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LP
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CREP 105LP
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An extremely prolific artist, whose work encompasses composition, opera, theatre, radio plays, film or performance, Ergo Phizmiz returns to the Discrepant fold long after his Two Quartets and Disco Carousel -- under his given DW Robertson name -- albums. A purveyor of the Creative Commons rights, Phizmiz has been deploying much of his work on the ever-expanding Free Music Archive directed by WFMU since the early 2000's, creating a sprawling and defiant body of work that defies given and stale notions of sound hierarchies, history and copyright through a process that comprises collage, sampling, reappropriation, songwriting, covers and pretty much any available media with a playful and thoughtful approach. For this new Discrepant entry, Phizmiz goes back in time to push into the future a number of pieces recorded more than two decades ago creating this perpetual motion outside a linear chronologic progression. Anticipating by almost 20 years the memefication of ASMR videos, Selected Ambient & ASMR Works 2001-2003 -- itself a pun on the AFX classics -- embraces the ambient tag not at its functional face value, but instead as a means to the "evocation of imaginary spaces, and correspondingly the invention of their sonic environments." Collecting recordings from a myriad of instruments -- violin, xylophone, banjo, kora, found percussion and so on -- shortwave radio and field recordings to create loops with different lengths that play with and/or against themselves continuously in a process "(dis)conjunction" not far removed from Feldman's Why Patterns? or hip-hop's sampledelia. A free-floating temporal space that collapses the flashing images of Angelfire pages unto Web 2.0 sense of displacement.
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7"
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CARE 712EP
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Limited edition single-sided 7" in a heavyweight colored card sleeve with gold foil design on front and illustration on back. On the 25th anniversary of the Pet Shop Boys release of It's a Sin, Ergo Phizmiz releases his fantastic baroque-skronk version. Composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and broadcaster Ergo Phizmiz was described by Mojo as "like Vivian Stanshall, Syd Barrett, and Dali making merry" while he can count amongst his fans Michael Nyman and The Simpsons creator Matt Groening.
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CD
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CARE 108CD
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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) theater 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 favorable 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 recognize 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.
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LP
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CARE 108LP
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