Perpetuum Mobile, by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz

Perpetuum Mobile

by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz

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Levrikon Has there ever been a collaboration as strong as People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz? It's impossible to tell where one artist ends and the other begins, instead you just have this singular sound that could never be pulled off by anyone else. Favorite track: Social Dance Song.

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Full Digital Discography

47

releases

Get all 47 People Like Us releases available on Bandcamp and save 85%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Copia, Thermos Explorer (2023 reissue), Sharity! Selected Works of People Like Us, Rhapsody In Glue LP, In Concert : Kings Place London 2008 - Video and Audio Download, 108, In The Waking (2022 extended mix), Free Sunshine (on Heaven's Lathe), and 39 more. , and , .

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Limited Edition Compact Disc
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Handmade screen printed artwork

Includes unlimited streaming of Perpetuum Mobile via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Ghosts Before Breakfast 06:22	buy track
2.	Social Dance Song 04:52	buy track
3.	Beyond Perpetuum 05:26	buy track
4.	Flanagan's Wake 03:21	buy track
5.	James's Mourning Hordes 01:03	buy track
6.	A Bastards Waltz 04:36	buy track
7.	Air Hostess 07:21	buy track
8.	Fat Henry's Mambo 02:31	buy track
9.	High Society Dance 01:11	buy track
10.	Smiling In The Rain Suckling 03:16	buy track
11.	Four Short Blasts On My Whistle 01:17	buy track
12.	Pierrot's Persecution Mania 03:27	buy track
13.	Funeral March For Jim 02:40	buy track
14.	A Bastard's Reprise 00:40	buy track
15.	The Joy Of Noise 04:43	buy track
16.	Soggy Style 02:56	buy track
17.	Porter's Porcelain Perpetuum 03:56	buy track
18.	Oh No Not Another Cha Cha 04:33	buy track

about

Released 23 April 2007 on Soleilmoon Recordings on beautiful handmade paper digipak SOL156 CD

“Perpetuum Mobile” is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic “open source” compositional process: the UK’s finest collage composers 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 left, 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 . . . – Drew Daniel

credits

released April 23, 2007

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz
Soleilmoon Recordings

license

about

People Like Us London, UK

Since 1991, Vicki Bennett has been repurposing pre-existing footage to craft a/v collages, seeing sampling as folk art in the age of mechanical reproduction, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant. ... more

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