MOMUS: The Creation Years VS. Cherry Red (Le Grand Magistry) years ???

Excellent question.

I'm a huge fan of the years 1985-1993 (up to and including Timelord).

After that, and try as I might, I cannot escape the feeling that best is over. I have never ever reached the end of either CD of Stars Forever.

Apologies to Mr. C, who is still responsible for three of my favourite albums of all time (The Posion Boyfriend, Tender Pervert and Voyager).

I must say that FOLKTRONIC is an incredible album but The CREATION albums have that very literate and sophisticated feel to them. The expensive production and the lack of "cheesy" sounding electronics help. Still, I think MOMUS maintains his creative level. Stars Forever and Folktronic are excellent examples of mixing electronic music with old world/folk music. Little Red Songbook does the same.. Listen to "Symphonies Of Beethoven" or "Old Friend, New Flame"... and I always thought that Animal Of Airs should have put up money so they could make a video for "Akiko Masuda".. Still, the classic CREATION songs like "Ice King", "...Sexual Jealousy", "Hairstyle...", "Breathless", "Vocation", etc... are classic tracks that NEVER get old...

Todd

Oh Lord.

Arriving towards the end of Momus' Pet Shop Boys-period, I was always somewhat confused by "The Ultraconformist" album.

A different sound for each different label perhaps?

I prefered him when he was pretending to be Jaques Brel

I prefer his early, funny films.

happy new year nick: how's triXoR?

I actually answered this the other day on alt.fan.momus, where Todd also posted it: http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=alt.fan.momus On rereading my answer I think it's rubbish because the idea that I quote other music any less now (or with less passive aggression) is nonsense. Today I would rather say
a) The artist is the last person who can answer such questions.
b) The records in question were made by men of different ages, with different hopes and fears, living in different cities and surrounded by different cultural contexts.
c) Just because you're having more fun and keeping yourself interested, it doesn't mean your work necessarily resonates more in the listener's soul.
d) Consumers can be conservative. For the consumer, music draws power from its association with the past: time, use, familiarity and the listener's investment enhance it. But for the producer, music draws power from its association with the future; will this record be full of new discoveries for me, will it bring me a new audience, will girls swoon when they hear it, will I finally be enlightened about those two great mysteries, form and content? Will I 'express myself' without making people projectile vomit? So my short answer to Todd's question is, I always like the next record best. It's true the Creation albums had bigger budgets, but they also had fewer of my own ideas on them. They tended to be -- as most pop records are to a much greater degree than mine -- designed by a committee, albeit a committee just consisting of the artist, the musicians, the producer (if there is one) and the sound and mastering engineers. But already that's a whole bunch of opinions about how music should sound, and the result is a dilution, a blanding, a summation of the musical 'doxa'. The end result is a glossed-up or roughed-up product made of received ideas about style. Personally I'm really happy to have total control of sound, as I have had since 1993 when I made my first home studio-produced album, 'Timelord'. That way, even if it's stinky, it's my own stink. It's there on purpose! The advantage of the 'doxa' sound (I'm borrowing the word from Barthes, who used it just to sum up the current bourgeois cliches, influenced I think by Flaubert's hilarious 'Dictionary of Received Ideas') is that it allows you to comment on the centrality of pop music in our culture, and share some of its power. So in some of my 80s records, a bit like Scritti Politti, I was making a metapop which sought to criticize, undermine, harness, mark itself off from, and blend in with mainstream pop -- all at the same time. (Think of the Stock, Aitken and Watermanisms of 'Don't Stop The Night'.) The advantage of homemade sound is the chance to get really hands on with every element of sound, something absolutely essential if you're to take music into new areas. The more you define 'your sound', the more you escape the sense of quoting someone else's musical syntax. That's my feeling now; that I have a personal musical language, a style to call my own, whereas once I was just quoting other people's styles with a certain passive aggressive irony, putting churlish quotation marks around all the stolen riffs and soundalike arrangements. 'Here I'm quoting Brel, there Sylvester; here Joni Mitchell, there Kurt Weill.' Since about 1997 Momus has been quoting no-one but Momus. That's either tiresome or it's wonderful, depending on your perspective.

Hi Mark S! Happy new year back. I just got DSL at home and IL* loads like a -- what am I saying? This is the one page where DSL doesn't make any damn difference. Where are the 58MB Quicktime files? Where's the streaming 70mm celluloid? I want my money's worth!

Whoops, I really messed up the big posting above. Not only did the paras not work, but I mistakenly pasted the alt.fan.momus statement I was refuting right after the refutation, as if it were a continuation. My ILM answer ends with the line about 'the record I like best is always the next one'. Then it's the AFM answer. Oh what an eyesore! What a brainsore! What a bore. I should have maintained my lofty indifference. Now I shall have to come out of retirement.

Yus indeed. One of us, ONE OF US. So how'd the operation go?

You mean the Creation Years operation (rock 'n' roll liver transplant) or the Analog Baroque Years operation (removal of spleen)?

Zing. I meant the thing they did wit' yer eyeball, sir. You said you were going to be in London in part to have it peered at, poked at and otherwise manhandled.

the newer albums have more colors and zing to them. i like them much better than the bland older records.

Never mind my friends who keep whispering "that's PetShopBpys isn't it?" with a very knowing wink, wheneverr I put my favorite Voyager 'on' (and then they actually like it!) and then I reply "yes, this is their greatest hits album"

Yay Chaki!

Ned, the eye op succeeded in its goal of reducing pressure in the eye, although we're not looking at improvements in vision any more. It's just a holding operation now, keeping the eye structurally sound until they develop eye cloning for humans (it's just been done at tadpole level).

Congratulations, and hey, you have to start somewhere. And when I felt the need to listen to some Momus the other night, the choice was _Ping Pong_ so hurrah.

I prefer the later, funnier albums