Release date: 10/11/2024
Putting together a spoof TV commercial for Yikes, his early 2024 album, Momus decided to have fun by feeding his song lyrics into a new website called Udio. Using nothing more than a text prompt, the AI service produced an astonishing range of musical stylings: folk, opera, chanson, rap. The Scotsman instantly realised that a dizzying moment had arrived for songwriters and musicians: Artificial Intelligence is either a monster about to take our jobs and gobble us up, or a thrilling new tool, a toy, a source of joy. His next album would set out to answer the question: is this the death of our art, or a new start? The result is Ballyhoo, a Momus album which asks AI to supply the songwriter with K-pop backings... oh, and please add monophonic synths and an early 1980s Britfunk feel! This isn't an entirely random juxtaposition: South Korea's NewJeans, for instance, delve back to the age of Shakatak, Heatwave and Imagination, wrapping retro UK funk references in slick contemporary R&B production. It's a style Momus has flirted with in plenty of his forty-odd albums: a style appealing enough to drag an indie artist towards some of the pop mainstream's guilty pleasures. AI was the starting point here, but by curating, sculpting, extending, softening, replaying and remixing — even feeding some his own old songs into the mutating machinery — Momus took these compositions into familiar areas, replacing machine lyrics with his own (often based on deliberately mishearing machine Korean as quirky English: "the mondegreen method", he calls it). The result is something that could only have been made in the hot summer of 2024, at a moment when AI pop is a mess of fascinating paradoxes: slick yet glitchy, mainstream yet weird, boss and clown, our new robot overlord or just a pantomime pirate buccaneering through a weird parallel archive of its own invention. So, the answer to that question about whether it's going to gobble us up or become a new tool? Well, have a listen to Ballyhoo!
1. Plastic Seoul
2. Asylum
3. This Abuse
4. Kleptoglade
5. Singapore
6. The Enshittification of Everything
7. Three Trapped Tigers
8. Chromosomes
9. Catchy
10. Cruel
11. Reshape
12. The Fox in Winter
13. Glassy Menageries
14. Faraday
$12.00
M. Grig is a multi-instrumentalist who specializes in dobro, lap steel and pedal steel guitar living in Durham, North Carolina. His songs are beautiful, slow, wistful...
$1.00
Release date: December 6, 2019This Lynchian collaboration pairs the calm, late-night vocals of Tanya Maus with the melancholic piano, sparse electronics, and foreboding processed guitar...
$12.00
On M. Ostermeier's debut full-length CD, both mood and melody come into focus. The acoustic piano provides a warmth and familiarity that offsets the abstract...
$8.00
Release date: November 22, 2019 The German label [ parvoart ] recordings released M. Ostermeier’s debut album Percolate in a numbered edition of 50...
$11.40
Poignant and at times avant-garde piano style mixed with the spare use of electronics and processed acoustic recordings. Empty space and minimalism figure heavily in...
$8.99
Darla Records is proud to offer the first digital and CD reissue of M.I.A.'s fourth and final record After the Fact, originally released on Flipside Records in early...
$5.94
A six song, digital-only EP featuring three tracks each from newly remastered albums, Notes From the Underground and After the Fact. This is the first time the two...
