There has also been an important development with my new album release. I recently heard from Illegal Art, the label who released a number of my works around 13 years ago before the label shut down. Illegal Art is starting up again (hurray!) this week (hurray!!). This time in a different form: this time around not just a sampling-related label, but now with a more genre-leaning direction. Here is their Instagram Post from a little earlier today and here is their website: https://reboot.illegalart.net/new/
The new People Like Us album is going to be called THE RHiZOME. We are aiming to release the PEOPLE LIKE US CD in September/October this year, on Illegal Art.
The PEOPLE LIKE US IndieGoGo campaign is still open where you can pledge to pre-order this album, plus a wide selection of other items including lathe-cut vinyl, and we very much welcome pledges for items which are still in stock/available.
8.3. , 20-21:00: The high art of collaging: PEOPLE LIKE US in Ö1 Time-tone portrait As part of the new, three-hour time-tone on Sunday from 19:00 to 22:00 today with full program dedicated to International Women’s Day:
British media artist and radio producer Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us is a pioneer in audiovisual performances. Since 1991, she has been working with material found from films and old vinyl records and uses methods of collage and sampling to create sound and visual worlds that re-connect our media presence.
Profound archival knowledge, among other things, about British popular culture, on the one hand, and a distinctly humorous approach, on the other hand, are characterized by her creations. In 2006, she was the first artist to be given unlimited access to the BBC archives. At donaufestival 2025, People Like Us presented the Austrian premiere of their current AV work “The Library of Babel”, based on the story of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, a principal representative of the so-called “. Magical realism.
In this radio portrait, we traverse her work for the Prelinger Film Archive, the archive of Britain’s first electro-acoustic composer Daphne Oram, collaborations with radio host John Peel and the band Negativland, and her ‘DO or DIY’ series for non-commercial radio WFMU Vicki Bennet is a representative of artistic DIY – do it yourself. She follows the approach of “Sharity”: a combination of “share” and “charity” as well as the name of a current album by People Like Us.
People Like Us now have an additional official website, for handling t-shirts, tote bags, greeting cards, postcards, prints and mugs. We’re continuing to use the same supplier but this time directly, so this change allows us to offer the same high-quality organic cotton t-shirts but at significantly lower prices.
Additionally, we have a brand-new t-shirt and tote bag design featuring a sneak peek of artwork from our upcoming CD, called “Copia”, set to release in May 2024.
We’ve moved as much of our shop as we can over to bandcamp – which not only sells digital but also merchandise (CDs, records, cassettes). The link below is still managed by us as well as any necessary visits to the post office, it’s just a lot easier to use than going through our website, and gets us more random traffic too 🙂 https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/
Vicki from People Like Us will be doing a fill-in show for Ken Freedman:
🗓 24 December 2025 📻 Live on WFMU DO or DIY with People Like Us 🕘 9am–12 noon (NY time) Live playlist + comments during the show already here: Wfmu.org/playlists/shows/159286
Warning and possible reassurance: NO Xmas music here!
I’ve relaunched my album fundraiser, keeping it open for new pledges until 31 December 2025. When IndieGoGo changed ownership, they reset all campaigns in progress and suddenly showed them as “100% funded”, even if we hadn’t met our goals. So to be clear: our campaign was NOT fully funded, even though it looked that way, and it wiped out the momentum of our final push, since it looked like we made our goal.
All related costs are covered and fully paid for. I always put my own income last, and it’s that part that is underfunded now – actually being able to pay myself for the months of work it takes to make the album and stay afloat.
If you’d like to support, share, or add to your pledge, you can do so here:
Had a fun conversation with three friends a few weeks back, which has now been edited into a podcast which you can listen to above on University of Minnesota Press site.
What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artefacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra.
Has been most excellent to co-create a new video for The Soft Pink Truth alongside animator Matthew Murray Sullivan – “Time Inside the Violet”, features Drew Daniel (Soft Pink Truth), M.C. Schmidt on piano, and strings arranged and played by Ulaş Kurugüllü, accompanied by Filippo Tramo (French Horn), Elin Andersson (Trumpet), Simon Fransman (Trombone), and Nicklas Dahlin (Saxophone). We made the disruptive mincemeat-and-worms middle section of this video.
SPT’s new album “Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?”, comes out on the Thrill Jockey label on January 30th. Pre-order the LP/CD/digi from Thrill Jockey Records, Bandcamp and other purveyors of music.
Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle / Afternoon session is free; evening programme £5/3 starandshadow.org.uk
In collaboration with Culture Lab (Newcastle University), wildpop 2025 takes place across Culture Lab and Star & Shadow Cinema. It’s a lot of info so just look at the poster 🙂
7 Nov: After morning sessions at Culture Lab, 2–5pm artist presentations at Star & Shadow feature Daniel Bird, Gavin Butt, Dina Kelberman, and Graham Dolphin. The evening programme follows with performances by Elaine Mitchener & Loré Lixenberg, Dina Kelberman, People Like Us, and YEAH YOU, and DJ Kenosist.
8 Nov: Morning and afternoon conference-style presentations and roundtables at Culture Lab lead into the evening performances by Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Elvin Brandhi + Tengal, One or Several Wolves (Toi Guy, Mark Wardlaw, Stewart Smith), GUT (Pinnel, Cath Tyler, Mariam Rezaei), John Bowers (GLOW), and Adam Soper (BLACK BILE: Melancholy, Hauntings, and Hope for Change), and DJ Sean C.
I launched my IndieGoGo campaign last night for my new album 1000 Platypuses, and I’d love your support. This fundraiser aims to cover 100 days of creative work — the time required to compose, edit, and record the album.
Every early pledge really helps build momentum and shows others that this project is worth supporting.
There are numerous perks available — including pre-release downloads, signed CDs, handmade lathe-cut vinyl, and original collages — but even a small contribution or sharing the link would mean a great deal.
On Saturday June 7th at noon, author Tom Comitta will discuss their new book People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted & Unwanted Novels on the Edendale Library Zoom at 11 a.m. PST with legendary UK sound collage artist Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us.
Tom based the two halves of People’s Choice Literature on a nationwide poll of the elements that Americans claim to prefer most in a novel, as well as those they like least. Giving the people exactly what they want, The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown and David Baldacci, in which a California woman teams up with a hunky FBI agent (with a tragic past) to solve her brother’s kidnapping, getting drawn ever deeper into a tech tycoon’s apocalyptic ambitions. Then, in an epic synthesis of what nobody wants, The Most Unwanted Novel is an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from arctic wastelands to the dark caverns of the macabre, featuring sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories along the way. A wild ride!
The third in a series of events hosted by The Wire magazine looking at the impact of AI on contemporary music making. Tickets
Generative music systems were around long before generative AI. This event looks at a previous history of music as a series of inputs, workflows, and rules-based processes, from Fluxus onward. What are the choices that inform generative music systems internally (in scores, programming, and technical possibilities) and externally (in power structures between performers, users, and corporations)?
Generative AI also generates its outputs from massive datasets, and can be ‘trained’ on the work of thousands of anonymised creative artists. Debates are heated about copyright, ownership and originality, and the consent of artists and creators to be used in these massive datasets. What does Generative AI say to the rules we have about what constitutes agency and identity, and the distinction between self and other in relation to information transmission and exchange? Looking into plunderphonics, folk, sampling and copy cultures, were or are other paths possible?
Loré Lixenberg and Elaine Mitchener are both vocalists, composers and improvisors working in the realms of new music, experimental music, music theatre, performance and visual art. For this Salon they will perform a selection of early process-based scores in which the rules are transparent and all too human.
Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) is a multidisciplinary British artist recognised for her immersive audiovisual collages and unique approach to mass media as contemporary folk art. Her contribution to this Salon will lift off from her ongoing advocacy for open access to creative content, and her practice of freely sharing her work online and championing the principles of the gift economy. Bennett regards sampling as a potent metaphor for culture and consciousness’s interconnected and ever-shifting nature. In her view, everything exists in a state of flux, and meaning is always relational rather than fixed. Through her practice, she draws attention to the fluid dialogues woven throughout cultural production, challenging conventional ideas about originality and the boundaries of artistic ownership.
Mattie Colqhoun (Xenogothic) is a writer, researcher, and biographer of Mark Fisher. For this event they will be presenting on the implications of AI for blogospheric topics from the 2000s-2010s, regarding hauntology, salvagepunk and accelerationism as three different approaches to the cultural production of the new and how the recombinatory processes of AI sampling are changing our relationship to appropriation and sampling in music.
The event will conclude with a panel moderated by writer and Wire contributor Robert Barry.
