Ergo Phizmiz

Over the past twelve years Ergo Phizmiz has become one of the most defiantly single-minded and uncategorisable artists in the world. Across pop music, opera, radio-art, puppet theatre, film scores, cover versions, sound-collage, installations, sound-poetry and electronic music, he has built a body of work that exceeds 300 hours.

Radio: Ergo Phizmiz has produced radio for BBC Radio 3, BBC 6 Music, WFMU, Soundart Radio, Resonance FM, WDR3, DRadio Kultur, Silenceradio, and other stations internationally. This output has spanned radioplays, documentary, large-scale sound-collages, and live improvised radio. He received the Special Mention in the composed radio category at the 2010 Prix Italia for his "Paul Klee, a Balloon, the Moon, Music & Me" for BBC Radio 3.

Opera: After teenage years spent writing operas (as detailed in the 2011 WDR3 programme "Disappearing Boxes"), Ergo returned at the age of 30 to this form with the alternately shocking and hysterical "The Mourning Show", in which radio DJ Chris Evans is driven to insanity and plummets to his death in the misguided belief he is a bird. This was followed by the one-man semi-opera "Fulcanelli's Shoes", a performance-lecture-of-lies. Most recently he has produced a radical adaptation of Flann O'Brien's absurdist novel "The Third Policeman", in which electronic music, puppetry, stagecraft, and animation collide into an intense unity. He has recently been nominated for the Arts Foundation Opera Composition Fellowship.

Netaudio: A prolific exponent of free, Creative Commons netaudio, he has worked with the netlabels Headphonica, UpItUp, and Bad Panda Records on a wide range of projects, notably "The Faust Cycle", a 15 hour audio adventure produced over four years in collaboration with sound-artists from across the globe. Other netaudio works have included "M: 1000 Year Mix", and a series of acoustic & toy instrument cover-versions of pop music history, from the Velvet Underground, to Aphex Twin, Beyonce, The Prodigy, and 1990s club classics. His own netlabel, Chinstrap, releases music by collaborators, friends and fellow adventurers, as well as found audio, forgotten 78 RPM obscurities, and cuttings from public-domain film soundtracks.

Pop music: A lover of pop music from the 1920s onwards, Ergo Phizmiz is a songwriter of polished nuggets of pop gold. Often misunderstood as a writer of "comey songs", because the subject matter of his songwriting isn't limited to talking about fucking or trying to fuck (rather, in the tradition of the best calypso, a song can be about anything whatsoever), his work in pop has just began to be appreciated, via the 2010 release of "Things to Do and Make" on Care in the Community Recordings, to be followed soon by "Look, Do and Listen" on the same label which refines vastly his songwriting craft.

Visual Art: Ergo has also produced a wide range of visual art, in films, installations and collage. He produced "Forest" for the Venn Festival, "The Invention of Birds" for Soundart Radio, an avant-garde children's television pilot programme, a wide range of puppet and stop-motion films, and most recently the exhibition "Staticopera" for Tete-a-Tete: The Opera Festival 2011.

Ergo Phizmiz's work has been presented in performance, exhibition and broadcast throughout the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Japan, and the USA.

He lives in Bridport, UK, operating from his own giant-shelf studio called Grindia or Grin Dear.