People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz

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4...according to our Phil on Fri 15 Jun, 2007.

One of my favourite things of the week is the People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz CD on Soleilmoon. Perpetuum Mobile is a complete sample-delic craze fest. This is complete lunacy with trollied samples left right and centre making up an perfectly enjoyable listen. Makes me want to say thrusp again and not many things want me to thrusp. The cartoon samples make it sound a bit like an old Tom & Jerry episode on acid pipes. Plunderphonics I believe this is called.. I'd like to say plundering never sounded so good but that's such wank thing to say I've annoyed myself senseless and am gonna sack myself.

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.

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