DO or DIY with People Like Us on WFMU

DOorDIYSince Autumn 2003 People Like Us have been doing a weekly show on WFMU, called DO or DIY. The aim of the show is to mix highbrow with lowbrow to challenge whether there is much difference.  Archived playlists of at least 200 shows from 2003 to the present day can be found at www.wfmu.org/peoplelikeus

Vicki Bennett also curated/programmed RADIO BOREDCAST in Winter 2011/Spring 2012. It was first broadcast on basic.fm and now is archived at WFMU.  More recently, Vicki Bennett has programmed OPTIMIZED!, a week-long expanded radio stream on WFMU 6-10 June 2016.

Subscribe to the Podcast of DO or DIY by clicking here – it will prompt your iTunes program to open, where you will receive the podcasts.

About DO or DIY

DO or DIY is a freeform sound art radio show broadcast weekly by Vicki Bennett (project name People Like Us) on WFMU.

The philosophy behind the show is simple. That within the realms of avant-garde and experimental sound art the goalposts defining “accessible” and “inaccessible” are constantly moving. As the radar rises and dips, fragments and shards of underground creations unearth, and popular culture and artist resonate, shifting shapes accordingly with one another in reflections of changing spotlights.

The avant-garde and popular culture rely on each other’s energy. People Like Us collage both “hard to listen” works and popular listening matter, showing that in fact, beyond the restrictions of genre, genre IS the restriction and it is possible to like many kinds of art and music. The key is finding the door – DO or DIY leads the way into new and unusual realms of listening and hope to show the way in.

Each show consists of collages made of sound works from the 20th and 21st century, often layered and looped many times over, resulting in an album type effect on each show.
The pun “All Things Avant-Retard”, a rhyme with “All Things Avant-Garde” literally means All Things Forward-Backwards. Essentially by using sonic extremes and apparent opposites we find some sort of central point or balanced perspective on music and sound.

Suggested Listening: DO or DIY fill in for Ken.

New Free WFMU iPhone/iPod Touch app!

Also, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch we are also pleased to announce that you can listen to not only the regular WFMU stream on the move at a glorious 128k, but also all of our special streams, recent DJ show archives and DJ podcasts including all of DO or DIY!

You can download the much improved updated free WFMU app right here.

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DO or DIY Special: Gwilly Edmondez

Monday, July 17th, 6pm – 7pm EST
on DO or DIY with People Like Us on WFMU
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/73648

Gwilly Edmondez is all over the place yet usually in the wrong place at the right time. As an improvisor and recording artist he tries to play as often as possible with anyone who’s game, or solo if no one is about. What he uses mostly is his voice, but is always searching for things to go with it, like samples, tapes and beats. Anything could happen, which is why Gwilly prefers to act at the very fringes of proper. He has collaborated with all sorts of people but his primary non-solo projects at the moment are YEAH YOU (with Elvin Brandhi), Kleevex (with Faye MacCalman) and Impossibility Knox (with Odie Ji Ghast and sometimes THF Drenching).

 

Exhibitions and Editions

ALL COMMISSION ENQUIRIES OR BOOKINGS FOR GONE, GONE BEYOND ARE TO BE MADE DIRECTLY WITH US THROUGH OUR CONTACT PAGE.

To date, People Like Us/Vicki has had 6 solo exhibitions and participated in over 20 group shows including at MAXXI (Rome), HMKV (Dortmund), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Vitrine (London), alt.gallery (Newcastle), Greene County Council for the Arts Gallery (NY), Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen), Kunstmuseum (Magdeburg), Pallant House (Chichester), Engramme (Quebec), La Scatola Gallery (London), Changing Room (Stirling), Franklin Street Works (Connecticut), Usurp Gallery (London), University of Greenwich Galleries, Matthew Gallery (Dundee), Edinburgh Printmakers, Millennium Gallery (Sheffield) Leeds College of Art, Sunbeam Studios (London) and Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla.

Also featured in Sounds Like Silence – 4’33’’ Silence Today (Spectre Books 2012), The Journal of Writing In Creative Practice (Vol 7 Issue 1 2015), The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Design by Tony Gibbs (Ava Publishing 2007), Cutting Across Media by Kembrew McLeod (Duke University Press 2011), Here To Go – Art, Counter-Culture and the Esoteric (Forum Nidrosiae 2014), Incredible Machines by Danny Snelson (avant 2014), writing for The Wire’s Collateral Damage (February 2012) and a whole chapter in Duchamp Is My Lawyer The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith on Columbia University Press (2020) and a chapter in Different People – Conversations on Art, Life and the Creative Process by Carl Abrahamsson on Trapart (2021).

.For gallery concerts and festival film screenings please also see Selected Performances and Screenings

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Final DO or DIY of the 2016 Season & Free Download!

From the final DO or DIY with People Like Us of the 2016 season on WFMU, keeping with a tradition we’ve been doing a “Best Of” show, here’s a release version of a megamix (minus mic breaks!) called MEDDLE MIX, downloadable from the bandcamp:
https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/album/meddle-mix-best-of-do-or-diy-with-people-like-us-2016

Playlists:
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/68229
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/68260

WFMU Marathon 2016

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Thanks!  We made it!!! – 24 March

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The annual WFMU fundraising marathon is now on!  This is the time when you can pledge money to the radio station and get swag and prizes in return.  Everyone works very hard at the station to bring you interesting eclectic audio that it is hard to hear elsewhere, and the shows are archived 24/7 too, there are 13 years of People Like Us radio shows so far!

Click here to make a pledge or call 800-989-9368 if you’re in the US.

A Tribute to Don Joyce

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Don’t Say Hello

Don Joyce (Negativland, Over The Edge) has merged with the radio waves.  Don was a close friend and amazing artist.  His influence on the work of People Like Us is beyond measure.  Here is a wonderful piece accurately conveying many of my own experiences, written by Jon Leidecker, who I also first met through Don. 

Don Joyce lived in a second story flat off Telegraph Avenue in what is now the thoroughly gentrified Temescal district in Oakland, but when I visited the Negativland home studio for the first time in July of 1987, after nightfall you had to watch yourself on the way from your car to the front door. I was there to drop off source materials and discuss the theme for the coming week’s episode of Over The Edge, which, after two years of avid fandom, I had finally been invited to play. Don still had his programming day job at that point, and I discovered him in his room tinkering with the GUI for a primitive typing tutor program on his Mac SE with his left hand, while his right hand hovered near the pause button on a cassette deck recording KGO talk radio. Occasionally, while talking to me and coding with one hand, he’d unpause or repause the recording with the other, seemingly randomly. But I soon realized he was precisely waiting for silences between the host and his callers, and making sure host and callers still alternated in sequence. The resulting tape would still sound as if it were a conversation; it just wouldn’t be even remotely close to the one that had actually happened.

This approach to multi-tasking wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who’s heard Over The Edge, which I’d randomly channel surfed into at 12:30 in the morning two years before; at first I’d assumed I’d hit one of those magic nodes on the analog dial where two stations were coming in clearly at the same time, and paused to enjoy the accident. The slow rush of recognition came on over the next twenty seconds as I realized it was actually five to ten things at once: talk radio recordings and advertisements cut in with each other and twisted into dialogues, all while loosely played guitars and keyboards mingled with fragments of pop and soundtrack albums. And only when the sound of a disconnecting line terminated the guitar riff did I make that final connection: a number of the lower fidelity instruments and tapes were being contributed by live phone callers. I stayed up until the show ended at three, that night and many nights to come.

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It’s the WFMU Fundraising Marathon

Many thanks to those who pledged, and to those who didn’t, do so next time!

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It’s the annual WFMU Fundraising Marathon. Please pledge your support for the best radio station in the world, home of hundreds of hours of People Like Us radio shows, Radio Boredcast, and win prizes and swag too.

DO or DIY
Radio Boredcast
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