|
|
|
|
 |
GARGANTUA by
Ergo Phizmiz * 11 date UK tour March 2013 Gargantua, a brand new 'vaudeville of the imagination' from the beautifully scrambled brains of UK polymath Ergo Phizmiz, tours the UK in March 2013 –full dates and info below. 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 - http://gargantuadisappears.blogspot.com – and get yer bookmarks out. GARGANTUA next plays at SVA Site Festival, Stroud, May 25th 2013. |
|
"Always accessible yet always otherwordly" - BBC "There are brains and vast imagination at every juncture" - Americana UK "Cleverly and lovingly constructed" - The Wire  Ergo Phizmiz performs from his new album "Eleven Songs" at Rough Trade, London, 07/12/12. "Eleven Songs" released 10/12/12 on Care in the Community. Available iTunes, Amazon and so on and so on.... |
"One of the quiet
highlights of the
musical year" - MusicOMH "Phizmiz's art places him as the real deal" - TheUpcoming "Balancing off the wall whackiness with accessibility, Phizmiz hasn't just delivered eleven songs but eleven very good songs" - Shout4Music "Flawless" - Pennyblack Music Hear a selection of the album below.... |
|
| 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. Most recently he produced "GARGANTUA: An Excessive Entertainment", which trotted about on an 11 date UK tour in March 2013 to delighted and perplexed audiences. He is currently working on an electronic operina on the histories of yodelling for DePlayer, and an opera on an episode in the life of Gala Dali. 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. He lives in Bridport, UK, operating from his haven of a living room and his studio Atelier Royale. |
 |