"Forest" by Ergo Phizmiz over Easter weekend on Soundart Radio

Tune into Soundart Radio anytime over Easter weekend to hear Ergo Phizmiz's sound-installation "Forest", a perpetually changing and shifting sound installation inspired the world of the Brothers Grimm.

The sounds in Forest were originally created as part of Ergo's multimedia installation for Venn Festival, 2008, built up in realtime over the course of the installation on instruments in the gallery space. Below you can watch a video of Venn, featuring footage of the Forest installation.

Venn festival documentary from Jerome Monnot on Vimeo.

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

Ergo Phizmiz news, mid 2010

Eventful times ahead, and here at Phizmiz towers we find ourselves at a strange juncture, so what better time than to update on impending goodness and gracious...

"The Mourning Show" - Ergo Phizmiz's new opera about UK radio DJ Chris Evans' opens May 8th 2010 at DePlayer, Rotterdam, with a couple of European dates programmed around it. It is anticipated the opera will tour the UK and Europe later in the year. It will be presented alongside new A/V material, DJ sets, and collages.

"Things to Do and Make" - After many delays the album of eccentric pop music will be released by Care In The Community Recordings in July. Many of the songs will be familiar to anyone who's seen Ergo play live over the past couple of years, including "Mandrill", "Busby Berkeley", "Late", and "The Dapper Transvestite". Londoners can amuse themselves in a few weeks by spotting Ergo walking up and down Oxford Street with a big sign.

"Music For The Jilted Generation" - A new cover of the entirety of The Prodigy's seminal 1990s dancefloor filler will be released free by UpItUp Records in May, alongside a collection of all of Ergo's covers projects from 2002-2010.

"Toped Buts" - a new album of instrumental music and improvisation will be released as a limited edition CDr on Cataclyst Records imminently. Tracks include "Pajamas for His Apprentice", "Bally Buttons", and "Socks Reggae".

"The Faust Cycle" has continued to garner great reviews around the blogosphere. Take a peep at one of the most recent, at Continuo. And for readers in Deutschland, you could do worse than pick up the latest issue of Beat Magazine, which features a long interview with Ergo about the creation of this 15 hour slab of audio beef.

Chinstrap - Ergo's free, Creative Commons netlabel Chinstrap is at Chinstrapmusic.blogspot.com, with new releases due from Angela Valid and Plushgoolash.

Ergo is also working on new material for the work-in-progress The Old Man Of The Mountain of Patrick Sims & Les Anticliastes Marionettes; the early stage planning for a mechanical opera about the English clown Joseph Grimaldi; and a new album of experimental pop and sound-design.

Chinstrap - A new netlabel from Ergo Phizmiz

Since January 2010, Ergo Phizmiz has been running a Creative Commons netlabel called Chinstrap. Here are the first five releases from this new project....

CHIN05 - Various Artists
"Cyclic Bits : The Raymond Scott Variations"
Remixes of Raymond Scott by some of the most inventive composers around.


CHIN04 - Oblivian Substanshall "The Greatest Hits of Oblivian Substanshall....and so on"
Pop songs, spoken-word, radio-art, and drawings from a unique purveyor of timeless English nonsense abstraction. Triple album.


CHIN03 - Martha Moopette, Heather McCallum & Rosalind Noctor "Hedgehogs & Honeybeads"
Electroacoustic soundtrack to award winning dance & animation film.

CHIN02 - Various Artists "Windpipe Moods"
Re-issue of sound-poetry compilation, first released on Mukow CD 2004.

CHIN01 - The Travelling Mongoose
"Singin' In The"
Field-recording sound-collage from a Mongoose who perpetually travels with a sound-recorder.

More Chinstrap at http://chinstrapmusic.blogspot.com

The Mourning Show

On his regular morning radio show, BBC DJ Chris Evans is called by three increasingly strange women. Something transpires. Something dark. But you'll have to wait and see.

A new opera by Ergo Phizmiz.

Starring Erik Bumbledonk, and featuring the disembodied voices of Margita Zalite, Lucinda Guy, and Martha Moopette. With The Travelling Mongoose as the Plague Doctor.

Premiering at De Player, Rotterdam, who also commissioned the opera, on May 8, 2010, to be followed by small-scale European and UK tours. Tour dates to be announced soon.

- If you are a promoter or organiser interested in The Mourning Show playing in your theatre, club, or wherever else, drop us a line and a full information pack will be forwarded -

For a sneak preview, you could do worse than download the Overture.

The Faust Re.Cycled

From Headphonica:

“The Faust Re.Cycled” is a remix-project in connexion with the the biggest/hughest creative commons release so far: “The Faust Cycle” by Ergo Phizmiz [myspace.com/ergophizmiz], released on [you guessed it] www.headphonica.com on January 1st 2010.

“The Faust Cycle” is an extraordinary album as it embodys 14+ hours [!] of music surrounding the phantastic fable about the house of Dr. Faustus - it is a “musical-comedy of disorientation and magick, somewhere between nightmare and the half-remembered childhood whimsy of an insomniac music-hall artiste”.
more information can be found here:
http://www.headphonica.com/?p=816

where you can also download the whole piece for free in various formats:
- mp3 [5 chunks / 2 GB]
- FLAC [in one piece / 4 GB]
- ogg [in one piece / 800+ MB]
not to forget the marvellous artwork [DIN A3, 2sided, pdf/jpg/gif]. now it's time to remix it:

so here you are:
http://www.headphonica.com/datas/The_Faust_Re-Cycle.zip
includes 62 samples and snippets from the original mastertapes, compressed in mp3/320kbps.
you can also cut out whatever you like from the released 14+hours and reconstruct it.
if you need something very special, please contact the duke of phizmiz himself: ergophizmiz@googlemail.com

so, take the samples and do whatever you like.
there are already many genres/styles in the original Faust Cycle - it’s up to you to transfer this samples into something new: invent new genres now.
click, create, communicate.

please send your remixes to:
headphonica@gmx.net

as we'd like to normalize the remixes before publishing them it's neccessary that you send it in WAV-quality / uncompressed. you can use www.sendspace.com / www.yousendit.com / www.megaupload.com or any free service like that and just post us the download-link.
if you have more than 300MB to send us we recommend http://www.mammutmail.com/en/ which takes up to 1GB


DEADLINE for submissions is april 30th.

“The Faust Re.Cycled” will be released including your remix on may 21st on Headphonica

Phuj Phactory: Choice Slabs of Phuj from Ergo Phizmiz on WFMU

Out now on the Free Music Archive, 46 tracks of choice sound-collage cut from Ergo Phizmiz's WFMU mash-up show Phuj Phactory.