Momus and Anne Laplantine's 'Summerisle': c or d

'Merritt does not keep careful track of what's happening in popular music these days, and seems entirely dismissive of most that he's heard. I asked him a few times if there were young and active artists out there whom he liked, and all I got was that Momus (mid-40s) is a "great lyricist," and that he likes the new High Llamas record. Since he stopped reviewing records, he doesn't get them sent to him for free in the mail anymore, so he says that "unless it's boring thumping disco music, I probably don't hear it, until my friends play it for me. Which they rarely do anymore, since I hate everything they play for me."

'...Merritt feels there is nothing new or groundbreaking in popular music these days. "There needs to be a new technology," he said. "That's usually when that happens. Robotics would be great. If we could have an easily used robot guitar, for example, we could do lots of nifty things that have not been done. Computer-assisted songwriting would also be great."

On Summerisle, of course, I pretty much replaced lyrics with grunts and hiccups. On my latest track (Sempreverde) I even replace my voice with a computer. Soon I plan to replace the music with the sound of scuffling hessian across a condensor mike. This is what Berlin does to you. At least it gets you in The Wire.

Merritt's comments are rather idiotic, though. He admits his ignorance to new music than makes a sweeping comment about it?

(see: elo)

People should give more props to Summerisle. Raise up for Currie and Laplantine!

Just discovered Anna Laplantine's 'Nordheim', released about 10 years ago, and it's great. I wonder what happened to her

the capsule history from Momus:

After we worked together on Summerisle -- a gentle, lyrical record -- Anne got married, left Berlin to live in Paris, and quit music for playing Go. She went to Go clubs and went on Go tours, playing the game obsessively.

Anne Laplantine's European Go Rating if your interested - which is frankly a bit pants for someone who plays 'obsessively'.

Plus she seems to have stopped played after getting 1 win out of 6 games in the big Paris tournament a couple of years ago - no staying power in the face of adversity these artists.

more capsule history from Momus:

"I stopped playing Go just after this event at Virginia Tech. I spent a lot of time looking at pictures of Cho Seung-Hui and reading the texts he'd written. They aren't very interesting in themselves, but they reveal an extreme solitude which spoke to me. My first YouTube video was a homage to Cho Seung-Hui, and many of my subsequent videos are too. I oppose myself openly to videos and comments filled with hate against Eric Auvinen, Eric and Dylan from Columbine, Cho Seung-Hui, who for me are saying something very important about our Western societies. I defend them 100%." By this point -- a month ago -- Anne had "friended" (in that internet verb which doesn't quite mean the same as "befriending") several YouTube users who film themselves shooting weapons. People with names like "Shooter" and "Sturmgeist89". Last week one of them -- Sturmgeist -- killed eight people in a Finnish school before turning the gun on himself. Anne's name was mentioned in an article in Der Spiegel entitled "How can mass murder be prevented?" The fact that Anne had friended Auvinen, and that her user picture showed Seung-Hui, was, said the journalist, a warning sign. He doesn't seem to have gone so far as to investigate Anne's videos or try and decipher her message.

"I'm a bit scared of being implicated in this story," Anne told me. "I didn't know him personally, but we were online friends. They all had their YouTube accounts closed. And I'm a bit scared of being questioned because, yes, I supported them, and I continue to post images on YouTube which risk being censored. I'm not sure the police understand artistic motivations."

Later in the comments section, someone asks her:

Your youtube "friends", you must have sensed that they were ready to kill, did you try to dissuade them?

To which she answers:

No, on the contrary, I tried to persuade them!

how edgy

More than edgy. Criminally complicit, if she really was encouraging high-school killers.

Stopping playing Go was clearly a big mistake.

how disappointing

What was the recent Momus-related release that he wrote about in The Wire?