Welcome to the only official site for People Like Us and Vicki Bennett
On Saturday 26 September 2015, Citation City will be performed by People Like Us as part of the Walter Benjamin Now Symposium – a daylong event at Whitechapel Gallery paying homage to Walter Benjamin who died 75 years ago on this day. The performance will be at 4.40pm.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/walter-benjamin-now/
http://www.versobooks.com/events/1163-walter-benjamin-now
Yes, the date there is correct. Just found this video, courtesy of Doug Wellman of Puzzling Evidence: Superstars of sample People Like Us, Wobbly, and C. Elliot Friday (Don Joyce) of Negativland join forces with projectionists Wetgate to layer lightly at the Cell Space one fine spring night to discern “what’s music?”…
Over The Wobbly Wetgate People Like on April 9 1998 from Puzzling Evidence on Vimeo.
PEOPLE LIKE US PRESENT an evening of film:
CONCERT OF COLLAGE : CITATION CITY
and selected short collage/cut up films curated by Vicki Bennett
at WATERSHED CINEMA 3, BRISTOL
18 September 2015
21:45 – 23:45
£5 / £4.50 CONC.
2hr
Tickets: http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/6803/concert-of-collage/
Join us for the performance of Citation City – a time-travelling voyage through one city, assembled from hundreds of movie clips and inspired by the wanderings of Walter Benjamin.
People Like Us’ ‘Citation City’ sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?
https://peoplelikeus.org/citationcity
Prior to this performance we will be screening a series of clips using the art of collage selected by People Like Us, from filmmakers including Bryce Kretschmann and John Oswald.
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.
Spotted by our friend Jonathan Lemon – a track by People Like Us, Wobbly and Matmos on their jukebox! No idea quite why the song is explicit… the “lyrics” come from a local London commercial radio station advert from the 1990s. Download Wide Open Spaces for free at UbuWeb.
NOTHING CAN TURN INTO A VOID – an hour-long doc film about People Like Us is now completed and available. If you are a festival or event organiser and wish to screen this film please get in touch with the creator Carl Abrahamsson direct by contacting jakob AT trapartfilm.com or carl AT trapartfilm.com. If you have previously booked People Like Us for a concert and are interested, please get in touch with us direct through our Contact page. You can also watch this movie for free courtesy of our friends at UbuWeb, or watch below.
British artist Vicki Bennett’s work within the project called “People Like Us” takes you on a journey into a world where literally anything can happen. Using her skills as an editor and a great sense of humor, she lets you roam through a world of imagination filled with contrasts and chance encounters between the past and the present. In performances, video work, music and collages, Bennett conveys that nothing is really what it seems. For more information, please visit: Trapart Film
Screenings so far:
October 2015 – Huset, Copenhagen
November 2015 – Brighton Cinecity Film Festival
November 2015 – Fylkingen, Stockholm
January 2016-ongoing – UbuWeb
July 2016 – Norberg Festival, Sweden
October 2016 – Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn
November 2018 – Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
March 2022 – Kimball Auditorium, Walla Walla, US
Author and Wire contributor Ken Hollings has produced a show for BBC Radio 4 on William Burroughs’s cut ups. The show traces the history of the cut up, from its roots in the Dadaist movement through Burroughs and Brion Gysin, to tape splicing and digital editing, looking at the cut up as a satirical device.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33254672
The show “Cutting Up The Cut Up” includes interviews with Armando Iannucci, Cassetteboy, Kevin Foakes (aka DJ Food), Vicki Bennett and others. It will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 25 June at 11:30am.
‘Cutcast Up-pod’ – featuring additional material from Chris Morris and Negativland – is available here.
http://www.thewire.co.uk/news/37051/ken-hollings-broadcasting-radio-show-on-williams-burroughs
http://kenhollings.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-cut-up-method-end-of-civilized-world.html
Pleased to announce that our radio show DO or DIY with People Like Us will return to the new WFMU schedule – Fridays at 7pm NY Time (that’s midnight UK), the first show will start on 12 June 2015.
WFMU Schedule
CCCitations is an offshoot of Citation City, an audiovisual performance by People Like Us.
Four artists, Jon Leidecker, Jason Willett, Gwilly Edmondez and Andrew Sharpley were given source material from Vicki Bennett’s Citation City a/v project and asked to make new work, interpreting the footage in a unique way.
Soundtrack: Gwilly Edmondez 00:01
Soundtrack: Jason Willett 02:47
Soundtrack: Jon Leidecker 05:23
Film: Vicki Bennett
Film and Video: Andrew Sharpley – using source material given by Vicki Bennett
About Citation City
Citation City sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?
Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual work is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time. By gathering and assembling such groups of similar yet unrelated, he revealed a hidden, magical encyclopaedia of affinities, a massive and labyrinthine architecture of a collective dream city. On reading Benjamin, his approach to editing astonished Vicki Bennett, and the similarity of their creative processes of cutting and collating extensive lists of subject matter by context.
In the live performance a series of story lines (convolutes) sit side by side with a soundtrack sourced both from the movie content, as well as new sample compositions thematically related to the visual content.
The result is a sweeping panorama of London, a London as represented through cinema – not the real city at all, but one that exists in the collective imagination of moviegoers throughout the decades. Filmmaker Magazine
Did a radio interview earlier this week on stress.fm in Lisbon
http://stress.fm/post/115943376554/people-like-us
talking about WFMU, Ubuweb, Walter Benjamin, Citation City, the internet and being stupid (oh, and the c with a circle word)
Yes, these two albums are now reissued… on cassette!
Now deleted on cassette but available on bandcamp:
PEOPLE LIKE US – A FISTFUL OF KNUCKLES – SOLD OUT!!!
PEOPLE LIKE US & KENNY G – NOTHING SPECIAL – SOLD OUT!!!
Many thanks to those who pledged, and to those who didn’t, do so next time!
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.