Our concert at Cafe Oto on 1st August just got Critics’ Choice in Time Out.
http://www.timeout.com/london/music/event/154237/people-like-us-ergo-phizmiz
People Like Us featured in the latest UbuWeb podcast
All Avant-Garde All The Time – UbuWeb Podcast #9: The Sounds of the UK from the 1960s To Yesterday
Listen / Download
Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the latest in its podcast series, focusing on a dozen of Ubu’s hidden treasures, highlighting audio works that you really should know about about but most likely don’t. With this podcast, we continue our series focusing on the sounds of different regions. Here the focus is on the avant-garde language-based audio coming out of the UK. Beginning with Bob Cobbing and making our way through the the swinging London scene of the 60s, and the political / punk work of the 70s, and ending up with the electronics + samples of today, we cut a path through the London (and beyond) underground. Featured here are works by Bob Cobbing, Neil Mills, Lily Greenham, Cornelius Cardew, Christopher Logue, Richard Long, Art & Language + The Red Krayloa, Furious Pig, Momus, People Like Us, and Caroline Bergvall.
We really recommend subscribing to this excellent podcast. Find out more about each episode here. Subscribe here.
People Like Us interview in Crawdaddy
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz Play London’s Cafe Oto
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz will be playing a joint set at Cafe Oto in Dalston, London on Saturday 1st August.
Doors open 8pm, Tickets £7 – which we recommend you buy in advance now since Cafe Oto is popular!
Cafe Oto site programme/tickets
The live performance will combine material from the last four People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz releases. Vicki & Ergo perform a set that crosses sampling with the English nonsense tradition, traditional composition with electronic music, and contemporary approaches to sound with melodic and textural fragments of orchestral music. The sound of the two artists collaborating has often been compared to circus or carnival music, and stands as a separate and distinct entity to the two artists individual work. It is perhaps best described as “woozy dream circus”.
There will be two 25 minute sets preceded by a number of short films by the artists, starting shortly after 8pm.
Special offer: the first 15 people arriving at Oto for this performance will receive a People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz CD.
Want to hear some People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz?
Cafe Oto site programme
Want to see what we sound like?
Preview the new People Like Us Live Set
Rhapsody In Glue now available for free download!
We are very pleased to announce that the recently deleted “Rhapsody in Glue” digital album by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz from 2008 is now available for the first time for free download!
Many thanks to our friends at UbuWeb for hosting this album, which can be sourced here – http://ubu.com/sound/plu_rhapsody.html
You can also download the album by clicking on the links below.
1. Snow Day
2. Gary’s Anatomy
3. Pussycat Giantess
4. English Hunting Song
5. Blame It On The Waltz
6. Carmic Waltz
7. Troika Country Garden
8. Social Folk Dance
9. Smiling Through My
10. In The Waking
11. Dancing in the Carmen
12. Antisocial Boogie
13. Withers in the Whist
Artwork
For background on the album please read on.
Following the success of the critically acclaimed “Perpetuum Mobile” CD of 2007, renowned UK collagists / composers People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz reunite for “Rhapsody in Glue”, a cycle of bricolage-ballet-music, skewed-waltzes, and skewiff-pop.
There is a story behind every album, and with “Rhapsody in Glue” we find a unique approach to constructing a record. Both long-term contributors to New York radio station WFMU, People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album “in the open”, presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition – informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the “Codpaste” free podcast series (which we have also recently made available as an mp3 download). “Rhapsody in Glue” is the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.
“Rhapsody in Glue” continues in the bizarre ballroom vein of their previous efforts together, however, increasing the sonic palette into textural depths previously uncharted in their work. If “Carmic Waltz” is an expressionist painting by aged ballroom dance teacher who’s eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms in her soufflé, then “Gary’s Anatomy” is a slice of pure absurdist pop shot through with slabs of exotica and Ethel Merman. Recurring through the record is an apparent obsession with Prokofiev’s “Troika (Sleigh Ride)”, which merges and mashes with Burt Bacharach and Queen on “Snow Day”, and lapses into pure fantasy on the almost entirely acoustic “Withers in the Whist”, jarring with Ergo’s strange, Victoriana obsessed lyrics. Then on “Dancing in the Carmen” we discover what happens if Nana Mouskouri is thrown into a pot with Peggy Lee and let simmer for 10 minutes, whilst “In The Waking” shimmers along on multitracked guitars, meandering melodies, and music boxes.
Later in 2008, the duo later went on to release a 7″ with Touch entitled “Withers In The Waking“.
