Ergo Phizmiz at Hay Festival

Sound & Music and Good Energy have teamed up to present a new work for music and performance by Ergo Phizmiz, created entirely on-site at this year's Hay Festival.

How many Socratic dialogues does it take to illuminate a lightbulb?

Could "War & Peace" be used to power a refrigerator for a year?

Can the average home generate its monthly energy with the Times Literary Supplement?

All these, and more, questions will be answered by this bicycle powered musico-literary fantasia from Ergo Phizmiz, in which an eccentric polymathic librarian-inventor reveals his life's work: the creation of devices for capturing the energy generated by ideas, discourse, words, and using that energy as a renewable source for our day to day lives.

Created entirely on-site during Hay Festival, the performance will combine bike powered collage music, gramophone-automata, puppetry, live music, and performance, melding into a fantastical, Heath Robinsonesque world that also draws parallels between the ideas of renewable energy / recycling, and the raid-the-universe collage approach of many contemporary artists.

Press Release

Hay Festival 2014 sees major partner, 100% renewable electricity supplier Good Energy, team up with Sound and Music, the UK’s flagship agency for the promotion of contemporary music, to create a sound art installation, a first for the Festival.

Good Energy uses the 100% renewable power of sun, wind and water to match over the course of a year, the electricity its customers use. It has selected composer Ergo Phizmiz to create a new work to capture the ‘Good Energy of Hay’ and will engage visitors, performers and the festival environment as inspiration for the composition.

Attendees are invited to come and take part in the bicycle-powered fantasia being produced during the Festival at the Good Energy stand.

Ergo is Sound and Music’s Composer-in-Residence with Mahogany Opera Group. He is a true innovator, whose recent reviews have named him “One of the most inventive composers around” (BBC Radio 3), “Mad, but mesmerising” (The Times) and a hybrid between “the new Viv Stanshall, a young Eno, a British Zappa, or a replacement for Frank Sidebottom” (The Guardian).