliip also has a track on the upcoming "Electroclash" compilation for DJ Hell's International Deejay Gigolo Records (also featuring tracks by Fischerspooner, ARE Weapons, and Bedroom Productions). Phiiliip is also an emerging live artist, having performed with artists such as Momus, Genesis P-Orridge, Brian DeGraw and Wolfgang Tillmans at venues such as Tonic, Fun, Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Good/Bad. He is currently plotting performances where he now lives and in New York, where he hopes to become a visitor.

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