Join OSE Associate Leon Clowes and internationally renowned audio-visual collage artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) for a listening session of ‘No One Is An Island’, Vicki’s WDR-commissioned radio piece that asks where ideas come from. The listening session will be followed by an artist ‘In-conversation’ and Q&A in which Leon and Vicki will discuss the provocations raised by the commission alongside Vicki’s creative processes and artistic concerns.
This event is held as part of Open School East’s 2022-23 Public Programme. This year’s Associate-led Public Programme responds to themes of social & ecological hybridity, as set out in the Associate’s first term curriculum entitled When The World Looks Back At You: about storytelling, ecology and the weird led by artist Saelia Aparicio. Through explorations of the voice, the body and sensitive connections with natural and man-made networks that unite the world around us, the Associate-led Public Programme looks to and explores creativity and collectivity in green spaces.
PEOPLE LIKE US | NEGATIVLAND | ERGO PHIZMIZ | GWILLY EDMONDEZ POREST | IRENE MOON | WOBBLY | HEARTY WHITE
Cafe OTO is proud to announce a new artist residency, featuring multimedia artist Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us. Vicki has collaborated with a wide range of artists and musicians; some are joining us for this 3-Day residency, alongside some screenings and discussions. The residency includes a preview of the new People Like Us audiovisual performance Is This The Real Life?
People Like Us
DAY 1 | 8PM HEARTY WHITE (compère) | POREST | IRENE MOON | NEGATIVLAND PEOPLE LIKE US & ERGO PHIZMIZ & GWILLY EDMONDEZ (trio) DAY 1 PASS £16 £14 ADVANCE£8 MEMBERS
HEARTY WHITE compère Our residency compère is Hearty White, a performer based in Lexington, Kentucky. His one-hour weekly radio show “Miracle Nutrition with Hearty White” has aired on WFMU from 2012 until the present. https://wfmu.org/playlists/ha
Hearty White
POREST Porest is the music and performance outlet of post-American artist and producer Mark Gergis. For decades, Porest has issued a trail of confounding agitprop sound art, post-globalized hate-pop, diabolical radio dramas, big songs and small songs. Porest’s blatant embezzlement of human syntax and cultural misunderstanding broadcasts vital mixed messages across all fields, forging carefully rearranged realities that both avoid and indulge the inherent trappings of radical art and politics. Live performances integrate Porest’s music, performance and sound into a grand total sum that can’t be unseen. Ongoing collaborations have included: Negativland (USA) Alan Bishop / Sun City Girls (USA), Aavikko (Finland), Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us (UK), among others. Porest has performed and toured worldwide, with albums released on Nashazphone (Cairo), Discrepant (UK), and in the US on the Seeland, Abduction and Resipiscent labels. In the 1990s and 2000s, Mark was co-founder of the long-running experimental California music and performance collective Mono Pause, as well as its offshoot Neung Phak. In his other life, Mark is an archivist and producer for global music releases on the Sublime Frequencies and Sham Palace labels, including compilations and documentary works such as I Remember Syria, Cambodian Cassette Archives, Saigon Rock & Soul, Choubi Choubi (Iraq), Dabke: Sounds from the Syrian Houran and his extensive work with artists Omar Souleyman (Syria) and Erikin Koray (Turkey). https://porest.bandcamp.com/
Mark Gergis (Porest)
IRENE MOON Since 1997, Scientifically Speaking with Irene Moon has been presenting The Lectography: musical lectures about insects and other arthropods in an attempt to elevate entomology as a rock genre. Performing at basement house shows and more famous music venues like the Knitting Factory and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Irene Moon has toured the US, Europe, and Australia. She created over 30 musical volumes during her career and performed live radio broadcasts dealing with entomological topics on WFMU in New York and other radio stations. Irene Moon (a.k.a Katja C. Seltmann, Ph.D.) is the Director of the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She brings the aesthetics from the entomology laboratory in front of alternative audiences in the form of absurd, factual presentations about insects. Her performance at Cafe Oto PLU Residency is a lounge-inspired lecture on bee biodiversity and evolution titled “Will You Bee Mind” that incorporates psychedelic imagery, pop-styled torch songs, and comedy. https://www.begoniasociety.org
Irene Moon
PEOPLE LIKE US & ERGO PHIZMIZ & GWILLY EDMONDEZ First commissioned for The Wire 40 Anniversary and now seen for the first time in expanded form, this new trio showcases a whole new AV performance dedicated to collage, technology and the cut-up. “The interplay between People Like Us, Ergo Phizmiz and Gwilly Edmondez creates a harmonious and dynamic show that captivates and enthrals. The combination of music, poetry, and performance art creates a magical and unforgettable experience for the audience.” – Tough Sell Zine
Gwilly Edmondez, People Like Us, Ergo Phizmiz
NEGATIVLAND What’s a recording? Are they safe? Are the things being played back true, or are they simply becoming familiar? You can wait for your own brain to come up with the answers, or you can go hear music in a room full of people. Don’t worry — you won’t even realize how much of it you’re going to remember. We are pleased as pugs to be participating in the People Like Us residency — whatever we end up doing is sure to only happen there, because you can never hear the same recording twice. https://negativland.com/
Negativland
DAY 2 | 8PM HEARTY WHITE (compère) | WOBBLY solo | ERGO PHIZMIZ solo PEOPLE LIKE US solo | GWILLY EDMONDEZ solo DAY 2 PASS £16 £14 ADVANCE£8 MEMBERS
HEARTY WHITE compère Our residency compère is Hearty White, a performer based in Lexington, Kentucky. His one-hour weekly radio show “Miracle Nutrition with Hearty White” has aired on WFMU from 2012 until the present. https://wfmu.org/playlists/ha
WOBBLY Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) is a human in the loop, improvising with people and machines that listen. His work with sampling and feedback blurs any easy distinction between his solo and collaborative work, including touring and recording with Negativland, the Thurston Moore Group, People Like Us, Jennifer Walshe, Zeena Parkins, Zoh Amba, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Thomas Dimuzio, Fred Frith and Huun-Huur-Tu (among others). Lectures on the various secret histories of electronic music have been presented at Mills, Stanford, Oxford, Peabody, UC Berkeley, and MACBA. As well as playing as part of Negativland, Jon will perform a solo set for this residency. https://www.detritus.net/wobbly/news.html
Jon Leidecker (Wobbly)
ERGO PHIZMIZ Ergo Phizmiz is a composer, writer, collagist, stage director and radio playwright. Recent projects have included animated stage designs for “The Rake’s Progress” at the Royal Academy of Music and Maggio Musicale Firenze, and the huge, smash hit community pantomime “The Quantum Horse” in collaboration with Cube Microplex, Bristol. Their multiple award winning work for radio includes programmes for Bayerischer Rundfunk, Deutschlandradiokultur, BBC Radio 3, BBC 6Music, WFMU, West Deutscher Rundfunk, VPRO and Resonance FM. Recent music releases have mainly comprised the deluxe holiday leisure trilogy on Strategic Tape Reserve “Elmyr”, “Plaza Centraal” and “Owl and Monkey Haven”. Ergo is currently developing a new operatic work “Adapting Don Quixote” as a PhD at the University of Bristol. Ergo will perform a rare solo set for this residency. http://ergophizmizmusic.bandcamp.com
Ergo Phizmiz
PEOPLE LIKE US Residency host Vicki Bennett will preview her brand new audiovisual performance “Is This The Real Life?” This work explores themes of reality and perception and the relationship between image and sound. https://peoplelikeus.org
GWILLY EDMONDEZ Gwilly Edmondez emerged in the 1980s from Bridgend, South Wales, where he was a founder member of Radioactive Sparrow, once dubbed ‘the most legendary band you’ve probably never heard of.’ Gwilly practices a form of composition that disavows fixity and rehearsal, preferring an approach that dissolves the line between ‘life’ and ‘performance’ in ways that compromise neither. Having coined the term Wild Pop to describe his aesthetic as both a solo artist and as Gustav Thomas in YEAH YOU (est. 2013), his embracing the age of evaporation is manifest in a relentless autopathology oriented towards devotional sublimation. Gwilly closes Day 2 of the residency with a special dictaphone karaoke set, a real crowd pleaser. https://gwillyedmondez.bandcamp.com/
Gwilly Edmondez
DAY 3 | 2-5PM PEOPLE LIKE US & HEARTY WHITE CONVERSATION, VARIATIONS LECTURE & CHART SWEEP PERFORMANCE DAY 3 PASS £10 £8 ADVANCE£5 MEMBERS
JON LEIDECKER “VARIATIONS: A HISTORY OF SAMPLING MUSIC” Morton Feldman’s remark that “The degree to which a music’s notation is responsible for much of the composition itself is one of history’s best-kept secrets” referred to the medium of sheet music. But the comment is just as true now that the site of the musical composition has migrated from written notation to the captured recording. The creative process of modern music production is revealed to the listening audience in the form of collage and sampling music precisely through its use of familiar materials; through a demonstration of how known compositions and sounds can be transformed, the tools used by all sound engineers to construct modern popular music are made transparent. https://rwm.macba.cat/en/buscador/radio/serie/variations-9458
GWILLY EDMONDEZ SINGS “CHART SWEEP” CHART SWEEP (AKA TIME SWEEP) is a 2-part mix created by Hugo Keesing using up to 5 seconds of each and every #1 since the mid-fifties, in order, up until 1981 in Part 1 and into the early nineties in Part 2. find more info at ubu.com/sound/keesing.html Gwilly Edmondez started watching Top of the Pops when he was 3. From then on he was obsessed with pop music. he has developed an approach to music making that collides a pop sensibility (with all its showbiz delusional rhetoric) with the materials and mentalness of experimental music. ubu.com/sound/edmondez.html | https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/album/gwilly-edmondez-sings-chart-sweep
We made a fundraiser to help us spend time this year to create a new touring audiovisual performance and album, with a whole list of very exclusive merchandise and experiences in connection with that. Hope you are able to lend a hand and take this show on the road with us 🙂 The initial campaign is now completed but for now, you can still get a whole bunch of exclusive merch and recordings and help us to keep things going this year while making the new work.
PEOPLE LIKE US & ERGO PHIZMIZ – Rhapsody in Glue Limited edition 12” lathe cut clear vinyl LP & download Release Date: 26 November 2022 Pre-order on Bandcamp from Friday 7 October 2022
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz are pleased to announce the release of a new limited edition vinyl album, “Rhapsody in Glue”.
Rhapsody in Glue began its journey as part of the Codpaste podcast on New York tri-state area radio station WFMU in 2008. With Rhapsody in Glue we find a unique approach to constructing a record. People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album “in the open”, presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition – informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the Codpaste free podcast series. Rhapsody in Glue was the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.
The album was initially released as an online-only release on Bleep in 2008, and now for the first time ever we are making it available in a Limited Edition of 100, hand numbered copies on 12” high quality remastered stereo lathe cut vinyl, hand cut by Bladud Flies! It comes with 300gsm inserts, lyric sheet, digital download codes, both for this, and also the original digital album release from 2008. The vinyl will ship with a polylined inner sleeve.
The vinyl will ship within a polylined inner sleeve. Includes a ‘lathe cut’ care card. Limited edition of 100, hand numbered.
“Hey, hey, have you ever tried… reaching out to the other side?”
Gone, Gone Beyond is an immersive a/v spatial cinema work by People Like Us (Vicki Bennett), which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what’s behind.
The initial work was commissioned by Naut Humon, the founder of immersive theatre project RML CineChamber, Gone, Gone Beyond is a 10 screen / 6 or 8 speaker piece, with seamless wrap around projection and surround sound where the audience sit inside. It comprises of movie and musical compositions, animated and sample-based/musique concrète collage juxtaposed with content filmed/recorded by the artist, all sewn together in a giant patchwork. Pull on a thread and watch whole new narratives expand and unravel all at once on a 360º palette. The project has been a work in progress since 2017, and showed for the first time in Autumn 2021 in feature length format.
The work’s title and underlying concepts come from the Heart Sutra, a key Buddhist text, describing how all phenomena are empty in form yet ultimately interconnected. The last lines of the Heart Sutra say ‘gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā’, which means “gone, gone beyond, gone beyond that a bit more, and then beyond that a bit further”. This reflects perfectly the action of going beyond the frame to where there are no edges to the narrative – just emptiness.
In this 360º format, time and space becomes elasticated, with the use of collaged video furthering the reflection on how information comes to us as fragments and that nothing is fixed. A new narrative-thread is woven in the mind of each viewer every time the work is seen, limited only to that exact time and space – just as the Heart Sutra reminds us that the only constant is change, and everything is related with no fixed source.
The initial in-process tester movie screened in San Francisco in October 2017 at RML’s own Recombinant Festival at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Since then the work has been in development, with a private screening event in April 2019 Goldsmiths SIML for potential partners. The work will screen at nyMusikk, Oslo; SPILL Festival, Ipswich; Attenborough Centre (ACCA), Brighton; and London Barbican, in Autumn 2021. Version 2 of GGB screened in San Francisco’s Gray Area in May 2022 to great critical acclaim.
People Like Us return to WFMU for 3 hours on 28 December 2022, filling in for Station Manager Ken. It broadcasts live from 9-Noon NY time, that is 2-5pm UK time. Live playlist and comments here when it’s on.
People Like Us will perform The Mirror at Electric Spring Festival at Phipps Hall, University of Huddersfield on Saturday 18 February 2023. Also on the bill is our old friend and collaborator Jon Leidecker AKA Wobbly.
“As a collage artist combining disparate narratives, the ever-emerging, growing availability and use of AI software appeals, with its creation and manipulation of imagery using keywords and phrases. This resonates with my own methodology of using database content searches and mind maps. Both result in juxtapositions and styles that one would not have thought of, a springboard for new ideas and directions.
My current project will involve developing my skills through learning from a number of artists, writers and technicians with working knowledge of AI (e.g. dall.e, disco diffusion, artbreeder, midjourney and also GPT-3) about how to integrate this with my present digital AV collage work. This includes researching the viability of creating a new touring AV performance, to be later expanded to be a real space 360 immersive cinema work and exhibition.
This project builds on my previous work, including the immersive 360 real-space cinema, Gone, Gone Beyond. This work was a 10 screen / 6 or 8 speaker piece, with seamless wrap around projection and surround sound, and was commissioned by Naut Humon, the founder of immersive theatre project RML CineChamber. It comprised of movie and musical compositions, animated and sample-based, musique concrète collage juxtaposed with filmed and recorded content. The project has been a work in progress since 2017 and was shown for the first time in Autumn 2021 in a feature-length format in venues including The Barbican.”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, November 29th 2022, 7pm Immersive audio-visual performance The Mirror by People Like Us Post-performance discussion: Vicki Bennett, Olga Goriunova & Marcell Mars (moderated by Tomislav Medak)
The first edition of the new‘Intangible’ festival, takes place from October 27 to November 62022 in Lleida, focuses on creative arts and welcomes British multimedia artist Vicki Bennett as a special guest. It includes the solo exhibition MIND MAPS: THE ART OF VICKI BENNETT which first showed at Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla earlier in 2022. https://intangible.paeria.cat/#
People will have the opportunity to delve into Bennett’s creative universe with a solo exhibition, as well as enjoy a conference at Lleida CaixaForum gallery and an audiovisual performance of The Mirror live at Espai Orfeó. The event’s artistic director, Antoni Pinent, said that Intangible offers “a wide range of activities” aiming to reach different types of audiences and not only art experts. The festival “wants to be informative but reflective and critical at the same time,” he added.
