Ergo is becoming an artist-of-the-split-personality: the 'pop' orientated work has become infinitely more refined, moving into a pure and timeless sound that could sit anywhere between the 1960s and 2020, gently subverted from the inside, and produced entirely with one laptop, one microphone, and instruments; whilst his experimental work in opera and radio-art continues to explode format, context, and style, with a healthy disrespect for the boundaries of history and culture.
Please do continue with us on this strange journey, and tell all your friends....it's going to be fun....
Pop music - This year will see the release of the follow up album to 2010's critically acclaimed "Things to Do and Make" on Care in the Community Recordings. Chances are that, if you've seen Ergo perform live in the last year, that you've already heard some of the new songs. Track titles include "The Rock Song of J Alfred Pruflove", "Ophelia", "The Devil in the Belfry" and "Celandine". Ergo will also be touring in support of the album, so keep your eyes peeled.
Gargantua - The new Ergo Phizmiz opera is an epic. Based (very) loosely on Rabelais' "Gargantua & Pantagruel", it takes in the nativity, UFOs, World War II, and a masque of dunces. Ambitious in scope, it will premiere, somewhere, in 2013. Having given up applying for UK arts funding for anything whatsoever, Ergo is writing the opera in his own spare time and hope's to develop partners for the project when it reaches production stages.
You can keep up with the progress of the opera at it's dedicated Soundcloud page.
Conversations With Birds - A new radioplay for Bayerischer Rundfunk is in progress, detailing meetings and incidents with birds from Ergo's life. Written in a mixture of English, German and Polish (with translators Denis Kundic, Caroline Stupnicka and Robin Gill), it promises to be a strange and magickal ornithological odyssey.
Upsidedownisms - A new short-form radioplay for BBC Radio 3, about the art of turning things upside down, and the limits of electronic music, will broadcast on The Verb in late January.
The Mourning Show - On Tour - The 2010 opera about the death by demonic possession of radio DJ Chris Evans will be taken on a comprehensive UK tour in the later part of 2012, in a completely new multimedia staging, starring Elvis Herod as Chris Evans and Ergo Phizmiz as The Plague Doctor.
Populista - Robert Ashley - The division of Bolt Records curated by Michal Libera will release Ergo's collaborative reinvention of the operas and techniques of Robert Ashley.
Electronic Music 2000-2011 - A series of very limited cassette releases bringing a hitherto unreleased mass-body of work from Ergo Phizmiz to you. These will be cut to c45 tapes and released intermittently throughout the year.
Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, we'll see....
Happy new year from Bridport....
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