Name: Nick Currie aka Momus
Occupation: Writer in various contexts, including musical ones
Nationality: Scottish
Recent release: The new Momus album Quietism is out via American Patchwork. Buy at darla.

If you enjoyed this Momus interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Patreon, and Facebook.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects, and colours. What happens to you physically when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I listen with my eye (singular) open. So I often have visual memories of the place in which I first heard a piece of music, or the place I imagine the music was created in.

For instance, for Bowie's song “Aladdin Sane,” it would be the model-making room at my boarding school, an overheated basement room with no windows, fluorescent lights and enormous speakers. I heard “This is the Day” by The The the other day, and instantly overlaid a Deptford street scene over the Kyoto café I was sitting in.

It's a bit like a photographic double-exposure: the place I'm in, plus the place I was in, or imagined, when I first heard the piece.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

I basically grab and parrot whatever sounds are in my environment. It's not that I "like" them, just that they inhabit me.

When I cross the road at a Japanese pedestrian crossing, I can't help whistling the crossing signal or making a contrapuntal melody around it. I mimic animal sounds back to the animals that make them.

A bassline in a café stays in my head until another bassline kicks it out. A deep temple gong keeps resonating long after the actual sound has faded.

When did you start writing/producing music - and what or who were your early passions and influences?

I started in 1967. My dad had brought a Uher tape recorder home from university, where he was doing a PhD in language research. We recorded an episode of Top of the Pops.

I banged out some hastily-improvised songs on our upright piano and my Dad recorded those too: “We Can Fly,” “The Miser,” “I Can See Japan,” “The Day We Got Married.“



They were influenced by The Who, The Move, The Beatles, Manfred Mann. (It was therefore very exciting when, much later, Manfred Mann actually covered one of my songs.)



You started off as the lead singer of The Happy Family but have been a solo artist across the 43 years since they split. Despite the autonomy you enjoy, is there anything you miss about being in a band or having other musicians play on your recordings, as they did for your first three solo albums?

There were moments when Malcolm Ross, who helped form The Happy Family, would come up with an amazing slide guitar part, or plucked autoharp, or when Neill Martin, the keyboard player, would find a synth or string machine line. Those were things I would never have been able to do alone.

But I find that technology has now allowed me to outstrip my own musical capabilities: machines and patches and AI now surprise me in just the same way.

Working alone isn't limiting, and in many ways frees me from the logistical and emotional problems that come from working with other musicians (like, for instance, splitting up, ha!).

What are the most important tools and instruments you're currently using?

AI is the main one, for the last couple of albums. Udio and its stems. But also, on the iPad, an app called WorldScales.

And a battered old acoustic guitar I found in a Paris flea market.

Which albums or artists do you love specifically for their sound?

I'm currently listening to a lot of Broadcast again. I love their sound.



And I love non-Western traditional music, the sound of cut reed pipes, gongs, claves, kalimbas. Things that sound "wrong" because they're microtonal, or modal. Things on old UNESCO samplers.

There can be sounds that feel highly irritating to us, and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Irritating: a crying baby on a longhaul flight! Motorbikes or cars revved with deliberate aggressiveness (I'm waiting impatiently for internal combustion to be outlawed altogether, but the current crop of politicians seems intent on backsliding on this).

Welcome: a café that plays only Eno ambient music (I've found one here in Kyoto, it's called "here"). Birds and insects.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Japanese train stations with their tinkling melodies. So much in Japan, in fact.

I also like the very quiet humming of machinery: aircon, fridges, washing machines, muffled engines.

And happy girls singing, not professionally but just because they're happy!

What are among your favorite spaces to record and perform your music?

I once performed very quiet harpsicord songs in an old Swedish schoolhouse. That felt oddly appropriate.

And once I turned up for a gig in Berlin and there was no mic, so we went through the audience — me and Tujiko Noriko, who happened to be there — murmuring the lyrics into people's ears. Noriko didn’t know the lyrics, so she made up her own.

[Read our Tujiko Noriko interview]

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

It feels like working on the fabric of time itself. Like being a time tailor.

How important is sound for our overall well-being, and to what extent do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment reflects its overall health?

To quote Howard Devoto: "I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd, I was shocked to find what was allowed."

I am shocked on a daily basis by how wantonly our societies allow sound to pollute public space, whether it's the sounds of demolition, construction, logistics, traffic, or simply people yammering away in a restaurant. I'm a classic introvert in that sense.

I feel a warm, ambient sensuality in spaces where sound is gentle and subtle, but for too much of the time I'm in a warzone, and the worst of it is that the people around me don't seem to notice or care.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard, and if you're suffering from these or similar issues, how do you cope with them?

I have a bit of tinnitus, which means that if I'm near a yapping dog or screaming child the ringing is easily set off.

Most of the time, though, I don't notice it: the brain is the best filter. The sound is imaginary, so you can cancel it with the same imagination that creates it.

We can surround ourselves with sound every second of the day. The pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself, and what importance does silence hold?

Well, as Cage pointed out, true silence is impossible. We're always surrounded by sound, even if it's only the sound of our own nervous systems in operation.

I prefer subtle sounds, though, to loud ones. There's a song on my current album called "Noise Reduction": “Does their right to sonic violence // Trump my fragile right to silence?”



I'm not sure that there is a right to silence; silence isn't possible, and near-silence isn't desirable for most people. Is it a right we'd be willing to die for? I'll be silent when I'm dead.

With more and more musicians creating than ever and more of these creations being released, what does this mean for you as an artist in terms of originality? Who are some of the artists and communities that you find inspiring in this regard?

When I was writing for Wired I coined this slogan "ubiquity is the abyss". I think a lot of interesting voices get lost now because they're just files on Bandcamp that nobody plays. Feathers on the "long tail".

I suppose we have to distinguish between "availability" and "ubiquity". A lot of music is available in theory online, but that doesn't mean it's ubiquitous, because to become ubiquitous the available music has to be widely played, and it isn't. I'm as guilty as anyone else, because I don't really make the effort to discover new things on platforms like Bandcamp.

We need guides and enthusiasts to cheerlead us into caring, so we need to support sites like The Quietus or magazines like The Wire, but they're both facing existential crises right now. I don't know the answer.

Maybe the music subculture as we know it needs to die and become mulch for a few years, so that something new can replace it.

What's your view on the role and function of music as well as the (e.g. political/social/creative) tasks of artists today - and how do you try to meet these goals in your work?

I think that paradoxically art makes things happen only from the moment we declare that art makes nothing happen. Its soft power depends on a separation from all hard power. But that soft power is enormous. It's still the thing that marks us, and that lasts, far more than the temporary scuffles described in the newspaper headlines.

So I just soldier on, knowing I'm doing the most significant and satisfying thing I could possibly do, and trying to reflect the society I'm in — but not too closely, because art is a signpost to worlds we haven't quite grasped yet.