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.

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."

The Critics are Dancing.....

The critics have been doing proverbial somersaults over the new Ergo Phizmiz album "Things to Do and Make", on Care in the Community Recordings.


"Phizmiz is a bona-fide songwriter juggling absurdist humour"- BBC

"Musical settings reveal an ear practised in making the magical brush shoulders with the mundane" - Drowned in Sound

"A genuinely intriguing album bursting with unusual sound effects, jaunty gypsy tunes, clackety electro, whistles, bells, typewriters and flashes of melancholy that all only hint at what this force of nature is capable of" - AU

"It’s very good indeed, but his idea of pop is a wholly individual universe of eccentricity, leftfield ideas and subversion, and all the better for it" - Americana-UK

"The first major and mainstream Ergo Phizmiz album may be a small independent release, but this album goes to show how major record companies have lost touch completely..ever so enjoyable...rather unique" - Pennyblack Music

"Bloody marvellous" - Clash Magazine

"Intelligent lyrics, fun melodies, frivolous and eclectic arrangement -- hell, he had me from the ukulele in the opening track" - Monsieur Delire

"A marvelous, manically-arranged set of odd pop songs" - Idletigers.wordpress.com

"Inventive pop, which is full of ideas" - Beyond the Noize


"Things to Do and Make" is available for order at Rough Trade, iTunes, Amazon, Zavvi, HMV, Play.com, and so on ......

Ergo Phizmiz Live at Rough Trade East, September 3rd 2010

Rough Trade East In-store - ERGO PHIZMIZ - Friday 3rd September, 7pm

Ergo Phizmiz will be playing a solo set of uberpop, primarily from the new album "Things to Do and Make", at Rough Trade East, Brick Lane, London. While you're there, why not pick up a copy of the album, released on Care in the Community Recordings. Oh yes.

Look forwards to seeing you there. Further info at Rough Trade.

The Mourning Show - The Talulah Tapes

A very pleasant surprise discovery. Ergo's 6 year old daughter filmed the vast majority of one of the rehearsals of "The Mourning Show" at Tete-a-Tete: The Opera Festival (with the exception of the shadow-puppetry based Prologue). Filmed without sound, we've edited it to the recorded version of the opera, and here it is ....

"The Mourning Show" at Tete-a-Tete: The Opera Festival - Video Extracts

A selection of extracts from the UK premiere of Ergo Phizmiz's opera about radio, magic, death & Chris Evans, "The Mourning Show".















And a little backstage treat, with Vulnavia Vanity lip-syncing to The Quiz, whilst Erik Bumbledonk & Ergo Phizmiz rehearse their moves...