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PEOPLE LIKE US & ERGO PHIZMIZ - Withers in the Waking

Format: 7 Label & Cat.Number: Touch Seven TS 08 Release Year: 2008 Note: Nr. 8 in the 7"-series, lim. 500 and cover-design by Mr. JON WOZENCROFT Price (incl. 19% VAT): €7.50 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info "The 8th in the series of Touch Sevens, and the first to introduce melodic narrative. Both songs are results of the WFMU podcast series "Codpaste", in which Vicki & Ergo publicly composed a series of collage compositions, deconstructing their respective practices, and a live soundtrack to Christian Marclay's "ScreenPlay". The series and soundtrack resulted in the online only album "Rhapsody in Glue", from which these two songs are alternative versions. "Withers in the Whist" takes one of Vicki & Ergo's current staple obsessions: the melody line of Prokofiev's 'Troika' from the Lieutenant Kije soundtrack (originally used in V & E's work during a particularly snowy sequence of the Marclay film). This treatment dispenses with sampling entirely, instead using instruments to create variations on Prokofiev's deceptively simple melody-line, tied together with impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. It is playing with Prokofiev like a bad child who loves it's toys. "In The Waking" began with Ergo replaying with multitracked guitars the main melodic motifs Vicki collaged in the composition "Carmic Waltz", with Vicki then ornamenting the guitars with splashes of colour like a real painter of sound, all blended into a pot of carnival steam with Ergo's wordplay. It is a fantasy for the dream the fairground has when the world is sleeping, but only takes place five minutes before the carousel wakes up." [label info] "The latest entry in Touch's ongoing series of limited 7"s from People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz is by far the biggest surprise of bunch so far, in that you'll find no deep drones or abstract minimalism or delicate soundscapery, instead, as it states plainly right there on the sleeve, we get "Two new rolls of woozy dream circus lovingly cooked by two bakers of antiquity. Recorded in the ice and snow, in clay ovens, by broken down carousels." Which is pretty much what it sounds like. Lilting sunshine-y melodies, circusy calliopes, gentle summery strum, and lushy boy girl vocal harmonies, all spun into some sweet pop confection. Sort of like Belle And Sebastian run through The Decemberists, and indeed all woozy and warbly, playful and pretty, old timey pop. But that's just the A side. The B side begins with a rhythm straight out of Perrey And Kingsley's songbook, but it's not long before the vocals come in, and again offer up a sing songy fractured doo wop duet, while the strange honk and skronk continues on beneath, along with some warm record crackle and some warped off kilter keyboards. Definitely a weird one, and will likely rub some of the more striaghtlaced minimalist Touch music fanatics the wrong way, but it's a pretty darn giddy chunk of high art gone low brow, which is most definitely a good thing." [Aquarius Records review]