Momus - Bibliotek

Bibliotek is the 2012 album from Momus. It's a record of shudders, shivers and tingles which collides the genres of pastoral and horror, offering a landscape of forests, fields and dunes in which disturbing events seem to be happening just out of frame, and utopia is just a hair's breadth from hell. Momus made the recordings (and accompanying videos) in Osaka, in spring, while writing the script for a horror film set in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and the result approaches the broadcast hauntology of the Ghost Box label. Musically things are complex and playful: we get blurred Italodisco, drum machine folk, communist marching songs, spy themes, and retro-crooner cruise-pop. The opening song is in 5/4, the penultimate ballad uses just intonation, and atonal Modernist flutes, sombre brass, haunting recorders and insane sax crop up everywhere. Most of the sounds were sourced on YouTube, that "delirious archive" celebrated by the 2010 Momus album Hypnoprism, a kind of sister to Bibliotek (it also sported a painting by Misaki Kawai on its sleeve). Above all, Bibliotek is a record that doesn't shy away from sensual sadness, lush grandeur and a certain spine-tingling gorgeousness.

1. Erase
2. Lycidas
3. Dunes
4. Farther
5. Core
6. Southbound
7. Huge
8. Jackdaw
9. Erostratus
10. Cheekbone
11. International
12. Bibliotek
13. Shunned
14. Isaak