utorak, 5. ožujka 2013.

Ergo Phizmiz - Gargantua (2013)




Phizmiz je otkačeni barokni specijalac, kao - pisac, skladatelj, zvukovni kolažist, radijski producent, filmaš, performer, multiinstrumentalist, tvorac opera... Njegova najnovija zvukovna rableovska fantazmagorija je srednjovjekovna techno-opera Gargantua. Pop i nadrealizam susreću se svake večeri ne na operacijskom stolu nego u krevetu s Orsonom Wellesom. Ekscesivna zabava!

www.ergophizmiz.net/
ergophizmiz.blogspot.com/





Outtakes from Ergo Phizmiz's "Gargantua"

Gargantua, a brand new 'vaudeville of the imagination' from the beautifully scrambled brains of UK polymath Ergo Phizmiz.
A multi-sensory feast and genuinely unique patchwork of artistic disciplines, Gargantua plunders history and culture and places them in a boiling pot ready for explosion. A devilish mix of storytelling, performance, animation, puppetry, moving image collage and masks, all garlanded by an original music score that's equal parts contemporary electronic, medieval and 1930s British dance band.
If 'F is for Fake' then 'E' could be for 'Ergo'. This hallucinatory odyssey through time and culture tells three simultaneous stories: one a detective story on the disappearance of the giant King Gargantua, another of an adventure by French writer Francois Rabelais across Europe, the third a strange, elliptical board game that draws these threads together, in a story told by the more than reliable Gargantuan narrator Orson Welles...

As one portal gives you access to insider knowledge, a trapdoor opens and leaves you wonderfully displaced, and so it goes. Grey matter is constantly electrified and eyes lavished by Terry Gilliam-esque architectural constructs, political sensibilities are enlightened by meta-narratives, absurd social commentary echoes Thomas Pynchon or Felix Kubin and limbs and laughing muscles loosen as if being tackled by a crack tag-wrestling team of Andy Kaufman and Phil Kay. If you haven't visited before, welcome to the world of Ergo Phizmiz.
The Gargantua blog features details of said board game, video/audio clips, remixes and pictures of the production in progress. Visit here - gargantuadisappears.blogspot.com – and get yer bookmarks out.


Ergo Phizmiz (54 Albums, 313 Tracks)

streaming and download


Foundation five: Ergo Phizmiz

Ergo Phizmiz

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, collagist, opera writer, radio producer, filmmaker, performer; take your pick from a long list of Ergo Phizmiz’ current specialisms.
The versatile soundsmith has turned his hand to all manner of music composition and sculpture over the years, but he first came to prominence with his experimental electronica. Never one to sit still, he has since written medieval operas, radio plays and modern folk albums, garnering praise from all corners of the music industry in the process.
Described by The Wire magazine as a ‘one man movement’, and by BBC Radio 3 as ‘one of the most inventive composers around’, Ergo has developed a reputation as one of the most genuinely innovative composers working today.
A singularly prolific artist, he has created over 300 hours of audio and video, including projects for the Tate Modern, the Royal Festival Hall, the Dutch Academy of Fine Art, Cologne Kulturbunker, Arts Council England, Geneva School of Art, Cherbourg-Octeville College of Music & Atagatomusi-k, Resonance FM, Ubuweb, WFMU, Sonic Arts Network and BBC Radio 3.
PRS for Music Foundation recently supported Ergo for his electronic theatre performance Gargantua, based on the cross-pollination of the work of Rabelais with elements of film noir, Cold War and detective fiction.
For the latest instalment of Foundation Five, Sarah Thirtle caught up with Ergo to find out more….
What inspired you to create music?
My entire childhood was spent with music, unavoidable – my dad taught three-manual organ throughout the day and played organ in the working men’s clubs at night. And later my parents were a duo performing cover versions in the Northern clubs. So there was either the sound of organ music or cover versions pumping out throughout a 1,500 watt power amp. I don’t know how the neighbours put up with it!
A different organ lesson ringing through the house every hour meant also that, because organists play from melody and then improvise the left hand and bass pedals, I unavoidably heard constant permutations of the same song on hourly rotation. That led, I realise now, to my becoming interested in how music is constructed, how composition functions. I’m interested more in the inside of music than the outside of it.
Ergo-Phizmiz-2 
How would you describe the music PRS for Music Foundation supported?
The piece PRS for Music Foundation funded, bless their cotton socks, is called Gargantua. I could never find a way to describe it succinctly, so I settled on ‘An Excessive Entertainment’. It’s a mixture of electronic opera, detective story, puppet show, animation and vaudeville.
Musically it’s a dense patchwork. I’ve become interested in very synthetic, artificial music, almost like epic music being badly imitated by automatons. I suppose the music of Gargantua could most succinctly be described, in the time honoured fashion of sticking genres together and hoping for the best, as electronic-miniature-epic-classical-techno-supermidi-opera.
What has the funding enabled you to achieve?
Writing this piece! I have been attempting to make this project for the last three years. I didn’t receive the rest of the funding I applied for from other organisations (I won’t say any names, but if they’re reading it I’m looking at YOU!), so PRS for Music Foundation is the main funder on this project. Without the Foundation coming through it’s likely this project would still be sitting in a drawer, but it’s not, it’s embarking on a 10-date UK tour in March, with European and possibly US dates in the offing….
Have you any tips for other artists applying for funding?
Finding funding for arts projects in the UK has become very difficult, but don’t let that deter you! Invention in response to poverty, imaginative use of crossovers between digital technology and real things – going back to the world you inhabited as a child dressing up in tea towels and pillowcases. ‘Austerity’ shouldn’t imply austere art.
On a more practical level, when drafting your proposal materials, be clear, be succinct. This isn’t always easy, especially with very multiple-element projects, but the key in a funding application is to present funders with the core of your projects. The way to find this is to draft and redraft your description of the project, honing it down, like an astute gardener with very sharp but very fine shears.
What’s next for you?
Gargantua tours the UK in March from 16 to 25. Right now I’m heavily in production of animation, puppets, choreography, giant heads, giant blocks and so on with the marvellous team of people working on it. My new album Eleven Songs was released December on Care in the Community Recordings. I’ve been working on a radio play called Boojum and an opera about Gala Dali, Salvador’s rabbit-boiling, nymphomaniac wife and her love affair with Jesus Christ Superstar.
www.m-magazine.co.uk/

 
"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" ....


                 






         

Eleven Songs (2012) streaming





After the critical success of his 2010 debut album, Things To Do and Make, composer Ergo Phizmiz returned to a string of often award winning commissions for radio (BBC 3 and 4 and German national radio) theatre and opera before coming back full circle to the melodic three minute popular song form.

Earlier this year, over the space of a few weeks, and in typically prolific style, he refined and self-recorded a number of ideas that had been forming in his head while busy with other projects. Leaving behind the favourable comparisons to the 1960s Canterbury Sound or Vivian Stanshall of his debut and occupying less identifiable territory, the resulting Eleven Songs is a leaner, harder collection of songs that, as the title suggests, each stand in their own right. Although ostensibly the album consists of ten songs and an instrumental, Ergo considers Space Dance, a Sun Ra tribute, in the manner of Lieder ohne Worte, a song without words.
With no default mode of music making, but versed in so many, it would be fair to call Ergo a music conceptualist. But the purposeful construction of his writing and production methods are always in the service, rather than at the expense, of the pure joy of what makes a good song. Anyone who has seen Ergo perform will instantly recognise in these songs his natural theatricality, narrative drive, and a lack of pretension that allows music to be a shared experience. This is a highly addictive album that should echo the chorus of voices that acclaimed his first album with the lament that there aren't more pop musicians like this.


"Cleverly and lovingly constructed" - The Wire


"Balancing off the wall whackiness with accessibility, Phizmiz hasn't just delivered eleven songs but eleven very good songs" - Shout4Music

 Prolific art-pop shapeshifter Ergo Phizmiz follows a split record with R. Stevie Moore and his experiments in "multi-media opera" with this jaunty oddity for Care In The Community - also home to issues by Scritti Politti, Gary War. Equal parts Canterbury rock, outsider indie and electronic whimsy with a certified dose of psychedelia, his 'Eleven Songs' clearly recall Syd Barrett's visions of a lysergic Albion or the odd-pop of Cleaners From Venus with an uncanny way of expressing those strange, rainy-but-sunny day emotions and a sort of wistful, witty pastoralism. - boomkat

Phil had to wake me, dribbling and drooling from packing the records in order to “persuade” me into reviewing this. “Remember,” he said in a calm voice, “Remember, you liked this didn’t you?” He wheeled me over to the computer side of the room and promised me a choc ice if I could remember the artist in question, where I was or even my name. Luckily it came flooding back.
Cut to February 2010, a floppy haired youthful Clint (played by early Peter Davison)  raved about this guys previous record whilst devouring lashings and lashings of jelly and ice cream. The previous album, if I recall correctly, was a more quirky English version of Tom Waits type of affair where “a malfunctioning cuckoo clock battles with parping bicycle horns”. This is much more straight English whimsical guitar pop and is no the worse for it. The lineage goes something like The Kinks, Syd Barrett, Bonzo’s, Peter Blegvad, XTC, Cardiacs side projects.
Let’s take one song as an example of this guy’s brilliance. It’s called ‘The Rock Song of J Alfred Prulove’. It sounds like Martin Newell (Cleaners From Venus) relocated to a maypole and told to sing until the music stops. Fired by strummed acoustic and a child’s drum kit it bounds along for the best part of an unstoppable five minutes with a torrent of lyrics bursting forth. It’s kind of like a one-man busking version of XTC, lots of vaguely psychedelic songwriting, y’know that Syd Barrett school of backwards songwriting but with a lovely mellow English vibe of rolling hills, jangling acoustic guitars, plaintive horns and buttered teacakes.
I love the music contained within this CD, at its best it makes the entirety of life worth living, it’s clever, catchy, thought provoking and reminds me instantly of all the great bands I once loved who now no longer exist. - Norman Records

 Ergo Phizmiz is something of a renaissance man. His website labels him a “radio producer, collagist, writer, composer, and filmmaker, who has worked across radioplays, installations, opera, songwriting, animations, and performance”. 2010’s album Things To Do And Make was a collection of 11 slightly madcap songs, and Eleven Songs is, in that respect, a pleasing continuation.
One surprising change is in the quality of the recording, which is sometimes just poor. Not poor in the ‘yeah, cool man, low budget’ way. Poor in the ‘GCSE music’ way, something not evident on Things To Do And Make. Phizmiz’s blog suggests that it was a deliberate decision to make it sound so, and certainly, it marks the sound of this effort out from others by Phizmiz and most contemporary recordings. Considering the musical riches on offer, however, it wouldn’t have done the record any harm to polish it up a bit. One suspects that this might have been too predictable for Phizmiz.
But despite that minor (and admittedly snobby) gripe, Eleven Songs is a dark, amusing and engaging record. The whimsical ghost of The Beatles hangs over the album, but it might just be a surprise to hear such straightforwardly well-written pop music. Having said that, the organ textures and the surrealism on Eleven Songs set Phizmiz up on territory well covered in the 1960s, and it works for him.
Eleven Songs is, for much of its duration, a deliberately creepy affair. The fairly typical Devil In The Belfry sees Phizmiz intoning “Come along, join me in a little walk up the winding staircase” in a quaint manner somehow suggestive of violence and the listener’s impending doom. A comical turn on the woodblock makes the whole thing more, not less, scary. That doesn’t mean it’s not funny, though, despite the trauma of the chorus: “I tried so hard to forget about it.”
It’s not all so blackly shaded. On Fingerwings, Phizmiz finds an effectively beautiful melody and sparsely backs it with odd harmonies and chiming plucked strings. When your fingers start to grow wings, apparently “many things will start to make sense that haven’t made sense before”. It would be nice to live in Ergo Phizmiz’s head for a day or two. It’s very obviously alive with ambitious and self-consciously strange ideas that still hover some distance back from being totally pretentious. And it’s probably quite a funny place to be.
After several listens, it’s hard to tell whether the Ergo Phizmiz is joking with the listener or ridiculing him, kindly or otherwise. It’s also possible that he’s being deadly serious, and it’s entirely possible to take both sides of the album away without contradiction. One of the quiet highlights of the musical year. - Aaron Payne



Things To Do and Make  streaming ulomaka

Anyone who names their label Care in the Community is streets ahead of the comparatively mundane competition. And if said label owner then acts like they indeed do need care, that’s even better.
Things to Do and Make isn’t quite the soundtrack to the recent BBC3 comedy pilot This Is Jinsy, but has a similar air of unexpected jolly lunacy – in the tragically forgotten spirit of Viv Stanshall’s art-school layabouts The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (ask your art-school layabout dad). No wonder Bonzos freak John Peel namechecked Ergo in his autobiography.
Phizmiz has written for BBC radio and opera (The Mourning Show, about the death of a popular radio DJ through demonic infiltration of BBC phonelines, premiered in May) but this is his first album. He’s been labelled “a berserk electronic and plunderphonic whizzkid,” which makes sense when the album’s intro Busby Berkley – a banjo-fronted pop song masquerading as a 1930s tea dance – is followed by the scuffed Casio mash-up Fairy Chewbacca, which resembles a garden-shed-fi Blur B side.
Which in a manner of speaking leads back to Syd Barrett: the Edward Lear of psych-pop. Food and War and Mandrill aren’t far removed from Pink Floyd’s Bike, with an elliptical loveliness and child’s-dressing-up-box of silly noises, but the tunes are real earworms.  The Dapper Transvestite – powered by typewriter rhythm, Russian steppes backing vox and the chant “socks are stripy” – has some of Robert Wyatt’s gorgeous weary charm, so put two and two together and you have a lopsided update of the famed 1960s Canterbury Sound.
It’s not all rampant absurdity, though. Shanty is a shrug of a sad folk song and Parrot in the Pie belies its titles with more shapely melancholia. Current single, the loping and winding Lately, is similarly robust. In other words, Phizmiz is a bona-fide songwriter juggling absurdist humour rather than a comedy writer sketcher trying his hand at songs. Even if Phizmiz does overuse the duck quack. As Busby Berkley puts it: “Take off your brassiere and what d’you think about that?” Quite. - Martin Aston

Sometimes the people here at Norman Towers just know exactly what will whet my whistle. Apparently this guy has already been awarded the coveted Norman records 'Album of the Week' gong....Mercury Music Prize - pah! This is a very eccentric, very English style of music with heavy nods towards the pastoral English quirky pop of 'Village Green' era Kinks and Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. The vocals are presented in perfectly clipped upper class English tones but the music is ramshackle yet extremely melodic. My favourite is 'Food and War' where a malfunctioning cuckoo clock battles with parping bicycle horns, the same horn passes through 'Hotel' this time accompanied with twanging banjos. The more melancholic numbers recall Robert Wyatt yet Ergo often comes across as a British take on Al Duvall, mining music from the pre rock and roll era but bringing a modern sensibility to it. The best thing is he never forgets to write a tune and despite the clattering toy instruments theres a fantastic melancholy to a lot of the tracks. You can imagine him touring the country armed with a big bass drum, toy accordian, banjo and various horns attached, moustache quivering as he entertains gaggles of onlookers. Really worth a go this one. Highly recommended. - Norman Records

Perhaps the Ergo Phizmiz phenomenon is better known in England/Europe, but I hadn't heard of him until a promo copy of "Things To Do and Make" landed at KiC headquarters. A quick online search reveals the rich career of Mr. Phizmiz over the last decade, who looks to be a well-admired fellow working as a multimedia composer, artist, and sound art archivist. If you're interested in exploring his work, he releases a substantial portion of his output directly to Archive.org and Free Music Archive, where just a few clicks will yield many hours of Phizmizian glory.
While most of his previous work focuses on plunderphonics, collage, and bizarre cover arrangements, "Things To Do and Make" is what he considers his first recorded foray into pop music. It's an incredibly catchy album that I've found myself playing many times over. In its way, though, its brand of "pop" belongs to your eccentric great uncle. Ergo's "pop" manifests through deep influences from vaudeville music and late-era Tin Pan Alley arrangements, while his lyrics and even his accent deliver the project with a whimsical attitude redolent of the Canterbury scene of the late 60s. Phizmiz also reveals himself to be a capable multi-instrumentalist, using a wide range of acoustic instruments with confidence (and occasional electronic supplementation from drum machines/synths/samplers). Many string and keyboard instruments are featured, and I also hear a lot of wind instruments, from clarinets to low brass to tinwhistles and slide whistles. While a lot of songs are very short--half of the album's tracks are around 3 minutes or less--many of the longer compositions feature well-played instrumental passages.
Ergo is a great vocalist, too, and he's filled many of these arrangements with layers of satisfying overdubbed vocals. Vocal melodies generally move quickly, creating rich layers of bizarre vaudevillian rhymes. The straight mid to uptempo rhythms found through most of the album sustain the carnival atmosphere, but harmonically, Phizmiz stretches out with experimentation closer to the Canterbury vibe: half step motion like that of the verse endings in "Busby Berkley," or the meandering faux-Baroque falsetto lines of "The Dapper Transvestite," wouldn't have been common in the early 20th C. pop this music expands upon. Some songs seem to come from more of a 50s or 60s rock & roll approach, like "Dirty Shower Honk Stomp" and "Late," but my favorites point toward older influences. Homemade instruments and junk percussion frequently appear, punctuating a lot of arrangements with toy squeaks, jaw harps, and slippery low-tuned plucked strings.
One doesn't hear many people this far North of Syd Barrett continuing to expand on the potential of vaudeville songwriting, but Phizmiz has proved to me with this record that there indeed remain "things to do and make." And I'd highly suggest exploring Phizmiz's many online recordings, as they're clever and beautifully conceived on their own, while also contributing to a rich overarching career quest toward music that can be both touching and fun. Related to his pop music efforts, one can find similarly chimerical instrumentals in excerpts from his music for operas and plays, and amusing "utility music" applications of his pop music made to solve problems like repairing or comforting household appliances, or musically addressing irritating neighbors. The next Phizmiz pop release looks to be titled "Look, Do and Listen," which seems to have been released last year. I don't see any ordering information for it online, but if anyone knows of a way to locate this record, feel free to mention it in the comments--I'd love to give it a workout on my turntable.
-- Killed in Cars




Mozaična radio-drama Conversations with Birds

This Friday sees the premiere broadcast of "Conversations With Birds", a 45 minute horspiel on birds, language, memory, dreams and art-history in a mixture of English, German, Polish and Bird Language by Ergo Phizmiz.
Created with a stellar group of collaborators and cast members from across the gamut of artistic mediums including Juliane Meckert, Margita Zalite, Patrick Sims, Denis Kundic (aka Vernon Lenoir), Michal Libera, Martha Moopette, Dwoogie, Caroline Stupnicka, Flora Bertolli, and Oblivian Substanshall.
The piece was commissioned by Katarina Agathos for Bayerischer Rundfunk, and can be listened to by tuning in at 9pm German time this Friday 19th October



BOOJUM by Ergo Phizmiz, broadcasting on Studio Akustische Kunst, WDR3, on January 25th. Listen here.
The science-fiction memoirs of Ergo Phizmiz, after his death, in the 2033. Detailing a descent into obsession caused by the Boojum, a monster in the centre of the internet unintentionally unleashed by Lewis Carroll, which eats music until it disappears entirely.
Hear all about disposable music, a war in the aether between Antonin Artaud & Lewis Carroll, computer tennis music, the infinite echo chamber, popgasms, the graveyard of empty shells, and a cat called Bernard.
A dialogue between past, present and future, with a music score of 78 RPM records, and modelled on elements of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World", Boojum is an adventure for radio that will send your ears and brain into a whirl.



The fabulous Illegal Art released the DVD and 7" single from the continuing collaboration of People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz (of which, exciting new things happening in 2013). The project plays with the relationships between early silent-comedy and avant-garde cinema, to an original instrumental score. Here
illegal-art.net/shop


THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

The new production by Patrick Sims and Les Antliaclastes Marionettes featured musical elements by Ergo Phizmiz. The piece tours extensively in the coming year.


Continuing adventures in the sonic landscapes of cinema, focusing on the works of Karel Zeman, Piotr Kamler, and Orson Welles.

New sound collages on the history of cinema, comprising:

Neurotic Fantasia on Orson Welles' "The Trial" using elements of Welles' deeply strange Kafka adaptation to create a nightmare-game of estrangement and disconnectedness.
Zeman's Magic Composites using fragments of Karel Zeman's "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" and "A Deadly Invention".
Bouncing Balls for Piotr Kamler takes tiny fragments of Kamler's "Couer de Secours" and "Le Labyrinthe".
Here



An online only EP of synthetic orchestral music, sound-collage and a cover version of John Holt's "Strange Things". Here


POPGASMS

Adventures in "disposable music", which feed, as with many of Ergo's playwithexperimentalish works of 2012, into his 2013 radio piece "Boojum". Here

RADIO BOREDCAST
For Vicki Bennett's mammoth 744 hour long radio broadcast, Ergo sang the entirety of foru Gilbert and Sullivan operas from memory, whilst in the midst of some form of nasty breakdown caused by trying to tour a Flann O'Brien opera with no money. Listen here, if you can stand it....

ERGO PLAYS ROBERT ASHLEY

One of the most detested CD releases of the year, Ergo's combination of Robert Ashley and Winner's Dinners, recorded in Poland and released on Michal Libera's brilliant Populista imprint, stuck a lollipop firmly up the bum of the so called avant-garde. Respect nothing, or death

QUEEN OF NAMES


The one-man retrospective of opera and opera related work premiered at this year's Tete-a-Tete: The Opera Festival, and can be seen in its entirety here.



CARING IN THE COMMUNITY
The splendid folks at Tete-a-Tete Opera commissioned a short opera about miserable neighbours from Ergo, who has lots of experience in the area. You can view a performance of the opera here.

    "The Faust Cycle", the epic 14 hour adventure for sound by Ergo Phizmiz (made between 2006-2009 and originally released on Headphonica), has now been added to the archives of Ubuweb.

streaming and download
       

The Third Policeman

Ergo Phizmiz & the Gang of Rogues


Music & Words: Ergo Phizmiz
After the novel by Flann O’Brien (By permission of A.M.Heath.Ltd)
Director: Ergo Phizmiz & Erik Bumbledonk
Synopsis
From “maverick composer” Ergo Phizmiz comes an opera on Flann O’Brien’s perplexing masterpiece. Part thriller, part comedy, part science-fiction, this radical adaptation combines stagecraft, animation, puppetry, and distinctive, unforgettable music into an astounding composite for the ears and eyes. Expect bicycles, murder, atomic theory, typewriters, infinity, and sweets.
The opera is a truly 21st century adaptation of O’Brien’s work, using a wide array of creative methods and approaches in handmade and digital art to bring Ergo Phizmiz’s idiosyncratic take on O’Brien’s already idiosyncratic world to life.
Created in collaboration with a host of artists and performed by a cast of non-trained singers and comedians, with visual influences from Eastern European animation and musical references ranging from British dance bands to intricate electronic music, it promises to be a unique sensory experience.
This production was rejected arts funding at an early stage, and has been made possible by the kindness and generosity of friends and strangers.
 www.tete-a-tete.org.uk/


 








 itunes pic
 Hallucination Duets - 1

I have become interested recently in the idea of double-doses of information by the fragmentation and simultaneous presentation of two originals.
That's to say, what the Hallucination Duets are, are two different pieces of music sat on-top of each other, each split into equal fragments of a few milliseconds and playing alternately.
We can hear both, but not quite enough of either but too much of one to hear the other.
I wonder whether it becomes a piece of music itself, or if actually we are hearing two pieces simultaneously without the usual juxtaposition of overlaying anything. Everything is in isolation.
I'm curious if this was applied to "Moonraker" and "The Man With the Golden Gun", would we be able to watch two Roger Moore Bond films in the time it takes to watch one?
Hallucinatory Duetting today comes from ...
Delia Derbyshire vs Art Shaw
Jack Hylton & his Orchestra vs JH Squire's Instrumental Octette
Maria Callas vs Maria Callas
King Tubby vs the Poet Musicians of Turkey
Musique des Vallees Scandinave vs Tala'i, Musavi and Kiana
Robert Ashley vs Polynesian Polyphonies




Ergo Phizmiz and his Orchestra: plays Aphex Twin streaming and download



Ergo Phizmiz is a UK based radio producer, collagist, writer, composer, and filmmaker, who has worked across radioplays, installations, opera, songwriting, animations, and performance. His work is characterised by restless change and playful toying with history, art, music, science, and the limits between creativity & charlatanism, facts & fictions, copyrights & copywrongs, words & music. He likes Laurel & Hardy, and Kurt Schwitters, and Paul Klee, and Cervantes, and Morecambe & Wise.
His theatre work has included the experimental electronic multimedia operas “The Mourning Show”, “Fulcanelli's Shoes”, and “The Third Policeman”, which have toured UK & Europe on shoestring budgets to critical acclaim. He is currently working on a new piece "Gargantua", which tours the UK in March 2013.
In radio he has produced a vast body of work for WDR3, Bayerischer Rundfunk, dRadioKultur (DE), Soundart Radio, BBC Radio 3, BBC 6Music, Resonance FM (UK), WFMU (US), and other stations across Europe. These have included "Conversations With Birds", "Paul Klee, a Balloon, The Moon, Music and Me", "Disappearing Boxes", "Boojum" and "The Faust Cycle", described by Continuo as "the most ambitious music project of the 21st century". His work has received awards and special mentions at the Deutsche Akademie der Darstellenden Kunste and the Prix Italia.
He has released critically acclaimed songwriting on Care in the Community Recordings, and has also released music with Soleilmoon Recordings, Touch Music, EgoTwister Records, Womb Records, Sonic Arts Network, and many others. His new album "Eleven Songs" was released in December 2012.
His visual art has included the collage exhibition "Families, Intimate Situations, Opium Architecture & the Behemoth" at the Depozitory, Isle of Wight, and the installations "Forest : Part One" for Venn Festival, "The Invention of Birds" for Soundart Radio's First Spark Festival, and "Reconstructing Scarborough" for Sonic Arts Network.
Among the artists with whom Ergo has collaborated are Pete Um, Patrick Sims, Denis Kundic/Vernon Lenoir, People Like Us, Frankie Boyle, Safety Scissors, The Bees, Hilary Jeffery, DJ Lenar, Oblivian Substanshall, Joel Cahen, The The, and Christian Marclay.
Lots of Ergo's work is available free on the internet, released in collaboration with Headphonica, UpItUp Records, Womb Records, Proot Records, Surrism-Phonoethics, and his own netlabel Chinstrap, on which he also releases the works of a wide range of artists and vintage or found recordings.

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