Friday 24 September 2010

"Paul Klee, a Balloon, the Moon, Music and Me" receives Special Mention at the Prix Italia

Ergo Phizmiz's radiophonic work "Paul Klee, a Balloon, the Moon, Music and Me" has received the "Special Mention" in the category of music radio at the 2010 Prix Italia in Turin.

"An interesting and even daring experiment. The painter Paul Klee was deeply inspired by music and now Klee’s works are translated back into music and soundscapes. Movement and colour is suggested in an almost cinematic way."

The work, which told of an adventure through the paintings of Swiss painter Paul Klee in sound, was commissioned by the BBC for Radio 3's Between the Ears, and entered by the Beeb into the prize.

Prix Italia prizes news article (Italian).

Does this mean we can crack a bottle of wine?

Tuesday 21 September 2010

Things to Make and Do - Ergo Phizmiz at Whitechapel Gallery

Ergo Phizmiz will be performing a special set from his new album "Things to Do and Make" at Whitechapel Gallery, London, on November 25th 2010, including a performance of songs created through an open invitation to local musicians.

The last time Ergo worked with musicians from the area local to a show to present his songs resulted in the album "Live in Warsaw", with Macio Moretti and Piotr Zabrodzki, which you can hear below:



This event is curated by Care in the Community Recordings.

More information and booking at Whitechapel Gallery.

Monday 20 September 2010

Cinemacollages : Volume 1


A series of sound-collages on cinema and animation, comprising: "Sounds of Soviet Animation" Volumes 1 & 2 (mixes of sound-design and music from the Soyuzmultfilm Studios), "Betty Boop" (a mix of sounds from the legendary Fleischer animations), "Trnka / Trojan / Novak" (comprising of sound-effects from Jiri Trnka's collaborations with composers), "Laurel & Hardy Ubermash" (a mash-up of various hollerings, clangs, and music from the Hal Roach era L & H films), and "A Fantasia on Jan Svankmajer" (a whistlestop tour of stop-motion and Surrealism).

These collages were created 2006-2009



The pieces included here were originally created for Ergo Phizmiz's Phuj Phactory on WFMU, except "Trnka / Trojan / Novak", which is previously unreleased.

Within these collages you will hear music and sound-design from:

Zdenek Liska * Ideya Garanina * A. Babaev * N. Bogoslovski * Alfred Schnittke * A. Babaev * Yuri Norstein * B. Shapner * V. Dashkevich * Vadim Kurchevsky * Nina Shorina * Natalia Golovanova * Anatoly Petrov * M. Meyerovich * A. Khrjanovsky * V. Shumova * L. Atamanov * Ivan Ivanov-Vano * N. Serabryakov * E. Artemiev * Laurel & Hardy * Zoltan Kodaly * Charles Barlow & his Orchestra * Captain Wiggly-Hips * Edvard Grieg * Tchaikovsky * The Mike Sammes Male Voice Choir * Raymond Scott * The Avalon Boys * Auf Zum Schutzenfest * Ludwig Koch * Louis Armstrong * The Beau Hunks * Woody Allen * Groucho Marx * Max Fleischer * Sammy Timberg * Jan Svankmajer * Jack Hylton * BBC Radiophonic Workshop * Bernard Herrmann * The Marx Brothers * Esquivel * John Tavener * John Cage * Paul Bowles * The Brothers Quay * Leszek Jankowski * Bert Kaempfert * Luis Bunuel * Brian Easdale * Gyorgy Ligeti * Jiri Trnka * Vaclav Trojan * Jan Novak

Cinemacollages Volume 2 – Orson Welles / Karel Zeman's Magic Composites / Laurel & Hardy: Static / The Dream of Alfred Hitchcock is a work-in-progress ....

Saturday 18 September 2010

Ergo Phizmiz Live at Bridport Hat Festival - Videos

Below are some songs from Ergo Phizmiz's live show at Bridport Hat Festival, September 18th 2010..... keep an eye for some delightful hats passing by, some wonderful moustaches, and some angry looking fellows....

"Hats"



"Yellow Hat"



"In The Waking"



"Food and War"



"Fashionable Waltz"



"An Elephant On His Head"



"Mandrill"



"Fingerwings"

Wednesday 8 September 2010

Ergo Phizmiz in Sync : 2 - Jared Brandle's films to "The Faust Cycle"

Film-maker Jared Brandle has been producing a series of fascinating films to elements from Ergo Phizmiz's 14 hour work "The Faust Cycle". We are delighted to present these beautiful pieces here.....














Ergo Phizmiz in Sync : 1 - Creative Commons usages of Phizmiz music

We thought it an opportune moment to post up the plethora of videos that have turned up lately using music by Ergo and collaborators .... some fascinating, hilarious and beautiful things here ...




















Giant Winged Beasties from Natalia Castro on Vimeo.



Camera Test 2 from Thomas Galyon on Vimeo.



Bottomless pit - radio edit from petesa on Vimeo.



Chasing the Buffalo from KS12 on Vimeo.



Toasted from EganWorks Productions on Vimeo.

Tuesday 7 September 2010

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - "The Keystone Cut Ups" - World Premiere, September 15th

Opening Gala - The Keystone Cut Ups

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz
Location: The Maltings Theatre, Berwick-Upon-Tweed, UK
UK / 2010 / 40 min / Cert. Suggested 12

World Premiere

"The premiere performance of the new commission from artists People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz opens the Festival. The Keystone Cut Ups is a live performance that combines video-collage with an original musical score, created using sampling and live instrumentation, to explore the aesthetic, contextual and stylistic relationships between early silent-comedy and early avant-garde cinema.

Using the influence of slapstick comedy on the Surrealists as a starting point, the piece takes us on a madcap journey, combining the techniques and popular imagery of the two genres.

The Surrealists took to cinema easily, using it as a device to show their disdain for established artistic tradition. In their quest to liberate the imagination, they believed that the process of juxtaposing unrelated elements would create images of great emotional and poetic power. Thomas Pynchon wrote, “one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects”.

In early silent films the actors often came from the Vaudeville tradition. They used flamboyant body language and facial expressions, a style suited to melodramatic comedy, which was popular at the time for its escape value. The earliest films were influenced by the presentation methods of theatre and the stage sets and inclusion of orchestras and dancers were motifs of entertainment that stuck throughout cinema’s evolution.

The Keystone Cut Ups employs a surrealist approach, presenting images side by side on the screen at the same time. It includes the everyday objects, such as top hats or umbrellas that were utilized as props by both slapstick comedians and the Surrealists, as well as reflecting the concerns of the day like mass industrial automation, and the stories made popular through film at the time, which included clunky monsters and the fantasy of trips to the moon.

The work reflects simultaneously on the histories of these two distinct schools of cinema and how they inform one another, whilst producing a work whose structure and format is informed by both silent comedy and early experimental and avant garde cinema." - Iain Pate

Don’t miss this unique event, followed by a drinks reception in the Maltings’ Stage Door Bar.

http://www.berwickfilm-artsfest.com/events-and-films/8/10/opening-gala-the-keystone-cut-ups#

Four Golden Nuggets on the Seventh Day of September

A few nuggets of delight we ought to mention ....

Soundart Radio are broadcasting Ergo Phizmiz's piece "The Faust Cycle" in chunks of one hour, on Mondays at 11pm GMT for the next 14 weeks. So if you've never had the time to sit and listen to whole bloody big whack, you can now do the digestible version via this marvellous and always unpredictable station.

Tobias Fischer's in-depth interview with Ergo Phizmiz about "The Faust Cycle", previously available in a German language version in Beat Magazine, is now available online in an English version. You can read the article here. If you've never heard the piece, this article provides a good introduction to it, and is the most detailed look at the process of it's creation around.

Composer and artist Greta Pistaceci has published an interview with Ergo Phizmiz on Popshifter. Subtitled "A Play in Three Acts", the interview takes the form of a number of dialogues between Greta as Ergo & Ergo as Greta, The A-Band as Winnie the Pooh & Ergo as Arcimboldo, and Greta as Gertrude the Duck & Ergo as a Residents Spokesperson.

On 15th September, on WFMU, Do Or DIY with People Like Us will feature the premiere broadcast of Ergo Phizmiz's puppet-opera score for Buchinger's Boot Marionettes "The Snow Flea".

"Join Ergo Phizmiz in the studio for this week's DO or DIY featuring the premiere broadcast of the entirety of Ergo Phizmiz's score for "La Puce de Neige" ("The Snow Flea"), a mime puppet-opera for Buchinger's Boot Marionettes, which premiered in Marseille, November 2009. The show, created for children, tells the story of Kerugug, a snow flea who in the Arctic who is displaced to Antartica through a hole in the world, and his journey back - with an evil ice-cream in hot pursuit, sneaking snow fleas to use as anti-freeze in his produce. The piece combines field-recordings of Inuit folk songs with a memetic score that references Mussorgsky, Moondog, French folk songs, Augustus Pablo, Prokofiev, Strauss, and Raymond Scott."