Ergo Phizmiz Shoots Peas on WFMU

We are delighted to have been cordially invited to shoot peas on WFMU.

Ergo Phizmiz Shoots Peas 
Monday, February 10th, 7pm - 8pm
on Do or DIY with People Like Us 
Ergo Phizmiz takes us on a magical mystery tour into the workings of the world of his Wild West dream odyssey "PEASHOOT", which opens in August 2014 at Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, London. Expect an artist's notebook falling to pieces, 1920s English versions of Cowboy tunes, a yodelling extravaganza, Jodorowsky waltzing with Morricone, thunder, lightning, rain and Marlene Dietrich. 

GESTURE PIECE by Vicki Bennett, featuring music by Ergo Phizmiz & others

GESTURE PIECE (2013) by Vicki Bennett from Vicki WFMU on Vimeo.

Gesture Piece is a new Pixel Palace commission in development by artist Vicki Bennett (also known as People Like Us). Vicki has collected scenes from hundreds of films containing gestures or instructions, from classic black and white cinema to recent releases. She edited them together to make a 15-minute film consisting of seven chapters, and invited seven sound artists to create a unique film score for each section. The result is a fascinating and witty reinterpretation of familiar film footage, with scenes arranged in incongruous, surprising and often very funny combinations. Gesture Piece was commissioned by Pixel Palace, Tyneside Cinema's digital art programme and supported using public funds by Arts Council England.

Soundtracks by :
Andrew Sharpley [00:06]
Matmos [01:02]
Wobbly [05:08]
Gwilly Edmondez [07:48]
Dave Soldier [09:38]
Jason Willett [11:02]
Ergo Phizmiz [13:23]

To find out more about Gesture Piece, please visit goo.gl/8wb4Yh.
Background info at peoplelikeus.org/2013/gesture-piece/
Press info at thepixelpalace.org/press

Two short films in production for Channel 4, Random Acts, with People Like Us

We are delighted to announce that we are a good chunk through the way of production of two short films for UK television Channel 4's Random Acts, in collaboration with Vicki Bennett / People Like Us. The above image constitutes a sneak preview. More info soon.....

The Keystone Cut Ups, by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz. DVD, 7" and Digital Download available now!

We’re very pleased to announce the release on Illegal Art of a DVD, 7″ single and digital audio album!

When People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz premiered The Keystone Cut Ups at the Berwick Film and Media Art Festival in 2010, it was met with praise and wonder. Invoking a dreamlike atmosphere from the pairing of surrealist avant-garde cinema and silent-era comedy films with the quirky, yet emotionally resonating soundtrack carved out a unique sector of musical entertainment. This project stands tall as a statement against an industry that often flounders in its own creative bankruptcy.

Until now, this experience has only been available to those fortunate enough to see it performed live. But this October, people all over the world can see what all the hype is about for themselves when Illegal Art releases The Keystone Cut Ups on DVD, as well as just the musical portion as a digital download and as a 7′ single.

BUY THE KEYSTONE CUT UPS DVD NOW
All prices below INCLUDE shipping within stated price.

UK ORDERS $13 

EUROPE ORDERS $14 

ELSEWHERE ORDERS $16 

The Keystone Cut Ups will play all regions, worldwide.

MOON MAGIC 7″ SINGLE by People Like Us & Ergo PhizmizAvailable to purchase from 13 October 2012

Actual release date: 13 November 2012Illegal Art IA702 http://www.illegalart.net

“Moon” and “Magic” is a AA side 7 inch single, also on the Illegal Art label. Both tracks are taken from The Keystone Cut Ups DVD.

DOWNLOAD THE KEYSTONE CUT UPS AUDIO IN MP3 OR FLAC FORMFrom the Illegal Art Shop

With this release, Illegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads. All label releases over the last five years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system. People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old.

Ergo Phizmiz sings Gilbert & Sullivan

In December 2011 Ergo Phizmiz recorded four Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, acappella, from memory, for Vicki Bennett's mammoth 744 hour radio-broadcast "Radio Boredcast".


These recordings, along with the rest of the Boredcast, is now archived by the ever marvellous WFMU.


"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 sings "The Mikado" 


Ergo Phizmiz sings "The Pirates of Penzance"


Ergo Phizmiz sings "Iolanthe"


Ergo Phizmiz sings "HMS Pinafore"


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.

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

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "The Keystone Cut Ups" Live at Flatpack Festival

New People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - from "The Keystone Cut Ups"

"Magic", by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz, from "The Keystone Cut Ups"

"Magic" is an excerpt from "The Keystone Cut Ups", by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz from 2010.

"The Keystone Cut Ups" is a live A/V 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.

Further info: peoplelikeus.org/​2010/​the_keystone_cut_ups.html

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#

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Perpetuum Mobile" album now available for freeeeee

We are very pleased to announce that we are now giving a download of our album Perpetuum Mobile (by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz) away for free! This is still available as a CD with beautiful packaging, from our shop but if you like your mp3s then here they are...



Here's the artwork



Free film to go with Perpetuum Mobile"

Also, "Ghosts Before Breakfast" from Perpetuum Mobile has a film to go with it! We are making it available for the first time ever now.

"Ghosts Before Breakfast" Hans Richter (1928) / People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz (2007) from Vicki WFMU on Vimeo.

Here's the press release for this wonderful offering by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz:

"Perpetuum Mobile" is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic "open source" compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other's work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but what makes this record different is that Ergo and Vicki then wrote and sang their own vocals on top of their Frankenstein creation. Here you will find slyly absurdist lyrics replete with monkeys, carousels, trousers, apple trees, tinkling bells, dogs, sausages, whiskey, and cannibalism. No matter how fraught with trauma, these ballads and ditties are sung with a straight face and mixed front and center, and the results feel like 1930s British music hall standards from an alternate universe: half Ivor Cutler, half George Formby. The astonishing thing is that for all this jiggery-pokery, "Perpetuum Mobile" makes for an exhilarating, remarkably fresh pop album. It works. On "Ghosts Before Breakfast" Ergo and Vicki proudly declare that they've got "quite a selection of pastry", and if the profusion of cuckoo clocks, gunshots, horn farts, string vamps, and digital malfeasance which go hurtling through this opening track is any indication, that's no idle boast. For sheer cornucopia of sonic raw materials, this track's avalanche of information sets the tone for the overflowing, manic record that follows. There's far too much to fully parse, but among the highlights: "Beyond Perpetuum" pushes off from the Comedian Harmonists' take on the 19th century compositional craze for "moto perpetuo" runs of continuous notes at a rapid tempo, and folds found piano, voice and strings into an interlocking array of M.C. Escher harmonic stairways. "Air Hostess" is detourned lounge pop that stitches together Nelson Riddle's "Ya Ya" theme to "Lolita", "Walk Right In", light operettas, organ, bachelor pad cha cha and mambo, and nervously twitching shards of Louis Armstrong. "Pierrot's Persecution Mania" bravely explores the possibilities of a Montparnasse-via-Dixieland hybrid of can-can and bluegrass, with ridiculous canned strings colliding with jew's harp boings, while "Soggy Style" rides banjo twangs, a digital bossa nova breakdown, and the "whooo-ooes" nicked from Terry Stafford's "Suspicion". Living up to the perpetual motion of its title and cock-a-hoop cover art, this is a frantically energetic music whose layered repetitions become cumulatively more disorienting and preposterous as they loop back. "Perpetuum Mobile" goes beyond the stealth-oldies nostalgia of the mashup scene and the "culture-jamming" rhetoric of plunderphonics, and shows Mr. Ergo and Ms. Vicki to be a potent, if Surrealist, songwriting team, and together they braid oddly affecting vocals and their trademark stolen audio into twenty-first century pop. Like the perpetual motion machines for which it is named, this collaboration will run and run and run and run and run and run and runŠ - Drew Daniel

Watch People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz Live at King's Place

From Peoplelikeus.org, here is the entirety of the PLU & Ergo Phizmiz live show, from King's Place "Art of Sampling" festival, November 2008.

Please give the above a moment to load into your browser, and if you cannot see the play button below the image, try hitting your spacebar.

Download the video here.

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz playing live in London

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz will be playing live at Cafe Oto, London, on August 1st, wi pth a set consisting of songs and music from their recent releases.

Go here to view a quite lovely page Lady Vicki of Bennett has put together, with images from previous shows and a link to listen to lots of PLU & Ergo's previous collaborative work.

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Rhapsody in Glue" Now Free!

The second People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz album "Rhapsody in Glue" can now be downloaded free at Ubuweb.

PRESS RELEASE FROM 2008

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz are pleased to announce the release of a new online-only album, "Rhapsody in Glue".

Following the success of the critically acclaimed "Perpetuum Mobile" CD of 2007, renowned UK collagists / composers People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz reunite for "Rhapsody in Glue", a cycle of bricolage-ballet-music, skewed-waltzes, and skewiff-pop.

There is a story behind every album, and with "Rhapsody in Glue" we find a unique approach to constructing a record. Both long-term contributors to New York radio station WFMU, People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album "in the open", presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition - informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the "Codpaste" free podcast series. "Rhapsody in Glue" is the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.

"Rhapsody in Glue" continues in the bizarre ballroom vein of their previous efforts together, however,increasing the sonic palette into textural depths previously uncharted in their work. If "Carmic Waltz" is an expressionist painting by aged ballroom dance teacher who's eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms in her soufflŽ, then "Gary's Anatomy" is a slice of pure absurdist pop shot through with slabs of exotica and Ethel Merman. Recurring through the record is an apparent obsession with Prokofiev's "Troika (Sleigh Ride)", which merges and mashes with Burt Bacharach and Queen on "Snow Day", and lapses into pure fantasy on the almost entirely acoustic "Withers in the Whist", jarring with Ergo's strange, Victoriana obsessed lyrics. Then on "Dancing in the Carmen" we discover what happens if Nana Mouskouri is thrown into a pot with Peggy Lee and let simmer for 10 minutes, whilst "In The Waking" shimmers along on multitracked guitars, meandering melodies, and music boxes.

"Sticky White Glue" download time .... and then some "Codpaste"!

The first release in the Collected Radio Works by Ergo Phizmiz, spanning over 30 hours of experimental radio across sound-collage, spoken-word & radioplays, large-scale instrumental compositions, songs, ambient & furniture music, musique-concrete, installations, and sound-poetry, produced between 2000-2008.

"Ergo Phizmiz's Sticky White Glue, a twelve-part series of sound montages--voices, music, and plunderphonic juxtapositions of the two--reminds us why radio has been described as "schizophonic," packing more disembodied sounds and voices than the ear can process" - Artforum magazine

This series "Sticky White Glue" first aired 2003-2004 on Resonance FM, London, and was repeated 2009 on Soundart Radio, Dartington. Segments of the pieces were also broadcast by Kenny G on WFMU. It is a fanciful play-around with the juxtapositions of instruments & voices with sampling and digital composition, and features as its main protagonists Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy.

Download it at WFMU's Free Music Archive.

And then, blimeyblimey, we are are delighted to also present a permanent archive of "Codpaste" by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz.

"Codpaste" was a weekly podcast series in which the two artists attempted to compose collage music from the very beginning, in a "work in progress" style, attempting to open up the creative process. The theory is that it is rare to see compositions made from the outset, and usually the audience are only invited in once the piece is finished, done and dusted. These weekly programmes were expanded into a digital-only album entitled “Rhapsody in Glue”.

Download Codpaste at Free Music Archive.