Still Mockin’ and Rollin’

These are busy days for musicologists, scrambling through the debris of an unprecedented collision between traditional folk forms and onrushing computer technology.

Possibly the best commentary so far on the whole topic comes not from a learned rock critic or a university scholar, but from a 41-year-old Scottish pop musician named Nick Currie, who has gone by the name Momus (the Greek god of mockery) during his 15-year career as a musical and cultural provocateur.

Currie has dived into the vortex where music’s past and future meet, and he surfaced last February with the album “Folktronic,” whose narratives and musical mixture--banjo and Casio, fiddle and synth--expose the flaws and discover the potential of the rising hybrid. “I’ve got that mountain music in me/But not since I was born/I learned about it yesterday from a CD-ROM,” he sings on one bouncy track.

“I guess it was just playing with all the contradictions,” says Currie, who plays at the Knitting Factory Hollywood on Saturday.

“For instance, Johnny Cash saying of Beck that he’s got that mountain music in him. What does that mean when Beck is like a walking hard drive full of samples of mountain music? What does it mean now in the 21st century to have mountain music in you, what does it mean to have roots, and what does it mean to be American?”

This is the kind of rich material made for Momus, who also reels off expansive essays in magazines and on his Web site, and has constructed an elaborate conceptual underpinning for “Folktronic,” including something he calls the Fakeways Institute, a play on the storied Folkways Records enterprises.

In the end, it’s not always easy to tell how Currie, who has lived in New York for almost two years, actually feels about the “plastic folk” he’s exploring.

“I’m basically a satirist,” says the musician, whose career has been marked by assorted controversies over sexual content.

“I walk the tightrope that all satirists walk between withering scorn and a kind of admiring envy of the things I’m dealing with. So often my first reaction is to say folk music is awful, but joking around with it and playing around with the concept I came full circle and I began to realize that I did actually genuinely like a lot of folk music.... I like those tinny field recordings, I like the very dry sound of just hands being clapped or bits of wood being slapped together ... in contrast to the horrible overproduced sound of most of today’s pop records.

“So I could have my cake and eat it. I could be appearing to mock it but actually be using all its best tricks.”

The result is an unusual and bracing mix of humor and heart in several “Folktronic” tracks, which might be a clue to Momus’ next musical step.

“I don’t know where I’m going after ‘Folktronic,’ but it might be a more introverted and spiritual kind of direction,” he says. “It’s playful, but it’s not really ironic.

“I’m not going along with those people who say that irony died on Sept. 11, but I think a certain kind of Gen-X, retro, snake-eating-its-own-tail kind of irony probably did die on Sept. 11, and I think we have to find new values now.”

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Momus, with Stereo Total and the Ray Makers, at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 8 p.m. Saturday. $15. (323) 463-0204.