Momus

HERR F

The devil has given Herr F eternal fame in exchange for his eternal soul. But Herr F, knowing that everything living forever is sooner or later screaming forever, is determined to squelch and squander this fame, return to obscurity, and die. Herr F, the take of infamous musician and writer Momus on the Faust legend, is an experimental narrative about bargaining for immortality soaked in abstracted ideas of German-language literature, drawn mostly from English translations of twentieth-century figures like Brecht, Kafka, Rilke, Klee, Fassbinder, and Adorno. Behind the narrative is also, of course, Goethe and his (worked and reworked) Faust.

Momus is the artist name of Nick Currie. Born in Scotland in 1960, Currie studied literature at Aberdeen University before lauching himself as a singer-songwriter specialised in electronic folk music. In the 21st century he has developed parallel careers as a performance artist and author. His work of fiction includes Book of Jokes, Solution 11-167: Book of Scotlands, Solution 214-238: Book of Japans, and UnAmerica. The Guardian recently described him as “the David Bowie of the art-pop underground”.