These are the confirmed live appearances from Momus. His February Shatter Tour is now in progress, but he's accepting bookings in Europe for June and October 2012. Send him an email if you want to extend an invitation to sing, guide or speak.
Brussels
Saturday 18th February
Momus Emotional Lecture #5
The Settlement, Bottelarij, Delaunoystraat 58, bus 11, 1080 Brussel (Molenbeek)
Admission free, 3pm
Dusseldorf
Wednesday 22nd February
Momus concert at Salon des Amateurs
Dortmund
Friday 24th February
Momus concert, 10pm at Small Beast at the Institut am Stadt Theater
Institut Am Stadt Theater Dortmund
Lund
Sunday 26th February, 3pm
Unreliable Tour of Skissernas Museum, Lund
Malmo
Sunday 26th February, evening
Momus concert at Babel
Stockholm
Tuesday 28th February
Unreliable Tour of the Nobel Museum
Stockholm
Tuesday 28th February
Momus concert at Debaser Slussen
ManchesterFriday 2nd March
Momus concert at Anthony Burgess Foundation
Cambridge Street, Manchester
7.30pm, tickets 7 Pounds advance from Common & Seetickets.com
Cardiff
Sunday 4th March
Momus concert at Chapter Cinema
London
Monday 5th March
Momus concert at Cafe Oto
Door 8pm, tickets 8 Pounds adv, 10 on door
Advance tickets here
Edinburgh
Thursday 8th March
Performance / tour at Edinburgh Printmakers
Kobe
Sunday May 6th
Momus concert at The Guggenheim House
Sternberg has published The Book of Japans, Momus' new book of speculative fiction for the Solution series.The story is simple. Twelve idiots -- possibly conspirators, possibly visionaries, possibly liars, or possibly the most privileged and valuable future-witnesses the world has ever seen -- have found a way to the future of Japan. It's a messy business, involving crawling into a calving cow, and, after the initial twelve idiotic visits, nobody has been able to reproduce the feat. A commission of enquiry is established, and the idiots duly give accounts of their voyages to a panel of Japan experts who try -- not without exasperation -- to match the extraordinarily idiotic things they're hearing with known facts, likely scenarios and extrapolated outcomes.
Amongst other things, the book makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the "far". We live in a time when difference and distance have been eroded and eradicated by globalisation, the internet and cheap jet travel. This "book of Japans" will try to restore a sense of wonder -- along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies, well-founded rumours, clouds of interference and globs of barn ectoplasm -- by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but time.
In May 2011 Momus completed his 2011 album, Thunderclown, a croony-crackly affair cooked up in close collaboration with Stockholm vinyl-charmer John Henriksson. There's a limited edition 10" vinyl release featuring four songs (you can order it on iTunes now) from Tona Serenad, John's label. Then on July 12th Darla exclusively released the twelve-song Thunderclown album worldwide on CD and digital; order here. You can also catch the record as a YouTube playlist:
"To say Currie's whole career has been building to Thunderclown is over-egging it," enthused Drowned In Sound, "but followers or anyone curious about his back catalogue will do somersaults when they hear what he's done here. In short, he's retched up the most blackly romantic masochism a human being can stomach and set it to a Tom & Jerry soundtrack. Henriksson's creaks and circus noises, so beautiful on his own releases, add a necessary veneer of cuteness, and make Thunderclown sound like Darren Hayman at a steam fair. The Thunderclown album is one clever little pantomime, as listenable as it is anarchic and with so much bile under its surface it's a wonder the case hasn't got ulcers."
"The naive, yet blissful sentimentality evoked from the minimal post-war era music (tape hiss, distortions and all) is offset by the clever, hyper-conscious complexities of the album's lyrical themes, creating a work that is immediately distinct and entirely original. The result is something you'd find yourself listening to alone on Christmas deliriously drunk and disillusioned, taking solace in long-vanished nostalgia... a last-minute contender for my album of the year," wrote Bigger Splashes.
The last album from Momus was Hypnoprism, released in late 2010 by labels American Patchwork and Analogue Baroque.
"Hypnoprism is not filled with sexual controversy," said PopMatters, "but well-crafted eclecticism where nothing seems out of place... These days, we need more artists taking chances, and Currie comes off here as the king of taking chances, in a nice, intriguingly creative package." Mojo magazine called it "oddly bloodless electropop with hints of low-budget bossa nova. But Currie's lyrics lift the proceedings onto a different level as he examines human flaws, foibles and mortality." "Typically it's the waspishly whispered words that entertain, rather than the occasionally desultory music," said the reviewer at UnCut, adding: "Nick Currie's musical career now looks like a long detour on his way to his destiny as discreetly subversive international Man Of Letters." And Mark Fisher in The Wire said: "It's a 21st century lounge music, which draws all manner of material into its studied insouciance: 1980s electronica (Sylvian & Sakamoto's 1982 masterpiece "Bamboo Music" is referenced on "Bubble Music"); post-punk (the album includes a cover of Josef K's "Adoration"); "Everything Stops For Tea"-style pre-war skit-pop (as used on "Is There Sex In Marriage?"). The highlight is "Datapanik", a sardonically tender meditation on how a computer crash now means the loss of irretrievable memory objects."
Hypnoprism features on its cover Diamond Eye, a painting by New York-based Japanese artist Misaki Kawai. Design is by James Goggin of Practise. The record can also be ordered via iTunes or as direct digital downloads from Darla, or Amazon (physical), as well as from the labels themselves.
The "hypnoprism" of the title is YouTube, a sort of hypnotic musical prism, the source of much of the inspiration for this album, and even some of the sounds. Hypnotised by watching his favourite music videos on YouTube, Momus made songs aspiring to the same qualities -- that mysterious catnip which makes you want to play a pop song over and over, and commit it to memory -- then immediately made videos for them and posted them. As a result, the whole album is available as a YouTube playlist:
There are notes on the composition of the record in the back pages of Zuihitsu, here.
Published by Sternberg Press in late 2009, The Book of Scotlands is a series of delirious speculations about the future of Momus' motherland. Commissioned by German editor Ingo Niermann and modelled on his book Umbauland, The Book of Scotlands was well-received in Scotland.
"I don't think I am over-stating it," wrote Gerry Hassan, "to say that The Book of Scotlands will be read and reread, studied and assessed centuries from now for what it says about early 21st century Scotland". And Pat Kane in the Scottish Review of Books said: "The Book of Scotlands is a considerate, deeply generous take on the life of this country and its possible futures."
The Book of Scotlands can be ordered online via Sternberg's website (click "order") or via Amazon.de, or Amazon UK or Amazon US,
The Book of Scotlands was one of sixteen titles shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council's SMIT Book Awards 2010.
The Book of Jokes is Momus' first novel. Commissioned originally by french publisher La Volte, it was published first in English in September 2009, followed in October by the french edition Le Livre des Blagues, and will appear in German later.
"Most of the book's story lines orbit around taboos, including scatology, pedophilia, bestiality and talking, chess-playing penises," said the Los Angeles Times. "One of the book's central conflicts poses the question of whether two men can be each others' uncles, which can be answered only with some of the most lurid, labyrinthine incest in literature."
"The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes," wrote Adam Novy in Dossier Journal, "it's a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials. Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical."
The Book of Jokes can be ordered in English via Amazon, and in French via FNAC.
The previous album from Momus was Joemus, released in November 2008.
Culturedeluxe called it "the best album from Momus in years, a brilliant, hallucinatory Nintendo arcade gloop of analogue pop and retro lounge as performed by two Space Invaders posing as human beings". "A great precis of where Momus's current musical fascinations lie", wrote Prefix magazine.
A collaboration with skweee-funking Scot Joe Howe, Joemus is available in the UK and Europe from Cherry Red and in the US from Darla. Other Momus releases are listed on this page. Six albums Momus released on the Creation label are available as free downloads from ubu.com.
Pretty much from its inception, Momus has used the web to communicate. From 1995 to 2003 the Momus website entertained visitors with frequently-updated content: monthly essays, daily photos, accounts of Momus albums, some portraits of Momus, collections of podcasts, a CV, audio clips and tour diaries. Then, from January 2004 until February 2010, a LiveJournal blog called Click Opera took over, adding Web 2.0 functionality and a lively comments section.
In February 2010, for a series of reasons outlined here and here and in this radio interview, Momus completed the Click Opera project and came back to iMomus.com, bringing a touch of blog influence back to the old Web 1.0 site in the form of a new yellow notebook column called Zuihitsu. This was replaced later in 2010 by the Tumblr blog Mrs Tsk, which is relayed here on the right.
Meanwhile, news and status tweets from Momusworld can be found at wolon, the Twitter feed of Momus' faithful personal digital assistant, Maria Wolonski.
This column is an automatic relay of the Momus Tumblr page Mrs Tsk *. Running here before was a blog called Zuihitsu.
