A Young Lady and Her Cat Spend a Quiet Night In (Board Game Intermezzo)

What a ridiculous board game!

Better off to be ignored game!

Big fat man is in the middle.

It is all a silly riddle,

Such a lot of stupid piddle.

Roll your dice 

then,

move your piece.

I don't like it 

in 

the 

least.

Lots of dreams and lots of castles,

It is all a lot of hassle!

Massive baby disappears -

what does all of it amountter?

I have gone and lost my counter!

Use a penny, 

anything,

I'm sick 

of this 

bloody 

thing!

War is raging all around,

Bombs are crashing 

to the ground,

Very noisy!

Bang bang bang!

If you roll a six, 

then maybe,

you might find yourself 

a baby.

Then I hope

My

Dear Friend,

This game

will be

at an end.

GARGANTUA: An Excessive Entertainment by Ergo Phizmiz - Full video

GARGANTUA: An Excessive Entertainment by Ergo Phizmiz from Ergo Phizmiz on Vimeo.

Fragments of GARGANTUA: An Excessive Entertainment

The first footage to be released of "GARGANTUA: An Excessive Entertainment" by Ergo Phizmiz & Friends.

This show, in performance, animation, collage, found-sound, and electronic music, ran for 12 shows between March and May 2013, and in true Phizmizephemerastyle is now a dead show, never to be seen again!

So, here are some bits of it. An edit of the entire piece is in progress from various parties, made of footage from the entire tour. In the meantime, dip your toes into the shallow end of this little meanderthon....




GARGANTUA was made by Ergo Phizmiz, Simon Mathewson, Martha Moopette, Flora Bertolli, Robert Lee, Nicky Mathewson, Talulah Lotus, Autumn Poppy, Rosie Mathewson, Oblivian Substanshall, Georgia Phoebe, Monkton Wylde, The Travelling Mongoose, and supported by PRS Foundation, Qujunktions, Handpressed PR, Soundart Radio, Bridport Arts Centre, and all tour venues.

Photographs of GARGANTUA by Rebecca Vaughan

Rebecca Vaughan kindly popped in and took these rather tasty photos of GARGANTUA: An Excessive Entertainment by Ergo Phizmiz & Friends. Many thanks. Delicious.

Out now! Two songs from GARGANTUA, digital single

Out now! A digital single of two tracks from Ergo Phizmiz's excessive entertainment GARGANTUA.

Ergo Phizmiz in The Wire magazine

The March issue of The Wire magazine (issue 349) features an in-depth interview with Ergo Phizmiz about his recent productions "Gargantua", "Boojum" and "Eleven Songs", written by Clive Bell with photographs by Tom Hunter.

"The latest sonic phantasmagoria by rogue collagist Ergo Phizmiz is a medieval Techno opera fed by Rabelais's Gargantuan appetites. Clive Bell meets a vaudevillean prodigy who believes pop and surrealism make natural bedfellows" ....

Buy it at The Wire.

Outtakes from GARGANTUA

Ergo Phizmiz's "Gargantua" tours the UK in March 2013. Here are some musical bits that didn't make the final edit, or made the edit in very different ways.

Full tour dates announced soon. European tour also looking likely, and some USA possibilities.....

Hope to see you there. Come and say hello. Perhaps buy me a whisky, straight, single malt. Thanks.


Outtakes from Ergo Phizmiz's "Gargantua", an excessive entertainment or bored-game with history in electronic music, collage, animation, puppetry and performance. Premieres March 2013. Supported by PRS Foundation for New Music, Soundart Radio, UpItUpRecords, Qujunktions, Handpressed, Bridport Arts Centre, Berwick Maltings, Morden Tower.

Ergo Phizmiz News September 2012

Greetings my sweet and sexy peas. Welcome to the new splurge of Ergo Phizmiz news....



The new single from Ergo Phizmiz "Time To Think It Over" is an outtake from the forthcoming album "Eleven Songs". The single is released download-only on Care in the Community Recordings this month. The album is released on December 3rd. Poptastic.

October 19th on Bayerischer Rundfunk sees the premiere broadcast of the new radioplay from Ergo Phizmiz. "Conversations With Birds" is a labrynthian game of language, opera, history, travel and literature.





Illegal Art are releasing a DVD of People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "The Keystone Cut Ups", a montage of silent-comedy and early avant-garde cinema with an original instrumental score. A 7" single of two musical cuts ("Moon"/"Magic") is also imminent.

Autonoise are releasing an edition of 100 cassettes, "RAKEDIKA". Subtitled "games for music to play with toys", the album is made entirely from edits of Autonoise's own hacked toys.

If you are near Lausanne at the moment, head to Theatre Vidy to see "The Old Man Of The Mountain" from Patrick Sims & Les Antliaclastes Marionettes, featuring music by Ergo Phizmiz, Ata Ebtekar and Oriol Viladomiou. The work also tours extensively in the coming year.

Taking up the majority of time at Phizmiz Towers & Atelier Royale is the production of "GARGANTUA", the new work for theatre by Ergo Phizmiz. Combining electronic music with vocals, puppetry, collage, dance and animation, the work is a hallucinatory encyclopedic voyage on the high seas of time and space. 

Inspired by Rabelais, but referencing, well, pretty much everything, it's set to be a unique sensory adventure. It tours the UK in March 2013, with a planned European tour for late 2013.

Supported by PRS Foundation, Qujunktions, UpItUp Records, Bridport Arts Centre, The Waiting Room, and Soundart Radio. The work, as per usual, was rejected funding from the Arts Council - there is a huge crowdfunding campaign planned to take off in the coming weeks, so if you can chip in, please do.


Thanks for reading .... I blow you big wet sloppy kisses across an apocalyptic landscape of knives, forks, spoon, and stones....

"GARGANTUA" 2013 UK Tour Dates

GARGANTUA by Ergo Phizmiz - UK tour March 2013

Announcing the new theatre work written, composed & directed by Ergo Phizmiz.

Ergo Phizmiz in 2012

Well well ... as usual, lots to look forward to from Mr Phiz in 2012 ...

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....