I’ve been reading, listening to, and following Nick Currie, the Scottish artist, musician, and writer known as Momus, for over 20 years. As he prepares to release his new album, Ballyhoo, he graciously shared his time and thoughts in this extensive conversation.
We explore his artistic philosophy, the role of art in liberating the imagination, and his experiments in AI compositions and K-pop influences, finding AI to be both a tool and a challenge for contemporary songwriters.
He delves into his concept of 'elective affinities,' reflecting on his cosmopolitan lifestyle, upbringing, and the impact of various global cultures on his work. We also discuss the contemporary decline of the West, Currie's views on masculinity, the moral panic surrounding new technologies, and his retrospective critique of authenticity, freedom, and more.
The conversation left me inspired to follow Momus and continue to advocate for a fearless approach to creativity and the importance of embracing change and novelty in art.
Selected Time Stamps from Interview
00:00 The Essence of Art and Fiction
01:09 Introduction to Momus: Nick Currie's Journey
02:43 Exploring AI in Music Creation
05:02 The Impact of AI on Songwriting
08:08 Cultural Identity and Elective Affinities
12:57 Global Perspectives and Personal History
17:59 The Role of Moral Panic in Art and Technology
22:18 Self-Censorship and Artistic Freedom
29:14 Influences and Inspirations in Music
34:09 The Schizoid Aesthetic and Autism
34:46 Drugs and Mental Health
35:44 Tao Lin and Autistic Identity
37:28 Masculinity and Identity
41:01 Cultural Decline and Fertility Issues
43:06 The Evolution of Decades
45:00 The Impact of the iPhone
48:07 Spirituality and Intellectual Interests
50:15 Love for Cities and Urban Life
56:50 Fashion and Personal Style
58:34 Future Projects and Reflections - In the Future We’ll License 15 AI versions of ourselves…
Nick Currie has been releasing music for nearly 40 years, books, countless websites, video lectures, radio broadcasts, performances across new and old technologies.
For More Visit imomus.com
Song Sample from Ballyhoo : Plastic Seoul
Photos, songs, videos, book covers etc all by Momus/Nick Currie
AI Machine Transcription - Enjoy the Glitches!
Note around minute 29: Momus and I discuss Korean’s producers and misname one of his favourite Korean producer: The correct spelling is Min Hee-jin who directs NewJeans.
Interview: Momus
Momus (Nick Currie): The whole point of art is not to be guilty about things. The whole point of art is to, to think unthinkable thoughts, to be brave, to be original.
When you're, when you post something as, or propose something as fiction, it liberates your unconscious and it liberates you to be more daring in what you say you've done or what you've thought or whatever, because it's just a character
[ Music Sample from Plastic Seoul / Ballyhoo ]
Leafbox: Nick, thanks so much for meeting me. Right when you connected, I wanted to say Nick-san because I've been following your thoughts on Japan for 20 years. So before we start, Nick, why don't you tell us about Momus, who you are, what you've been up to? I love your new album Ballywho. It's great by the way and we can talk about everything you're up to as well.
Momus (Nick Currie): I'm Momus, a Scottish guy called Nick Currie. I've been around since the eighties, essentially making pop records for various indie labels and continue to do that. And, my latest album is experimenting with AI composition and also with K pop a little bit. Cause I'm quite excited by K pop as a kind of, a weird amalgam of the styles that I remember from the eighties, like black music from the early eighties and, kind of. contemporary production, R& B style production. So, I just finished this album, Ballyhoo. , I used to blog, I write books, , I do other things too, but pop music is really the core of what I do.
Leafbox: Just for listeners, I've been following Nick and his work for, I don't know, 20 years since Folktronica. I think that was the first album I discovered of yours. And, , yeah, I fell into the deep rabbit hole of Click Opera, and I really love that, and thank you. , I think your vlog series is just a great extension on that, and your latest, post, even before I saw it yesterday, it actually touched all the topics I wanted to talk about.
Because I was like, So, maybe we can just talk about that, and, I've been thinking a lot about AI, and you have this great term about, the moral panic. the relationship with painting and how we might use that as a metaphor for what's happening now. So maybe you can summarize some of your thoughts on how you're using AI and how you feel about it as a songwriter and as an artist and even as a writer.
Momus (Nick Currie): I use it kind of as a novelty. Basically, I was amazed earlier this year when I did a kind of spoof commercial for my last album, which was called Yikes. And, the commercial used AI versions of the lyrics, somebody just sent me this thing he'd done. This guy in Hamburg, I think sent me a thing he'd done using AI in which he'd set my new lyrics to, basically fake tracks, you know, totally different styles than the, the songs I'd written.
And I was kind of blown away because they sounded like big productions and they sounded like hit records from the past, you know? So I thought, wow, there's this, the AI has reached a stage now where you can do this. You can actually get realistic sounding productions, convincing sounding songs, and big kind of sounds that you wouldn't be able to get in your bed.
So, you know, you have a choir, you have an orchestra, you can have all sorts of, you know, medieval, sounds. And so, It's like an expansion. There've been various stages in my music making career, like when MIDI and computers and samplers came along, you could get your own home studio for a reasonable price and make, what sounded like very slick professional records back then. Then when YouTube came along, that was like an archive that really excited me. And I started thinking, wow, songs, And videos could be like almost the same thing. I mean, I guess when MTV came along as well, but something videos were kind of the same thing. But this was like the way a home producer could make a video for each song.
And then you could also delve into what it was that had made all the songs of the past that you remembered or half remembered exciting to you. So I was calling this the catnip of pop back in about 2010, just making my Hypnoprism album, which was about being re excited by the archive. And so AI to me is like a, another archive, but it's an archive of a parallel world, a world that doesn't really exist.
That's kind of similar to the pop world we know, but it's none of it's copyrighted and none of it's kind of real. And yet it's convincing. It's reached the stage where it's convincing. I don't think it's convincing on lyrics. I think the lyrics are terrible in AI. But the music is pretty impressive. So I just thought, well, we can, we're either going to be swallowed up. We, as songwriters will either be swallowed up by this. It'll gobble us up and spit us out and move on. Or we can use it as a tool and it can be a very exciting new tool. So this, this album, Ballyhoo, has been a kind of experiment for me to see whether, which of those two it's going to be. And I think a lot of people are saying this sounds like a mom's record.
It's made me, it's pushed me into new areas where, I'm doing different types of song structure. So it's kind of expanded me. Maybe it's more mainstream than I usually am. It's got bigger choruses and kind of more funky sounds. So I don't know if it's pushing me in the right direction.
Sometimes I want to go in a more obscure direction this time. , I was excited to sound like a, a funk group from 1982 mixed with K pop.
Leafbox: You ever feel like the AI is kind of a guardrail that just. Like you just said you wanted to go sometimes push it in a different way, but because the AI is kind of a mad lib generator, it kind of keeps you in this, it's in a video game, there's this concept of rails.
I just wonder if that's why your album sounds more quote, pop or more accessible because the guardrail of what the LLM thinks about is this is, I'm just curious how you respond to that.
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, I mean, I think, um, it could be a force for blandness, but it depends how you push it. I mean, you can use it. I was using it very much, first of all, this is what I call the Pareto proportion of 80 20. So 20 percent might be good and 80 percent might be boring and you throw it all the way. But also there's this , interesting moment that AI is in where on the one hand it's very mainstream and it's drawing a lot from mainstream hits from the past and mainstream pop production from the present but it's also very glitchy and eccentric and weird so you've got this kind of tension at the moment between those two obviously it will get very slick and it'll be totally indistinguishable from human made songs in the future and that's a scary prospect but for the time being it's weird for me to be interested in it And it to be interested in me, perhaps, yeah, it's kind of, I left in the glitches deliberately.
I mean, the guardrail thing, I don't know, just when you, when you're in a candy store, you don't think I should, I should get some apples, you know, you go for the candy and I think pop music is like a forbidden fruit or candy or a guilty pleasure, all those kinds of things it's often described as. So for me, I, I didn't want to.
There's one track where it did a really obscure thing that turned into a kind of Bowie side two of low type thing, but mostly I wanted to go more mainstream than I usually am.
Leafbox: Was that the Faraday song? Which song was that?
Momus (Nick Currie): The Faraday song. Faraday sounds like a Bowie side to the low kind of thing.
It's very moody and mostly instrumental. I mean, I made a lot of ballads, which I've discarded, there's one called Happy Death Day, there are a lot of very slow ponderous tracks, but I didn't want it to have that energy.
I wanted to have it to have a more jubilant energy.
Leafbox: Talking about energy I've been thinking about a lot about, you're one of the first people who has thought very, I've lived in a lot of countries and I have a complex background like yourself. , My father's British and my mom's Chilean and we lived all over the world, Japan and all kinds of places and I have an American accent and now I'm in Hawaii.
So I've, I, I really like your concept of elective identities. And I wanted to think about how you, I think you're a good model of a cosmopolitan ideal accepting without, but you also play in your last video, you talk about the rootless cosmopolitan. And I'm curious if you find the AI being a little bit rootless and pushing towards a global homogeneity, because right now all the AI generally comes from the U S it's an American. The majority of the LLMs are kind of a U. S. AI model.
Momus (Nick Currie): I don't know if the people manufacturing it are really having a cultural input into it. I mean, I deliberately chose K pop. So pretty much all of my prompts this time were saying K pop. So I was getting pop songs in Korean. And that was another factor in the eccentricity thing that I was using what I call mondegreens, technically that is when you miss it, mishear a lyric, it's a mondegreen.
And I always find that that's much more interesting than a kind of consciously devised lyric because what you're hearing is really often prompted by what you really want to hear or what you're afraid to hear, and when people mishear lyrics, they often really treasure their mishearings over the real lyrics.
So I was listening to these Korean,, automatically generated pop songs and then hearing, things I wanted to hear in there, like there's, there's a lyric about beautiful vagina now, blah, blah, blah, on mountaineering and the mountain of the Eiderdown. Of course, it wasn't, those weren't the lyrics that the machine was giving.
Machine would be very, very cautious about saying, would never use a word like vagina. , but I can, you know, so, um, I, whenever there might have seemed to be guardrails approaching, I think I just, you know, laughed and rebelled and, you know, did something naughty. Because, at the same time that it's this mainstream, realistic thing, it's also, it's very corruptible and very silly and very glitchy.
And , You can push it and break it. You can sort of break it. As for, as for being the cosmopolitan, I guess there is a kind of sense that some conservatives, would say that this is not authentic music because it's generated partly by a machine. and I've always had issues with that idea of authenticity, I think it's a bit of a hackney old, chestnut and hackneyed old chestnut in the pop world that, or music in general, that it has to be authentic and come from roots, which are very identifiable and specific in a particular community.
Of course, if you come from the ghetto, you're going to boast about that, but by the time you're boasting about it, you, you usually have left the ghetto and you're usually a multimillionaire or whatever it is. That's when it becomes important to talk about your authenticity, when there's a doubt about it specifically.
So, yeah, I'm an old fashioned cosmopolitan. I'm not genetically cosmopolitan. I have very narrow Scottish Irish genes. But, in terms of my elective affinities, as you, I mean, this was a term I borrowed from Goethe. He had a novel called Elective Affinities based on, he was into chemistry, being a bit of a Renaissance man.
He was as much a scientist as an artist. And He was fascinated by the idea that certain chemical reactions happen because there are, there are relationships between existing substances and there are sometimes elective affinities. So for me, the elective affinity is, it's not that you're, the place you're born in is almost accidental, but the place you choose to live in, or, or, you know, your family of origins is something you can't do much about, although it's obviously very important.
The family you then choose to make around yourself in terms of finding a lover and, finding a family, if you do that. That's a whole other matter because it's your personal choice. So I don't know, I think that that's undervalued in a sense that we talk about the, the kind of the tragedy of destiny, which is all tied up with authenticity and roots and all that sort of language.
But we don't talk so much about the beauty of elective affinities and finding, especially finding correspondences on the other side of the world. You know, that you wouldn't have expected to find. I have no idea why I got obsessed with Japan. When I was a kid, did I see a documentary on TV about Japan?
Maybe I did. I've forgotten it now. But I, I was writing songs about Japan at the age of seven, about how I could see the mountaintops and the villages of Japan. And I, I really don't know where that came from, but obviously there's some kind of elective affinity with me, or maybe just a transfer, as the psychoanalysts would say, it's me projecting a kind of ideal onto a place on the other side of the world.
Leafbox: Could you give us just a summary for people, maybe talk about, I believe you lived in Greece and what your family childhood upbringing was and how that affected kind of that global outlook, I guess I'd call it.
Momus (Nick Currie): My dad was teaching global English. That was his job. He was in TOEFL teaching English as a foreign language.
And so, he got posted by the British council to Athens. And that was a really big moment for me that you could move somewhere warm and nice and sunny and hot and go to school there. I was at the British Embassy school for a year there, and then got sent back to a miserable boarding school in Scotland, which was, a horrible moment for me.
And just the idea that things didn't have to be the way they seemed to be, you weren't necessarily destined to live in Scotland for all your life if you were born in Scotland. This is also, ironically, a typically Scottish thing to do. There's more diasporan Scots in the world than there are in Scotland.
I think it's something like 20 million people of Scottish ancestry anyway. in the world. I must be more than that by now, but people who call themselves Scots and were maybe born in Scotland, but left to go to New Zealand and Canada and all these other places. And then there's 4 million Scots in Scotland.
So we're much more represented by people who are, and this is why we're so sentimental on Burns Night. You know, we all remember our heritage and stuff, but it's It's a beautiful thing, to be sent somewhere else. My dad was then teaching in Montreal, so we went to Montreal after that, and we didn't travel a huge amount.
He was going to be posted to India, to Hyderabad, but, it didn't happen in the end. He didn't like his boss or something, so he set up his own business back in Scotland. We got nostalgic when we were in Canada for Scotland, so we did move back. Then I went to university in Scotland, so, and then I moved away to London and spent too many years in London.
And then when the EU kind of dropped the borders in Europe, I said, well, screw this, I'm going to go and live in Paris. So I went to live in Paris because you could, you know, you didn't need the visas anymore.
And since then it's been, yeah, I mean, I've never been to the Southern Hemisphere. I've only, I've only lived in New York. Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Osaka, and I've toured to a lot of places as we musicians tend to do, but I've never been to Africa, never been to South America, never been to Australia.
Leafbox: You still have time, Nick,?
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, I still have time.
Leafbox: It's interesting because one of your songs, I think you've had a very complex relationship with the U. S. Maybe we can just talk about that for a second and I still think there's something there with the AI that maybe I don't know how to make it, but it's just the AI right now is in such a race with the US really pushing kind of the AI agenda, right?
And how that might be affecting just identity in general. And I'm curious how that could be in terms of psychological operations or even just a kind of metaverse of how people are creating and being and, it's just if we're all moving towards kind of this globalized, , we're losing our identities and our individual selves to this kind of machine.
Momus (Nick Currie): If there's one thing I can do, it's to It can fake your locality. It knows your locality from your IP address anyway. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of localized knowledge and accents and whatever. I'm sure the German AI is going to speak German. Obviously it's going to seem like a German intelligence. You know, it's, that's kind of fake as well, but it's able to do that. That's one of its, so it's, it's a bit of a chameleon, isn't it?
Leafbox: Yeah, I think I used to think that more until I moved to Hawaii. I was a little bit more into the cosmopolitan ideal. But once you live in a place that you really see sort of a local, very strong historic culture kind of disappear, I feel like I've, my, my partner's Polynesian and you start.
I don't know how I feel about the rootless. I used to be much more for it, maybe when I was younger, maybe I was getting older. So I just curious how you feel in terms of that rooting aspect.
Momus (Nick Currie): In a sense, the damage is already done, because, if I look at, for instance, the Hebrides, where I come from, my ancestral roots are.
Gaelic speaking, my great grandparents didn't speak English as a first language, they spoke Gaelic. the way of life of crofters on the islands, I won't idealize it because it was pretty shitty in many ways, and they were kicked off their land by aristocrats, and that's why many of them ended, New Zealand and Canada, but, that has all that bird has already flown, you can't reclose that stable door because television came along, and it was in English and only much later was there a subsidized Gaelic language television service, but by that time. All the native Gaelic speakers were either very old or they were dead, so that culture had already been eradicated.
I mean, it was constantly bombarded by various misfortunes and by the wind and the weather itself coming in from the Atlantic. But, I don't know, Certainly there is a kind of monoculture which is being imposed, and I'm sure AI will be part of it, but I think AI can't really bear them the burden of the blame.
I think that's just something capitalism has done.
Leafbox: Maybe you could expand on that just for a second, Nick, because in your in your vlog, you had a great critique of the moral panic just being kind of related to your critique of capitalism. So I'm curious if you could expand on that just for listeners.
Momus (Nick Currie): Well, I was being a bit ambivalent and saying, All new technologies tend to come hand in hand with a moral panic, and it's not just the fact that artisans will be put out of work, but it's also the idea that this will actually corrupt people's morals. I remember it happening with video cassette recorders, they were going to, there was such a thing as video nasties which were going to corrupt people's morals because they were going to be so depraved and no longer broadcasters would be able to determine gatekeepers wouldn't be able to keep the gates anymore and your children would be corrupted.
So, and in a sense, all new technologies really require this moral panic for promotion. It's actually used, although it's in a sense bad and it's saying these are bad and they bring bad things with them, it's used to excite people because of course people want to see video. As soon as you start saying we must ban video nasties like they did in the British Parliament in 1980, whatever it was, people start saying, well, what are these video nasties, you know, quite like to see them.
So that's when you get a rash of all these horror films and things, which are at least pretending to be video nasties because there's suddenly a demand for it. So, I think there's, it's a double edged sword, I think, if you look at any novelist. All the established classics, almost all of them, were considered depraved and considered to be undermining the morality of the day.
Madame Bovary, for God's sake, was considered a depraved and dangerous book. Pretty much every book that's not, that's still in the canon, was considered dangerous and toxic, and there were attempts by various authorities to ban it. So I think this moral panic actually is just a kind of hype cycle.
Leafbox: What do you think about the moral panic now? Or it's kind of ending now, but, quote, the woke panic in terms of cancellations and some of the canons being re, there's kind of a, another from the left coming kind of that.
Momus (Nick Currie): The left often, the left often pioneers these things and then they're taken over by the right.
So now there's, cancellation, uh, attempts and, you know, sensitization attempts by people which are being used against artists. , I have friends here in Germany and Germany, there's a bit of a crisis right now because many, exhibitions have been cancelled. If anyone tweeted anything ever in their entire life, pro Palestinian, for instance, You will have your exhibition cancelled currently if you're an artist, even if your exhibition has nothing to do with that.
And I've seen a lot of stuff in the art press recently kicking back against this identity politics based trend in the art world, especially where every biennial documenta, the Berlin Biennial, whatever, these big art shows are all very, very guilt driven. focused right now, as if, you know, the whole idea of decolonize, let's decolonize, landscape gardening, let's decolonize the classics.
It's a way, in a sense, in the name of sensitivity to avoid thinking about what a colonial mentality was. You're much better off reading Joseph Conrad if you really want to know what a colonial mentality was. It really did exist. It's too late now to decolonize us. We were colonial powers, and that is part of our DNA, and we will never be able to shake that off, no matter how many biennials you have in which you say, let's decolonize this, that, or the other, you know?
So I think, um, it's a kind of, apologetic and, it's, it's merely mouthed and it's, it's brings you eventually to a kind of wooden tongue of ideological correctness, in which the whole point of art is not to be guilty about things. The whole point of art is to, to think unthinkable thoughts, to be brave, to be original.
And I think we need to get back onto that track.
Leafbox: No, I agree 100%. I'm definitely more in that direction. So it's interesting to see that I didn't know about the Palestinian critique in Germany. That's just insane. And in the UK now there's similar,, efforts, I guess, in terms of on the right as being, if you're on the right, those people are being, censored and there's hate laws.
So it's hard to, if you lived in the U S it's difficult to, here where there's quite free speech absolutism. So it's it's an interesting. Well, maybe we can talk about that in terms of your self censorship. Do you ever have that? Or how do you approach it as an artist? How do you keep being how do you be free in terms of expression? Or do you ever find yourself not being free? Or what about when you lived in Japan for so many years? How did you constrain yourself and feel that constraint from.
Momus (Nick Currie): I felt tremendously free in Japan because you're so marginal as a white person living in Japan that, Nobody's going to take any interest in what you say, in some cultural format.
So, Japanese people were not listening to my songs and saying you shouldn't be saying this. It's more people in the West who are sensitive about certain topics. I do self censor a lot, a lot more than I used to as well. I used to be more of a kind of, mindless libertarian, if you want to call it that, and just try to shock people for the sake of shocking people.
Or, not, not so much for the sake of shocking, although there's a certain amount of hépaté bourgeois going on, but I was the bourgeois myself, and I was ashamed of being so bourgeois. I was perceived as too high class, uh, had too clear an accent. I didn't have a Scottish accent, although, I am Scottish.
I'm seen as like privately educated, too clever. And British people hate that. So, when I signed to Creation particularly, I mean, Elle Records was a bit different, because they kind of like those values. But then Creation, we went and took the first publicity shots outside brothels, in Soho.
And actually got in trouble from pimps for doing that. Got the camera taken away, and I kind of tried to look tough and macho. I shaved my head and looked really butch and, this was all because I was, so embarrassed about being a prissy kind of middle class bourgeois privileged kind of guy.
You're not meant to be that kind of person on the rock label. So a lot of it was me kind of trying to shapeshift and change my image and trying to be more filthy, my lyrics than anyone else had ever been. And, and also being inspired by literature, trying to be a sort of, Philip Roth of literature or Georges Bataille or whatever it is, to transpose some of those ideas into pop music, because it was the 80s and you were either doing entryism, trying to get into the mainstream, trying to push your pastiches to the point where they could be accepted as actual pop music, like Skritti Politti, Prefab Sprout and me and, you know, people who are, who had an ambivalent relationship to pop music, but that ambivalence turned little by little into love.
And that's a very interesting. trajectory to me that you start off trying to fake something and then you fake it till you make it, literally. As soon as you start getting indie hits or whatever it is, you start thinking, well, now there's things just beyond that, which I could be reaching for, which are successful because , ordinary people like them.
It's not just something that's going to appeal to grad students.
Leafbox: I think that was one of your quotes in, wasn't that one of your lyrics or one of your songs? The fake it till you make it. I think I heard that in one of the latest album.
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, the first person, I'd never heard that phrase until Colin Marshall in Seoul said, yeah, fake it till you make it.
I thought, wow, that's a good phrase.
Leafbox: Yeah. It's a very Americanized kind of thinking. I feel like you just an entrepreneurial.
Momus (Nick Currie): And you know, when I first moved to New York, I was reading an old interview that I'd done for, what was it, just like maybe Index magazine or something in 2000 when I first arrived in New York.
And I was saying, I love America. It's so plastic. You don't have to be authentic here. Your roots, you can have roots, but they're usually plastic roots. And so I started making this fake Appalachian fiddle music, which in a, in a way I had the right to do as a Scottish person because those were, those fiddlers were often Scottish people who'd somehow ended up in the States and the Appalachians, but I was deliberately playing up the fakeness of, of my fake folk music. I thought that was a much more interesting idea than apparently authentic, authentic, rather, folk music.
Leafbox: I mean, Nick, maybe we could talk about your concept of, well, your alter, persona Momus and how that's shape shifted and how that plays into your quote true self Nick and how those two are even Wolan, you have that Twitter handle that's your, I think, assistant. I'm just curious how you play with these masks. I'm just curious if you have any thoughts about pseudonymity as well. I, I interviewed some writers and, uh, especially in the male space in the dissident community, I think people are really hiding behind masks and feeling, this pressure to censor that the only way they can be quote free is to have, use a mask or whatnot. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on those issues.
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, I mean, I was a fan of David Bowie and he's still my guiding my guiding black star if you like, in terms of, synthetic being more interesting than authentic, a kind of synthesis of cultural ideas which are simply out there in the ether at the time, it's real in a different way.
But you're just reaching for other people's ideas, there's a certain amount of plagiarism in it, or a certain amount of, vampirism in it, in Bowie's case, you know, but also, this, it's one of his song titles, Who Can I Be Now, knowing that people's attention spans are short, and that if you want a longer career, you probably have to shapeshift just to keep people interested, and that, of course, became the template for Madonna, Lady Gaga, and all these pop stars ever since, they've realized that if they want to stay in the public eye, they have to either, have an endless succession of personal dramas to keep people interested, or just go through roles, and play it like an actor as Bowie did.
So, but also I think there's a kind of weird authenticity which comes through, a paradoxical authenticity, which is summed up by that Mishima novel titled Confessions of a Mask. The idea that a mask can be confessing, and it's not necessarily the person behind the mask whose, whose confessions are you're hearing, but there will be something authentic and something truthful coming through, precisely because it's fiction. It liberates you. When you're, when you post something as, or propose something as fiction, it liberates your unconscious and it liberates you to be more daring in what you say you've done or what you've thought or whatever, because it's just a character.
So that's why when I came to write my memoir in 2020, I used these characters, masks, that were the discarded faces of dead people, mostly dead writers, partly because they've been important figures to me as I grew up, and I had seen life through their eyes, so why shouldn't I speak through their mouths?
“Niche is a memoir in pastiche. One man’s life, six decades, 217 narrators, 105,000 words. "A grand entertainment", Kirkus Review calls it, "effortlessly blending pop culture and high culture." Publishers Weekly says: "This is that rare show-biz memoir that's both entertaining and a literary triumph." Niche was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on July 14th 2020.”
But also because, they allowed me, they, they freed me up to, to find other aspects of my, myself. They were the kind of AI at the time, in, in the sense that they gave me a different voice each time,, or a different,, style each time. Obviously also a big influence from Raymond Queneau and his exercises in style and this kind of thing.
So there were precedents for it. But as far as I know, nobody's written a memoir as a kind of oral history in that sense, where it seems like a documentary where you've got talking heads, but they're all dead talking heads.
Leafbox: Going about talking heads and heroes. I think you quoted somewhere that you're always a little bit disappointed with David Bowie's productions because you're such a fan of him.
I think you were talking about on your album Yikes and how people critiqued your album and maybe that's a good thing because they really like your work, Who are your heroes now? And I mean, I think David Bowie still is, but who are you looking towards? What other artists are you really finding? Or just even movements, or is it the AI K pop, software that's your hero now?
Or who's your hero? Who's your mask you want to put on?
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah. I mean, in terms of this latest album, probably the biggest, well, There's two levels of it. There's the, the k-pop contemporary level, which is that the producer of New Genes. , God, can I even remember her name? Uh, Lee Jean, uh, Jean Gin. It's Jin, so I guess New Genes.
The name is kind of a play on her name. Gin. Gin Lee. Suk, I think her name is, And I, I really liked her productions, uh, for, for that band. And, she's about 44, I think now, and she's gone through some legal problems and things, but she's, she's, and she's being copied a lot within her own label because of these legal problems.
The, the label is trying to replace her with these new bands that sound a bit like what she's done. ,also I was thinking a lot in terms of Nakata, the producer of Kari Pompom in Japan and, uh, various. other bands like Perfume. So in a way that took me back to my time in the 90s when I was a Japanese producer for, not girl bands, but solo artists who were female.
So I had to channel the female side of myself, which was a very interesting mask to wear, the wear of the mask of a woman, a kind of, psychic transvestism. But also going back to, , Jin's influences, this K pop producer's influences, , she's currently having, , Shaq attack sue her, or, or attempt to sue her, I would settle out of court or something for, uh, ripping off some of their early 80s stuff.
So I went back to all these early 80s,, Black, British and American funk soul acts, or R& B kind of acts. Heatwave, Shakatak, Shalamar, all these people, Oliver Cheatham, The Whispers, because they made fantastic music, pop music, which at the time I was sort of focused on indie labels.
So I would only hear echoes, of the Black music of the time. Um, in people like A Certain Ratio on Factory Records because they were white boys who wanted to play black music and got a black drummer and started moving towards funk idioms. I guess everybody did. We mentioned Talking Heads, the band Talking Heads started doing that as well.
Apparently, possibly influenced by A Certain Ratio because they actually supported, A Certain Ratio supported Talking Heads on one of their UK tours, I think about 1979 or something. And, this kind of pushed, or 78 possibly, this pushed Talking Heads more in a direction of, hey, white, uptight white guys can play funk.
It sounds different and it has a whole different sensibility, but it started coming into, or even the pop group and people like that, that very radical takes on black music. So, I guess even in my sheltered kind of indie label world, I was starting to hear the influence of these black artists and disco music in general, which had been reviled in certain rock quarters, but in other areas, people were saying this is, that's great music.
Let's try and do something a little bit weird and different and uptight with that. let's put the fear meaning of funk back into funk because apparently funk doesn't mean the funk as in fear at all funk as in a genre of music is actually to do with an african word which means sweat and stink and the sheer physicality of that music is what's meant by funk in that sense but we use funk we white kind of uptight people use funk to mean something scary.
We're scared. We're in a funk. We're, we're scared of something. So I think this fear filled funk music of the late seventies and the early eighties really fascinates me as well. And as soon as I take an AI generated funk track and start whispering my Momus vocal style on top of it, it turns into something completely different.
Now it becomes much more, I always like to talk about Susan Sontag's phrase, aggressive normality, because she described pop and rock music as aggressive normality. It's kind of normality turned up to 11, whereas what you really want and what literature in her, in her sense, anyway, can give you is a kind of gentle deviance which is, it's totally the opposite of that. And Momus has always been about gentle deviance, , including proposing God as a tender pervert.
Leafbox: . One of the things I, I took away from your discussion on, the funk concept was the schizoid. You described it as, and I think putting on those masks leads to that kind of borderline schizophrenic. But a lot of people, have you noticed a lot of people are using that term now? To describe what's happening with Twitter and what's happening with the internet and AI, everything's becoming, there's a schizoid aesthetic.
Momus (Nick Currie): I don't hear that so much. I hear autistic used a lot now. And a lot of people, including David Byrne, owning up to being autistic in retrospect. I think there's a lot of revisionism in our culture. It's very interesting. A lot of things get rewritten, with autism. the contemporary jargon. And that's sometimes a good thing, that, oh, wow, yes, I was sick. Tina Weymouth hated me at the time, but that's because I was actually mentally ill in a way, you know, autism was my problem, but there just wasn't the label at the time.
I kind of resist that a bit because I'm kind of a bit of an RD Lang fan. And, you know, the whole idea of craziness is simply an appropriate response to the craziness out there in the culture, and that we shouldn't start medicalizing, and especially chemicalizing, our unhappiness or a madness or whatever, there was this anti psychiatry thing in the 60s, which was much more radical and saying, don't try to be normal, just let's everybody get strange, because that's who we are as humans and we have bad times and we're sad and whatever, but don't, don't take drugs and things because of that, or take drugs in order to, you know, take a different kind of drug, a liberating kind of drug.
I've never personally taken drugs, but, I could see the point of doing LSD and things like that. But, and my brother in law is now Irvine Welsh. My sister married Irvine Welsh, so obviously that's sort of, that's now in the family, this sort of thing. The idea of drugs. I don't think he was promoting drugs though. I think he was showing really how miserable and wretched you could be on drugs.
Leafbox: I interviewed Tao Lin, which I think you're a fan of I don't know if you know, or have been following his work, but he quote has cured himself of autism. And he always said that he had autistic and he, he lives here in Hawaii.
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, I, I, I made contact with him quite early on in his career. And, I did kind of describe him as somebody autistic. I don't know if he was even using the term at the time, but I definitely said there's something of the high school shooter about Tao Lin, but also something of, of a twee kind of lovable kind of character as well.
Because everything was hamsters, and he was just writing poems about hamsters at the time. Um, or people as hamsters, because he could only deal with people if he imagined them as hamsters. I haven't really kept up, I haven't read all his latest novels, but I have seen his talks, and I read his tweets and things, and I think he's, He's almost become a Terrence,, Terrence, uh, what's his name?
Leafbox: Terrence McKenna.
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, kind of spiritual guru, drug enthusiast kind of character. So he's almost like a 60s countercultural, almost hippie now, and I have some reservations about that direction he's taken, but maybe it'll make sense to me at some point.
Leafbox: The next question I wanted to ask you, because I bring up the schizoid thing, another interview I did, it's just, I really feel like on the undercurrents of the internet, there's a schizoid aesthetic. People are really using that term now to describe, just even the Trump assassination, for instance, regardless of your politics, people are , is it real? Is it not real? There's this whole kind of simulacra effect that , you can't know anything right now. It's like the hyper real. The hyperstition, there's Nick Land, there's all these kind of accelerationist, libertarian, schizophrenic, Thomas Pynchon, all these kind of energies right now are flowing. So the question I have for you, Nick, is coming back to your concept of identity and masculinity. You've played around with, maybe a David Bowie aesthetic. Where do you fit now in terms of you have a new relationship, seems positive , what's your relationship with masculinity? How has that changed?
Momus (Nick Currie): Think I've always been very mistrustful of masculinity, including my own, tendencies to machismo. I do have a couple, but, but probably far fewer than most men I do come across as a very soft. I think, Who was it? The guy who used to publish Vice, uh, who now, like the, the Proud Boys, you know, he sort of started the Proud Boys. Gavin McKinnon. Yeah, we hung out in Tokyo one day.
He came and met me in a cafe and wanted to have adventures with the Yakuza in Shinjuku together. And I'm, I'm like, no, no, you mustn't talk to those guys in the cars with the tinted windows. And, but he just wanted, Because he's got a, his dad was a Glaswegian, you know, and he's got this very strong Glaswegian kind of machismo.
I'm totally not like that. So he ended up after that meeting describing me as the softest guy he'd ever met, which to me is fine and much rather be the softest guy Gavin has ever met than a proud boy. a fascist skinhead, whatever. Um, but no, I have a pretty tortured relationship with masculinity. I don't think I'm ever going to reconcile to it.
I think it's responsible for a lot of the ills of the world are inherent violence. I mean, I recognize my own inherent violence and my own inherent tendencies to be that awful kind of male. I try to combat it. I try to throttle the depth source, you know, whatever was done as Momus as well as because Momus at Greek God who I named myself after. He's described in Aesop's Fables as having proposed to the gods, or to Prometheus, who was making a little man of mud, that there should be a window in the man's chest so that the gods could see what people were thinking, what humans were thinking, because humans were inherently dangerous.
And, so really what I tried to do was to show all working to show what a man thinks there was this whole thing in the eighties of the new man, a reconstructed man, who had been, he was post feminist, you know, that feminism had deconstructed the patriarchy to some extent. And the individual man in your own personality in your own life, you could deconstruct page, your patriarchal impulses.
So I kind of bought all that stuff. And, You know, I, I do, I do think it's, I think the world would be a hell of a lot better if women ran it, you know, but then I'm probably wrong because, you know, I lived under Margaret Thatcher and there's women who are just as bad as men. Um, I don't know if every, if you somehow feminized culture, who knows, who knows which way it would go.
There might be terrible scraps all the time.
Leafbox: Nick, have you heard of this concept of the long house?
Momus (Nick Currie): Long house? No.
Leafbox: It's a critique of, from the right that suggests that. In traditional, I guess, Native American society, they had these long houses in the Pacific and all the women controlled and organized everything.
And that was the critique from the right is that those societies collapsed because the women what not running. So, you know, I, I think you love Korea and Korean music and they're having this fertility crisis. It's funny there, because the men there seem to be going in a very conservative direction and I'm not sure what the reasons for, um, that crisis are, but yeah, it's just interesting playing off.
I'm kind of critiquing or just responding to your, uh, you know, concept of masculinity or whatnot. And do you have any thoughts on the Korean fertility issues or the West or how is that capitalism that's just collapsing on itself?
Momus (Nick Currie): It's a very fraught issue, I do see the West in decline and I do see guilt, the prevalence of guilt in the art world and in culture in general, and witch hunts are obviously a part of that, that we must cancel somebody because they're guilty. They're not guilty enough yet. We must make them feel more guilty. You know, poor old, Neil, uh, what's his, I can't remember anyone's name today, but yeah, whoever's being canceled right now or, or not being canceled or, being, being shamed publicly.
All that stuff does seem a symptom of a culture that's lost the courage of its own convictions. And maybe, you know, if you go back and read Joseph Conrad and saw these manly men in, in storms at sea and stuff like that, maybe when we were colonized, we're all trying to decolonize right now, but maybe there was some kind of Nietzschean thing in the colonial period, which we might try to, to get back.
I mean, not necessarily to subjugate other races, but to subjugate AI, for instance, maybe we should subjugate AI. That would be a good thing to subjugate, you know, and there is something in the West that is in decline and is, um, destroying itself right now. And when I look to, to cultures that I like in the East, I see that demographically they're also in decline.
So the paradox is that, the higher life expectations you give women, the lower their fertility gets. So the more that women are educated and women going to the labor force, as they have been doing in Japan and Korea, especially, um, partly for racist reasons in Japan, because they don't want immigrants to come in and do jobs.
They would rather give the jobs to Japanese women. than to foreigners. Um, but you notice this tumultuous decline, but it's happening all over the world. Actually, this decline in birth rates just faster in, uh, in Asia, China as well, going to have very fast decline in population. And then the only growing apparently Sub Saharan Africa and India are going to be the future in the sense that they have a, they still have high fertility.
So I don't know. I mean, I think, um, I kind of, I have my antennae up and I look at what's happened in my lifetime. I remember the 60s, you know, in the 60s there was a kind of cultural optimism in the air. In the 70s there was a kind of weird perverse pessimism and a weird perverse sexy kind of thing going on, at least in my life anyway.
It was a weird kind of thing where you were being molested by everybody all the time and it was just a weird period of kind of, the 60s turned really sour. Roundabout, you know, from Altamont, traditionally, and the Manson murders and all the rest of it, the hippie idea of total liberty came up against the idea of the essential evil of human nature.
So a kind of, um, crisis emerged in the 70s, started playing through that with various other economic crises, like their own oil crisis. Then in the 80s, you had the return to order. A kind of right wing reactionary, uh, return to Victorian values, as Margaret Thatcher used to talk about. The 90s was a kind of reprise of God, why am I doing all the decades?
The 90s was a reprise of the 70s in many ways. It was weird. It was kind of libertarian, like the 60s, and, but also in a more negative way, like the 70s, and computers were coming along. Computers were like the psychedelia of the 90s. And also globalization was really happening as a positive force. And then since then, we've just been kind of backing away in horror from various aspects of the nineties, it seems to me like the the kind of globalization in particular became very unfashionable.
So my kind of hobby horse, which is, you know, let's be citizens of the world, deeply unfashionable or or let's be, you know, effeminate men or whatever it is again, deeply unfashionable. I don't know what to do about it. It seems we're heading to fascism and I don't know what to do about it. I just, I sing songs about it, but what can I do?
My, my records sell in the hundreds rather than thousands. So I'm just a guy who's gone out of fashion, you know?
Leafbox: No, it's, it's very useful that you went through that timescale. I think right now in the tens and the aughts and right now it's very hard to, I guess, 2014 when the, whenever the iPhone came, we're in a post iPhone, that's a new marker.
So whatever. You know, the iPhone really changed everything people's attention spans that so I would the only marker I would add is maybe a post iPhone, you know, if you remember before, so that's my only other time marker, I might add,
Momus (Nick Currie): I mean, I'm. I'm in a relationship with someone who's looking at her iPhone all the time.
I'm looking at my iPhone all the time. I try, I make time to walk every day and to look at things far away. Because, you know, if I just look at screens all day, my eyes get really bad. So I need to look at people. And I believe very much in the idea of the world as theater. Especially a really good city can be really great theater.
Um, so I kind of live a cafe society ideal of what it's like to, to exist in the world. I don't want to be, and it, it depresses me to go to a cafe and just see people looking at little screens when they're in a cafe. Why go to a cafe to do that? You know, um, just do that at home. But I think it's really important to use your body, to be embodied, to be in the world, and to experience things and to realize you only live once.
And don't waste your time reading junk on, on X, you know, um, that's junk reading. Read some real books. Why, why not?
Leafbox: Do you think these thoughts are reactionary or?
Momus (Nick Currie): Well, I know culturally, I often describe myself as a post Calvinist, which doesn't mean that I'm a rabid Protestant, but it does mean that I come from, an ancestry of rabid, rabid Protestants. And being post Calvinist, one of the main things you believe is that to be worldly is to be evil. If you get too much into the things that the world is doing at any given point, you're going to be dragged into satan's lair, so there is this Puritan kind of instinct in me to keep a few steps removed from whatever's going on, and that's been expressed in, being on indie labels rather than major labels and whatever.
It's been expressed in a kind of hipster snobbism as well, of not being into the same music that everybody else was into. I mean, I'm into more obscure, difficult, strange music that only gets hundreds of views, whatever. Or I make that kind of music. So that's a kind of protection against a lemming like instinct to go over the cliff, you know?
I think in a sense, a lot of people are going over a cliff right now in terms of, all the mental illnesses and the stresses that come from social media and platforms and from being stuck on these tiny screens. Yeah. But of course I see the appeal of it and I do, I don't discipline myself. And if I had kids, I don't think I disciplined them and say, you know, what's it screen time.
I wouldn't use screen time to say, you're not allowed to use your phone between eight and. And midday or whatever it is, I think appetite is really important. It's really important to gratify your appetites in order to move on from them. Because if you, if you withhold things, they just become more attractive.
We know this from the Garden of Eden onwards.
Leafbox: Bringing up this religious aspects,, and how is your relationship to spirituality, or do you still think God is the tender pervert or what's your personal, what is post Calvinism? Or do you, do you have a spiritual practice or? What is that, making music or?
Momus (Nick Currie): I had this, I met up a couple of days ago with these, kids. They were like in their early twenties and they were moments fans. And one of them, there was as usual, very bright because my fans were always super bright. And one of them was, I just finished a degree at Oxford in classics. Uh, it would probably end up prime minister one day.
The other one was about to start a post grad degree in theology, which actually my mother did as well. But my mother did it as a kind of intellectual exercise. And I think we have a, and I have an intellectual interest in, uh, Christian history or the history of any religion, you know, Japanese religions too.
And for me, they're real sociologically. They're real because people believe them and what people believe, what stories people tell about how the world. emerged and, you know, whether there is a deity and all the rest of it. Those really interest me as stories. I don't have a spiritual practice, you know, of course I would describe myself as a spiritual person in some way, you know, in the sense that I try to look at the big issues.
Today I was sitting in cafes reading Claude Lévi Strauss, uh, Talking about totems, you know, every day I just pick a book from my library here and go and I mean, when my girlfriend's not with me, because when my girlfriend's with me, we just are talking obviously in cafes. But if I'm on my own in cafes, I just read books, kind of almost randomly, but they're always kind of relevant in some way to what I'm thinking about, what I'm doing.
So no, in a way, I'm not a Buddhist or any kind of spiritual practitioner. You know, I was a teenage existentialist. I was very influenced by people like Eric Fromm when I was growing up, and that's a kind of post Protestant Marxist spirituality. If you read Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving or To Have or To Be, It's kind of almost like Meister Eckhart is in there.
You know, there's kind of a Protestant Germanic kind of sense of, of austerity, and, and spirituality in there about how we should, mainly how we should respect other people, you know.
Leafbox: So, Momus, one other question. I, I'm always fascinated about your love of cities. What and how do you navigate cities? You were a fan of the scooters. I think Paris, I don't know what the status, are they banned or not?
Momus (Nick Currie): The rental scooters, I mean, you can still buy and use your own scooter, but no, that was a terrible thing. They gave this some referendum vote last year and old people mostly didn't like the scooters, you know, I guess they felt menaced on sidewalks by these things and so they were banned.
And then this year we had a similar referendum against SUVs, which I was very much in favor of banning. But of course, it wasn't the same consequence at all. They didn't ban SUVs from Paris. All they did was hike the parking charges for SUVs. The vote was against SUVs, although the city was very divided.
So the east part of Paris, where I live, was very anti SUV, and the west part of Paris, where everybody has an SUV and thinks they have the right to charge around in it, um, voted for them, uh, to stay. And, um, but luckily, east Paris prevailed, and Paris is one of the more advanced cities in terms of cycle lanes and all the rest of it.
Leafbox: How do you balance that kind of totalitarian planning desire versus freedom? You know, what's that woman who wrote the New York City book? Um, she's famous, the West Village, um, Jean Jacobs. Yeah. You know, she always advocated for everyone to live in a micro tiny apartment and have bicycles, but then she herself lived in a three bedroom house.
Momus (Nick Currie): Did she? Oh, I didn't know that. Well, I don't care about accusations of hypocrisy. I think they're overdone in our society. But no, she was a, she's a great hero of mine, heroine of mine. I love cities and I think cities are for people, not for cars.
Definitely. I'm very, very antique. Do you have a car?
Leafbox: I do, but I, I, I, I, I, I'm on the bicycle. I bicycle every day and I, so I, I love bicycling and my ideal scenario would be just Fukuoka, you know, walking everywhere in tiny cities and tiny streets.
Momus (Nick Currie): I had a great time in Osaka just riding around in my bicycle in Osaka.
Yeah. I love bikes and I think people would be in much better shape if they, if more of them were cycling and it's great to seeing Paris, for instance, become a cycling city. All the major streets near where I live, they have less and less space for cars, more and more space for bikes and what's called la mobilité douce in French, the soft mobility.
Leafbox: Yeah, it's just interesting as I get, yeah, I know there's always a contrast because I obviously love that, but I'm wary of imposing my preferences on others. Yeah. Because I wouldn't want them imposing their preferences on me. So it's a hard balance.
Momus (Nick Currie): The 20th century though was, the 20th century was Carmageddon.
It was basically cars or nothing, especially in the U. S. where the whole society became scaled to cars, not to, to human legs. And so you had, and it was inevitable at that point that the body shape was going to change and you know, that people were going to turn into these accessories to their cars. And, and the main identifier.
Is your driving license, you know, in the U S you have to show your driving license for everything. It's like a driving culture entirely. It's, I mean, I lived in New York. I lived in the lower East side, Chinatown. It was a totally different world. I didn't live in the U S really. I lived in a walkable city.
One of the few.
Leafbox: Well, Honolulu and Hawaii is also not the mainland. So it's a different world, not the U S which is part of the reason we live here. But yeah, yeah, I don't want to take more of your time, but what do you think is coming in the next decade for you? What's your next projects? Another book. Are you going to do continue to release albums? What do you, do you want to move to Seoul? Where do you want to go next? Hydrabad .
Momus (Nick Currie): Basically, I'm at the age where just, you know, continuing to be alive is kind of the main goal. You know, I just want to keep my health, um, to continue to be excited and enthusiastic about life and to keep making records and books.
Yeah, sure. I mean, publishers, hello. Um, I love writing books. I love making records and maybe some live performance. I'm not sure. I haven't done a live performance in five years or so, so I've kind of got to that Beatles stage where I just think live. concerts are boring and I just want to do recording projects instead, um, cause in a way, you know, the internet's an instant publication medium and, uh, why do concerts in real towns?
But I guess, you know, it does get people away from their screens and it does get people out. I don't tend to go out at night though. I don't go and see bands at night anymore. I used to do that in my twenties and thirties and forties, even, I guess when I first moved to Berlin, I was, uh, in my 40s. Um, and I would go to weird kind of laptop concerts in which people would play a tuba and then distort the sound digitally and stuff.
And it was all kind of exciting at the time. I don't know if it's still going on here. I tend to, to enjoy cities during the day now, rather than at night.
Leafbox: You know, one of the cities that I really was fascinated that you went to was, uh, Myanmar when you went to Burma. And, do you have any thoughts about that?
That seemed like such a wild,, just parallel world, this UK, Indian, Burmese mix. So I was just, if you have any reflections on that, that really seemed not exotic, but just inspiring as another world. So I'm curious if you ever think about that time.
Momus (Nick Currie): Yeah, I spent a month in, in Myanmar, in Yangon, and which used to be Rangoon, of course, and I really enjoyed it, I really liked it, I was in Chinatown in the center of Yangon, and what I loved was the books that, I guess because of the British presence, there were a lot of old British, English language paperbacks being sold on the street and in weird kind of shopping centers. And I liked the kind of grunginess of the city, but also that it was very multiracial and multireligious, that there were, um, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, uh, all cheek by jowl with apparently without any conflict. Obviously there, the main conflict there has been the junta, the military versus the, civilian government.
And that turned pretty sour. Pretty soon after I left there, so I don't know if I would have gone back. I was just really surprised that you could have really fast internet. You couldn't get fresh water out of the taps, but you could get fresh internet pretty easily, and you could get cash out of the cash machines.
So with those two things taken care of, you didn't need much more. You know, and I felt very safe there. I didn't really go out at night there, but I also really admired how the people dressed in lungis with the kind of the cream that they put on their faces that made everybody look like a new romantic from the early eighties.
You know, everyone looked like adamant or something. Um, fantastic colors and forms. And I thought it was a very vibrant city.
Leafbox: My last question, then we'll talk about vibrancy, My friend Bin asked. How is your fashion? Are you still buying all your clothes in Osaka and secondhand stores? Or what? How's your relationship to fashion evolved? Or where is it now?
Momus (Nick Currie): Um, it's slightly at an exhaustion point because I just bought so many secondhand clothes that the storage became an issue. Just basically, this flat is just full of old clothes that I've assembled in Paris or wherever, or Japan, whatever. I keep them as a kind of archive now, so I can, I really enjoy getting up in the morning and choosing things from my archive because each item I have reminds me of where I bought it and, you know, what, what I was thinking when I was into that kind of garment.
But, I'm not buying quite as much. But when I say that I'm probably buying a couple of things a week , so it is, the archive is expanding and probably, will just, they'll find me kind of suffocating under a huge mountain of clothes at some point. And now I love the fashions of the past, I think it's another way to escape from the orthodoxies of the present, although in that also is problematical right now because vintage became such a mainstream thing.
On the one hand, when you go to vintage stores, you just see a lot of fast fashion from last year, but on the other hand you see a lot of the fast fashion trying to look like vintage And you also see that every that really mainstream people are into vintage shopping now So it's harder to find good stuff and there's various paradoxes and changes and things
Leafbox: yeah, I think one of your, you're always playing with the concept of the paradox and marginality. I really appreciate your quote. What is it? You'll be famous for 15 followers or I think that's it. Yeah. Uh, do you have moving towards the next 15 years? What do you think the next, are we going to be not famous for 15 seconds, but do you have any thoughts on 15 different worlds or
Momus (Nick Currie): You're going to be licensing 15 different deepfake versions of yourself.
That's the next thing. You heard it here first. Licensing AI versions of ourselves, including posthumous ones. There's going to be posthumous Momus bots out there. Deepfake Momus. It's going to be very convincing.
Leafbox: I think that's an interesting, we could have a whole hour on deep fakes and what that means in Simulacra, but, what can people, where can people find you? Momus, anything else you want to share for people? Where can people catch up with you?
Momus (Nick Currie): imomus. com. Most of the links are Octopus like from from that website.
Thanks!
Interview: Momus