Recyclopaedia Britannica – Selected Works 1992-2002

Released April 2002 – Mess Media (thru Soleilmoon) MESS1

SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE

“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly “topical” audio-jokes at the expense of one’s raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being “groovy”, the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw men and call it subversion. Happily, Vicki Bennett has yet to fall down either precipice, but yodels down contentedly from her own Alpine audio-cottage. There, with loving care, she snips and tucks at the lycra jumpsuit until the fit is snug, places every plastic shrub on the Happy Valley Ranch just so, and throws another dance record on the bonfire. Undercutting her own utopian mirages with formal breakdowns and sneaky semantic pranks, Vicki Bennett is One Funny Lady, with a deadly sense of comic timing that puts her in my personal pantheon of edit intensive music makers: -Steinski and Mass Media, Hank Shocklee, Tod Dockstader, Teo Macero, the Hanatarash, John Oswald, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. Serving her birthday cake with a turd, her gags are always lined with a virulent creep factor. You get the feeling that the vacancy and pointlessness of empty speech is being lampooned and mourned in equal measure. In sticking to this balance of celebration and critique, People Like Us genuinely hates and loves People Like You. The least you can do is head up to the Happy Valley Ranch for a spell and have a listen.” – Drew Daniel

People Like Us “Thermos Explorer”

Released Autumn 2000 on Hot Air AIRHEAD002 (SOLD OUT)

1. Music of Your Own
2. Take a Walk
3. I’m 89
4. Snippy
5. People Like You
6. Ipanmnmna
7. Millenium Dome
8. Uh Dear
9. Cream Crackers
10. Moronically Yours
11. Sugarbeat
12. Whistle Song
13. Caciocavallo
14. Pauline
15. Kitten
16. Importance of Mistakes
17. Sardines
18. Dolphy
19. Sugar and Splice
20. Nobody Does
21. ILY
22. People Like You
23. Serenade

Buy on Bandcamp:

You can download this album at UbuWeb
*CD is SOLD OUT*

Perpetuum Mobile CD

Released 23 April 2007 on Soleilmoon Recordings
SOL156 CD (now deleted)
download at ubuweb

“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

Scans of reviews here:
Perpetuum Mobile Music For Maniacs (October 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Geiger (September 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Bad Alchemy (August 2007)

Perpetuum Mobile – Brainwashed (June 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – RifRaf (June 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Rolling Stone (Mexico!!) June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Norman Records June 2007

Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Jumbo June 2007

Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Loop June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Boomkat June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Cologne Choices June 2007

A Call For Silence curated by Nicolas Collins

Curated by Nicolas Collins – 2004
Design by Joerg Hartmannsgruber (white-card)

acallforsilence

As in the old Roué’s quip that “a drink before and a cigarette after are the three best things in life,” sometimes the most important moments of our lives lie in an unspoken ellipse. The same is true of some of our most beautiful sounds.

On this CD 34 artists provide personal views into that sonic ellipse, suggestions for listening to that which might otherwise pass you by: count-offs, groove grit, tape hiss, breaths, rests, CD glitch, guitar hum, audience anticipation, reverb tails, room tones, minutes of silence, the calm before a storm.

Gongexeva

People Like Us have contributed to Gongexeva (CD) – which includes mixes by Ergo Phizmiz, Xper. Xr. and People Like Us). Released on Mukow, 2003 – it features sound-collages based around sacred music from around the world.
Gongexeva
Mukow website
gongexeva

Nothing Special by People Like Us & Kenny G

Here’s an album by WFMU’s two terrible DJs, People Like Us, & Kenny G.

nothing

01. I’m From
02. Wake Up
03. Nothing
04. So Sorry
05. Close To Me
06. You’ll Be A
07. More Sorry
08. Counting Time
09. Give Up It’s Mine
10. Greatest Nobody
11. It Wouldn’t It Be Nice In Yr Face
12. Too Far
13. I’ve Got You

And here’s the full 3 hour WFMU show that this album was edited from – Nothing Special with Kenny G
Kenny G website
Mess Media through Soleilmoon website

Interview with People Like Us by Kenny G on WFMU, one week before this was recorded.

Recyclopaedia Britannica – Selected Works 1992-2002

10 Years of People Like Us (CD on Mess Media – MESS1) – 2002
SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE

recyclo

The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly “topical” audio-jokes at the expense of one’s raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being “groovy”, the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw men and call it subversion. Happily, Vicki Bennett has yet to fall down either precipice, but yodels down contentedly from her own Alpine audio-cottage. There, with loving care, she snips and tucks at the lycra jumpsuit until the fit is snug, places every plastic shrub on the Happy Valley Ranch just so, and throws another dance record on the bonfire. Undercutting her own utopian mirages with formal breakdowns and sneaky semantic pranks, Vicki Bennett is One Funny Lady, with a deadly sense of comic timing that puts her in my personal pantheon of edit intensive music makers: -Steinski and Mass Media, Hank Shocklee, Tod Dockstader, Teo Macero, the Hanatarash, John Oswald, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. Serving her birthday cake with a turd, her gags are always lined with a virulent creep factor. You get the feeling that the vacancy and pointlessness of empty speech is being lampooned and mourned in equal measure. In sticking to this balance of celebration and critique, People Like Us genuinely hates and loves People Like You. The least you can do is head up to the Happy Valley Ranch for a spell and have a listen.
Drew Daniel

01. Another Kind Of Humor intro
02. OB & Cha Cha
03. Guide To Broadcasting excerpt
04. Smash & Grab
05. The Sacred Erm
06. Sing With Melodious Inarticulate Sound…
07. A Crossed Line excerpt
08. Clippety Cart Horse
09. In The Panto
10. Ursula Fährt Ski
11. T424PLU excerpt
12. More Plunderblunders excerpt
13. Ski Heil excerpt
14. We Believe
15. T424PLU excerpt
16. Sound Escape excerpt
17. Sound Escape excerpt
18. Handjob
19. If Someone Touches You (with The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly)
20. Music Of Your Own
21. Millenium Dome
22. My Son Jim
23. More Plunderblunders excerpt
24. Oompah Pumpah
25. I’m 89
26. Take A Walk
27. Morning Pedro
28. We Believe excerpt
29. Bran Mash & Crushed Beans
30. We’re Gonna Be Around
Mess Media through Soleilmoon website

recyclo

Mirrored here:

Thermos Explorer

CD on Hot Air – AIRHEAD002 – 2000

01. Music Of Your Own
02. Take A Walk
03. I’m 89
04. Snippy
05. People Like You
06. Ipanmnmna
07. Millenium Dome
08. Uh Dear
09. Cream Crackers
10. Moronically Yours
11. Sugarbeat
12. Whistle Song
13. Caciocavallo
14. Pauline
15. Kitten
16. The Importance Of Mistakes
17. Sardines
18. Dolphy
19. Sugar And Splice
20. Nobody Does
21. ILY
22. People Like You
23. Serenade
Hot Air website

We still have a handful of CDs left – if you’d like one visit our shop. All prices include postage and packaging.

Mirrored here:

thermos

A Fistful of Knuckles

CD on Caciocavallo – CAD10 – 2000

“People Like Us is simply too good. Why it presents us again and again CD, like a circus. One must win something distance from this music, thus her one not flatly with the endless heavily meaning basic sounds and memories. Here to the world between American white diapers, Pferdchen those the world mean, Kleinkinderklukluxklansofties and other one like Country, donkeys, sakeless Schubidus and cold kriegern in a leckeren soup. People Like US is like cinema, like which old humans at MTV finds so exciting always, these many cuts, only the cuts are not cuts, but, deeply inside into this world from sound the world of the television offers precise interventions to surgical quality, without it would refer to expressly drauf that that really like that it is but supplies actually only for People Like Us material, which so unconsciously passed through quasi by us that one can cannibalize it ever further and further. Carefully naturally and with a Manie CUT copy paste of the Artworkings, which one, once belonged never again loose will. ” A Fistful Of Knuckles” is the terminator point of a long long search to the praised country, which ran from the east coast in long Treks to the west coast, made a stopover with John Wayne over in People Like Us to end.” – translation from de-bug magazine

01. Hi There
02. She’ll Be
03. Morning, Pedro
04. Lullablip With Handjob
05. My Son Jim
06. Ursula Fährt Horse Riding
07. Doo Dah Tango
08. Just A Minute
09. Music Alone
10. Oh No
11. Arkinsaw Explorer
12. Grandma Song
13. Fun
14. A Place Like This
15. Oompah Pumpah
16. Oh! Susannah
17. Clippa Cloppa
18. Old Cow Whoopee
19. Weiner Schnitzels
20. Thank You
21. Bitter Dregs
Caciocavallo through Soleilmoon website
Reviews
in NME and Bizarre Magazine 2001

We still have a few CDs left in our shop. All prices include postage and packaging.

Mirrored here:

fistful