Momus - Krambambuli - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2024 . An album exploring AI composition tools and influenced by K-Pop. Album Tracks 1. 1. Plastic Seoul 2. 2. Asylum 3. 3. This Abuse 4. 4. Kleptoglade 5. 5. Singapore 6. 6. the Enshittification of Everything 7. 7. Three Trapped Tigers 8. 8. Chromosomes 9. 9. Catchy 10. 10. Cruel 11. 11. Reshape 12. 12. the Fox in Winter 13. 13. Glassy Menageries 14. 14. Faraday

2018 . Pantaloon sees Momus - veteran Scottish indie crooner Nick Currie - celebrating his return to Berlin (after eight years in Osaka) with a topical cabaret album which sets current political developments in a Inchneo-WeimarInch of the imagination a musical space influenced by Brecht and Weill's theater songs, the tribal rock opera Hair, traces of psychedelia and echoes of post-punk groups like Wire and Magazine. These thirteen songs - recorded in rapid succession during August 2018, they're some of the most confident and heartfelt of Momus' long career - address topics like Brexit, climate change, oligarchy and it's unholy alliance with populism, and the new politics of borders, blood and soil. But they're also about the satisfactions of personal life, and how we can offset the shadows in the newspaper headlines (not to mention the onrush of mortality) with various kinds of optimism, and with love, S*x, art, myth, and the imagination. The last word is given to Agnes Bernelle, a Berlin cabaret singer who settled in Dublin, having fought the Nazis by beaming black propaganda into Germany InchYou want to be rich, well isn't that what you are?Inch Album Tracks 1. When I Was An Animal 2. Burning the Flag 3. The Beckmanns 4. Good Time Coming 5. Glacier 6. Little Paper Humans 7. Brexochasm 8. Escalator 9. The Fisher King 10. Osip Mandelstam 11. Rootless Cosmopolitans 12. Goodbye Mr. Quin 13. The Nightingale

The 37th Momus album started as a pre-election warning against the 47th US President in the form of a song called Orange Pills (Inchdon't swallow themInch being the take-away). Somehow the American electorate failed to listen and elected Trump anyway. The issue, for non-MAGA people, then became where to position oneself on a spectrum running from quietism to activism. It's a theme which bounces through Quietism, a quiet yet poppy album focused on the sound of a real acoustic guitar (the machine which Inchkills fascistsInch, as Woody Guthrie liked to say). One might want to reduce the idiotic noise of this world, to retreat into a privileged world of beauty and intelligence, to become an introvert or a recluse. But politics cannot be denied, even by a Paris-based aesthete. In a new take on the old cliché InchFirst they came for the quietists and I said nothing...Inch One tiny piece of aesthetic activism going on here is the choice of a South American musical idiom 1960s bossa nova, partly generated by 2020s AI tools which are North American. A secondary theme - very much related to the use of AI - is mimicry, and the dialectical tug between authenticity and the synthetic, human input and the impact of robotics. What's real, what's fake, and which of those - the mask or the supposed face beneath - gets us to a more interesting place? A filmic vocabulary appears there are continuity girls, spoiler alerts, actors whose props win Academy Awards. At the end the album presents it's human author with an imaginary medal, for this is his Inchimperial phaseInch - a double-edged sword representing both his own artistic zenith and a period in which the world is dominated by new empires, old oligarchs. Album Tracks 1. The Actor 2. Orange Pills 3 3. 30,000 Nights 4. My Apprentice Devil 5. Spoiler Alert 6. The Quietist 7. Noise Reduction 8. Trauma Bingo 9. Th