Plaza Centraal by Ergo Phizmiz ft. Depresstival

You find yourself standing on a wide concrete plain which you immediately deduce to be the central square of a mid-sized inland Benelux provincial capital. The deserted bus station behind you might provide a clue to how you came to this place. You hold in your hand a printed booking confirmation for a well-regarded, family-friendly holiday camping park. Perhaps there has been a mix up. The plaza is dominated by a tall hotel, from which a café/discotheque extends chaotically across the open public space, spilling out a spectral assortment of professional musicians, frenetic dancers, haughty waiters, drunken bankers, gently smirking flâneurs, a Bavarian bowling club, incognito regional pop stars, a synchronised swimming corps and an elite squad of deadly assassins. You find an empty table on the periphery of the fray and a waiter brings you an unrecognisable but rather tasty aperitif. The sun is setting and the hotel staff have started warming up the strobe lights, lasers and fog machines while the musicians tune their synthezisers, drumcomputers, folk instruments and saxophones. You sit back with a feeling of serenity you haven’t felt in years, possibly ever, eagerly anticipating the evening’s program of entertainment, out here on Plaza Centraal.

Ergo Phizmiz is a deluxe interdimensional intermedia entertainer. Over the past 20 or so years they have delved deep into the collective cauldron to deliver a gargantuan series of works across perversions of pop music, opera, radioplays, installations and, most recently as this release testifies, Business Techno Pleasure Retreat Activities Jodel Trance. Next year they are planning to take a cast and crew to Center Parcs to discreetly and illicitly film a Hallmark movie.

Songwriter, pianist, filmmaker and multimedia artist Depresstival, whilst trapped in a field on the Isle of Wight for two years during the salad days of the pandemic, endeavoured to become the ultimate post-structuralist Geri Halliwell tribute act. This they have achieved in flying colours, as our visit to the central plaza more than verifies.

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