Monus - Quietism [CD]

The 37th Momus album started as a pre-election warning against the 47th US President in the form of a song called Orange Pills ("don't swallow them" being the take-away). Somehow the American electorate failed to listen and elected Trump anyway. The issue, for non-MAGA people, then became where to position oneself on a spectrum running from quietism to activism. It's a theme which bounces through Quietism, a quiet yet poppy album focused on the sound of a real acoustic guitar (the machine which "kills fascists", as Woody Guthrie liked to say). One might want to reduce the idiotic noise of this world, to retreat into a privileged world of beauty and intelligence, to become an introvert or a recluse. But politics cannot be denied, even by a Paris-based aesthete. In a new take on the old cliché: "First they came for the quietists and I said nothing..." One tiny piece of aesthetic activism going on here is the choice of a South American musical idiom: 1960s bossa nova, partly generated by 2020s AI tools which are North American. A secondary theme - very much related to the use of AI - is mimicry, and the dialectical tug between authenticity and the synthetic, human input and the impact of robotics. What's real, what's fake, and which of those - the mask or the supposed face beneath - gets us to a more interesting place? A filmic vocabulary appears: there are continuity girls, spoiler alerts, actors whose props win Academy Awards. At the end the album presents it's human author with an imaginary medal, for this is his "imperial phase" - a double-edged sword representing both his own artistic zenith and a period in which the world is dominated by new empires, old oligarchs.