Ergo Phizmiz has been making music for about 35 years. He told me via email that he’s produced over 500 pieces of music, including pop music, electronic music, choral works, opera, and more. Phizmiz works out of the UK and for that simple reason, he is in no danger of his instruments being bombed to pieces, taken from him or it being illegal for him to practice his art. Unfortunately, this can not be said for many artists around the world, and Phizmiz is aware of this.
Phizmiz told me that he recognises his creative skills and how seemingly useless they can seem to modern society, but, at the very least he decided to not be silent about the atrocities happening in this world.
Phizmiz and his collaborators have raised awareness and funds for Palestinians before, starting with their campaign for 9-year-old punk star Ari Radne, then an album with Depresstival (Phizmiz’s main collaborator Lotti Bowater) called P4L35T1N3. Bowater then came across a 17-year-old musician and composer from Gaza called Samih Madhoun. Madhoun’s instruments were stolen by the Israeli army and today he is working with a borrowed instrument.
In collaboration with Madhoun, Phizmiz, and Lotti released an album of Madhoun’s songs, with all the proceeds going directly to the young Palestinian artist. Madhoun himself shares a message to the world on the album’s Bandcamp page:
“Hello, I am Samih Madhoun from the Gaza Strip, Palestine. I am an oud player, a composer, and a singer. I study music, and I have studied it in a musical institution; however, unfortunately, I couldn’t continue my studies because of the destruction and aggression happening in Gaza. I hope I can continue my studies on the oud, as it is an integral part of me.”
Phizmiz told me that in his opinion, music is one of the world’s biggest mysteries, especially the power it holds over the human mind and body and how good of a vessel it can be for getting a message across.
“I’ve been composing music now for 35 years (I started when I was ten) and I have produced something ludicrous like 500 albums or more, plus choral works, orchestral works, opera and so on. I am utterly obsessed and to some degree hounded by music and musical ideas. I consider music to be one of the universe’s biggest mysteries – we don’t understand it, we don’t know why it does what it does to our bodies, why it makes us emote and feel. So why should such a purely abstract medium be suited to activism?
The clue, I think, lies in the format of the pop song. I’m obsessed by this. There is some argument to suggest that the pop song might be the culmination and refinement of the oral tradition – there’s a straight line from Homer to the Sugababes. A pop song is a way of encoding information that can be instantly memorable. What better way to communicate an idea than through an earworm?
Music is also like a magical box where you unlock the key and passion pours out, it is the art form of feeling and emotion. Is there a more effective route to expressing rage in existence than a punk song? What rivals the schmaltzy romantic love song as a reflection of sensuality? The pop song is a simultaneously concise and complex way of sending and receiving information, and if this information is about how to maybe fix the broken society, then all the better for it.”