Ergo Phizmiz sings Gilbert & Sullivan, on Radio Boredcast

Ergo Phizmiz has joined the boredom of the Vicki Bennett curated, mammoth 744 hour broadcast Radio Boredcast, commissioned by AV Festival 2012.

Thu 1 March – Sat 31 March

Radio Boredcast is a 744-hour continuous online radio project, curated by artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with AV Festival. In response to our ambiguous relationship with time - do we have too much or not enough? - Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed.

With over 100 participants Radio Boredcast includes new and unpublished works, freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews, monologues and much, much more. Thematic playlists will run throughout from “Acconci” to “Zzz…”

 

You can listen continuously for a month, or for hours, minutes or seconds. Online 24 hours each day, at www.avfestival.co.uk or www.thepixelpalace.org. To launch Radio Boredcast live from 1 March you can click the red radio icon in the header above, or via the individual link for each day below.

 

In the meantime, the schedule for the whole month is listed below, with details of each show and information about the artists. You can also subscribe now to the Radio Boredcast podcasts. Thanks to all the contributors.

 

Co-commissioned by AV Festival and Pixel Palace, hosted by BASIC.fm.

Ergo's contribution involves acappella performances of the entirety of "The Pirates of Penzance", "HMS Pinafore", "Iolanthe" and "The Mikado", comic operettas by W.S. Gilbert & A.S. Sullivan.....oh dearie me.....

Around the age of 11 or 12 I became obsessed with the comic operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan. This fascination lasted around 3 years. There were posters of W.S. Gilbert (the "S" stands for Schwenck, rather spectacularly) and Arthur Sullivan on my bedroom wall.

For years the thought of returning to their works "from memory" has been at the back of my mind. My very boring contribution to Radio Boredcast is "acappella" versions of the G & S operettas "HMS Pinafore", "Iolanthe", "The Pirates of Penzance" and "The Mikado".

Some of them I know better than others. In the cases where I didn't know the melodies, I made them up or roughly talked through them. I also decided to not use different voices for characters (these recordings are my second takes - the first takes sounded like The Goon Show and to be honest I had far too much fun doing them for it be genuinely boring), and to omit stage directions, so we are left with a very boring barrage of Victorian words, tuned and untuned, from my tired, monotone voice.

Ergo Phizmiz is a composer, writer, and multimedia artist. He makes pop, theatre, installations, opera, radio-art, radioplays, sound-collages and performances. He lives in Bridport, UK, and has a headache. He never wants to perform Gilbert & Sullivan again. http://ergophizmiz.net