Artist : People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz
Title : Perpetuum Mobile
Genre : Avantgarde
Year : 2007
Date : 05/2007
Bitrate : VBR kbps
Tracks : 01
Label : Soleilmoon SOL 156CD
Source : CDDA
Encoder : Lame 3.97
Length : 64:54 min
Size : 72,2 MB
Tracklist:
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01.perpetuum mobile 64:54
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64:54 min
"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 canRnotes
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 . . .
http://www.soleilmoon.com/
http://www.peoplelikeus.org
http://www.ergophizmiz.com