Ontologies.

I’m up at an odd hour, re-writing this post.

Why do I write these posts? And take such time over them? Or not enough.

My head is ringing with a piece I’ve been working on that sounds like a mad 1950s UFO film score.

The moon is blazing in at a time of day I rarely see it at, first full moon of the year. It’s making the kitchen look like an upside down sort of daytime. The surreal blue light, bouncing off frosty roofs and in across the worktops over last night’s dishes at an odd angle.

Everything is lit at an odd angle right now, isn’t it? Second hand light, between night and day.

It has been a terrible turn around the sun.

Hasn’t it?

The perils that some of us have been pushed further towards – and in many ways all of us.

I wanted to film a little film to get something off my chest. An idea I just had to get out of me, pinned to the crime scene pin board of 2025. My desire to do this is, I dunno, perplexing. The hours across years I’ve walked & talked to a camera as a music artist and not made a piece of music instead. It’s ish like art, except not much of an interpretation – and not thinking much about the experience it’s creating for anyone. Which is terrible storytelling. I do seem to have said to creative partners often that I think it’s good to learn out loud. I can’t explain myself, really.

Which is sort of the point of this piece. How do you explain yourself?

Why do you think you are here? Here now? In… *all this*.

Are you, hopeful traveller, really facing change? The change that’s going on. The change that’s coming? What is your ontology – and can it cope with any new shocks?

What if bigger changes are coming to the world than we think we are prepared for? Who will cope with this? Us funny lot, waddling back to the pub?

I’ve changed the story I think I’m in a number of times in my life. And in this video I claim to be getting used to it.

I filmed this whole walk & talk first time in the summer. Was on my way somewhere nice. It looked too nice, too comfortable. Even with the unexpected early gatherers for another flag festing protest outside my starting location. I hadn’t ridden the bus into Lansdowne to be too comfortable.

The things we can’t see round don’t just hold us up. They block our creative energy. And it’s like slowly asphyxiating.

The Climate Emergency Briefing in November I managed to miss. But the headlines were intended to be shocking. Friends of mine who’ve spent years in environmental advocacy said they faced a new level of grief for the first time at it. Some national changemakers are saying they are only preparing for societal collapse now.

More than two years of genocidal gentrification of Gaza, watched and not stopped by the world, signed off on by the Eurovision Song Contest, is a headline that doesn’t make a single scratch into the top layer of how dark the psychology of Israel must be at this point. No one is going to jail for what’s been done to the indigenous people group of Palestine. While the recreational joy of another beach on the other side of the world is forever now connected to horror because more people thought they could spread the violence yet again to anyone celebrating their Jewishness in public.

Protestors do indeed keep showing up outside the Roundhouse Hotel in my home town, flags and fear waving, imagining fantasy hoards of brown-skinned sex gangs invading our islands. The money paying for systematic propaganda across British media has left everyone not white feeling less safe on their home streets.

It is a shit show. Spread by men still not gone from places of power, running the world, trickling down everywhere. Somehow not dead. Somehow not in jail. Somehow still not removed by us lot. Because how can we see around all that? And so very much more. We don’t have time for a measured response to things, we may not possess the cultural flex to have some core beliefs challenged, and we are collectively exhausted with bullshit and work and cruelty. It is the world that raised us, disclosing itself again.

So when we wed ourselves so certainly to such dark, unsustainable ways of being, what happens when they collapse?

How do I say that 2025 was a quietly good year for Momo?

I have to straighten my captain’s jersey and say by my own reckoning, how could I not?

I’ve built things I can use across all of my work and produced things I am proud of this year. Experiences, productions and perhaps a few memories for people. I’ve had some personally exceptional moments this year, just quietly. And let me say, you surely know for yourself, self-motivating alone in a shed as I am, these tiny successes are like drops of oxygen in a sealed room. They are also the best I can do to demonstrate a different way of being.

You’ll see what I mean in the film. Somehow ending up in an unexpectedly stunning January afternoon on the coastline, it was hard to be as angry as I half want to be.

And while I might be tempted to say I still don’t know why I am here, how I and anyone else can relate to each other in our different grades of burden, this year has helped me firm up the opposite in me. I do know why I’m here, what I am supposed to bring. I am simply looking for the places, moments and people that know they need a bit of it, and that I want to give what I can to.

From that place, I just don’t think this is the end we might feel it is.

I believe more than ever that the universe is way bigger than most of us raised by this world believe it is. Which makes us way smaller, and way freer.

I might say soberly it’s the partly-horrifying, deeply disturbing experience of transformation. It’s my job to think about stuff differently, creatively, and so here I am. That word on my mind since the summer – ontology. I am always, in some way, thinking about my and our ways of seeing and being.

And so I am only looking forward after 2025. Expectantly. Honestly, in this midwinter moment before my next ontological shock… excited. I think I’m supposed to be, I think it’s why I’m here, because it’s the creative energy that changes the world.

I’m going to try to keep getting out of bed for that.

Along the way one additional note of encouragement to my work came at the end of Arts By The Sea Festival – the marketing team picked a Momo:tempo classic for the showreel, which I post here for a reminder of what joy looks and sounds like.

If you want to talk to me about it more directly, I’ve set up a private Signal chat to learn out loud with you if you’d like to join in – QR is below too.