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Handmade silkscreened 6-panel folderpack.
“Perpetuum Mobile” is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic “open source”
compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers (collage-posers?) Ergo
Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared
server, downloaded and processed each other's work, and flung the resulting
fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so
intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so
avant-garde; but what makes this record different is that Ergo and Vicki then
wrote and sang their own vocals on top of their Frankenstein creation. Here you
will find slyly absurdist lyrics replete with monkeys, carousels, trousers,
apple trees, tinkling bells, dogs, sausages, whiskey, and cannibalism. No matter
how fraught with trauma, these ballads and ditties are sung with a straight face
and mixed front and center, and the results feel like 1930s British music hall
standards from an alternate universe: half Ivor Cutler, half George Formby. The
astonishing thing is that for all this jiggery-pokery, “Perpetuum Mobile” makes
for an exhilarating, remarkably fresh pop album. It works.
On “Ghosts Before Breakfast” Ergo and Vicki proudly declare that they've got
“quite a selection of pastry”, and if the profusion of cuckoo clocks, gunshots,
horn farts, string vamps, and digital malfeasance which go hurtling through this
opening track is any indication, that's no idle boast. For sheer cornucopia of
sonic raw materials, this track's avalanche of information sets the tone for the
overflowing, manic record that follows. There's far too much to fully parse, but
among the highlights: “Beyond Perpetuum” pushes off from the Comedian
Harmonists' take on the 19th century compositional craze for “moto perpetuo”
runs of continuous notes at a rapid tempo, and folds found piano, voice and
strings into an interlocking array of M.C. Escher harmonic stairways. “Air
Hostess” is detourned lounge pop that stitches together Nelson Riddle's “Ya Ya”
theme to “Lolita”, “Walk Right In”, light operettas, organ, bachelor pad cha cha
and mambo, and nervously twitching shards of Louis Armstrong. “Pierrot's
Persecution Mania” bravely explores the possibilities of a Montparnasse-via-Dixieland
hybrid of can-can and bluegrass, with ridiculous canned strings colliding with
jew's harp boings, while “Soggy Style” rides banjo twangs, a digital bossa nova
breakdown, and the “whooo-ooes” nicked from Terry Stafford's “Suspicion”. Living
up to the perpetual motion of its title and cock-a-hoop cover art, this is a
frantically energetic music whose layered repetitions become cumulatively more
disorienting and preposterous as they loop back.
“Perpetuum Mobile” goes beyond the stealth-oldies nostalgia of the mashup scene
and the “culture-jamming” rhetoric of plunderphonics, and shows Mr. Ergo and Ms.
Vicki to be a potent, if Surrealist, songwriting team, and together they braid
oddly affecting vocals and their trademark stolen audio into twenty-first
century pop. Like the perpetual motion machines for which it is named, this
collaboration will run and run and run and run and run and run and run . . .
Released on Soleilmoon and available April 30th, 2007.
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People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz - Perpetuum Mobile |
CD $19.97
CAD
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