This is the latest song in Peter Gabriel's o/i project to be released.
It starts beautifully... and is the best track released so far in the project in my opinion.
“This is another song that comes out of the brain show that I am working on and the character has been effectively torn apart and is trying to reassemble himself one piece at a time. I needed a character for the story and I'd always wanted to do a little more with Mozo, who I had introduced many years back, and I thought, well, let's give him another blast here.
He's been brought back from the dead.
“What was interesting for me about Mozo was that he was not fully of the world and not fully outside it. For the original second album narrative he was found on this waste tip and there was a reference to alchemy, and how you only really get the opportunity to create gold out of the lowest material; shit. In Japanese culture they also have kintsugi (kin: gold, tsugi: repair) where a broken cup is repaired with gold or precious metals and the repaired cup with its faults showing ends up more valuable than the original. It's a beautiful symbol for humanity, because we're remarkably easy to break and trying to reassemble self, psyche and sanity, is really the journey of the song.
“There are two or three story songs on the record and I actually like the length of time they occupy and I like the fact that you have to stay in it for the ride to understand the story. It's like when you arrive in some hut in the woods and it takes a while just to settle in and get yourself tuned-in to the pace of that place. I wanted a bit of that in the song. If people are on for the full ride, they're going to take it through to the end.
It's a long journey, but I think it's place in the show, which is percolating in my head, it'll be towards the end, if not the end.”
Partly based on the biblical figure of Moses, Mozo was an enigmatic force who comes from nowhere, disrupts lives, and then disappears. But despite his transformative effect on the world, Mozo feels himself to be powerless. He is in the world, but not of the world. For the most part hidden and invisible, Mozo can only express himself and be heard with the aid of technology — specifically radio technology.
The figure of Mozo lives in a fantasy world created by what he picks up and transmits on short-wave radio. In this way, Mozo’s schizophrenic existence has prescient parallels with the disconnect between our own lives lived online and off. The broadcast is a construction — a projection of an imagined world — and a search for meaning and validation through attention.
Here's the song 'On the Air' where Mozo first appears....
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