Escher as the incredible rapper, challenged by MC Erik Satie. Harvey Keitel, maybe, nude and dangling. Wendy Carlos going back in time to meet up with his male self and to potentially create a new and strange offspring. And these are just the people we might immediately know about.
Momus, who has been running his webpage at http://www.demon.co.uk/momus/ for almost as long as there's been a web, is really Nick Currie, and Momus is just the pseudonym. As he'll tell you, but Momus is the public figure, so I'll just deal with him instead. Back in the mid-eighties he was a cult weirdo and now he's a post-structuralist construct of the cyberworld who is also a cult weirdo. Then again, he's not really weird; having talked to him a few times on-line, on the phone, face to face and so forth, he's one of the most erudite and friendly guys I know. He's just weird in context, because the world is such a strange place sometimes, and his playfulness and giddy sanity which seems insane at times but isn't is defiantly out of sync with so much else.
Momus is the master of vignettes; his songs are so tightly wired, wound and loaded with lyrical joy -- even when bilious, talking about "gold-plated credit card charisma to cover all the damage" -- that you react to the wicked wordplay after it has passed and the next twist and turn of words is already in your ears. Working with cheap keyboard presets and building up from there, inventing genres like "analogue baroque" for the fun of it, and making you think without ever having to seem to sweat [he may nights and days grappling with the issue, but he never lets you see it], Momus is musical trickery reified as musical sanity, logical progression without ever having to make a noise about dropping science, since it's just right there.
Sing, hey! Why this album? He's got so many good ones in these past few years, but this one stays…well, because of twinkly fake harpischords backing up reasons how to find inverts ("a dangling limp wrist, a talent for interior design…upgrade today! You too may be gay"), pop hooks that might already be there without him having to do anything, but who knows, Barry White as cosmic ubermensch (thus "Born to be Adored"), embarassment recalled in reflection, "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With," "Old Friend, New Flame," Beethoven getting down with Alex and his Droogs, Velvet Underground quotes leading to rap breaks, oh, I could go on. It makes me smile, it makes me cringe, it makes me empathize with a character theoretically I shouldn't be empathizing with at all, the anti-Lennon, let's say, not because he's alien per se but because it's not even a real character, maybe, but maybe not, oh who knows, as I said?
Not to mention instrumental tracks for a Momus karaoke contest as well. Truly, the man. Or the construct. Or the guy with the eyepatch. Or that guy down the street with the one thing who does that other thing at night in the one circumstance or…