Welcome to the only official site for People Like Us and Vicki Bennett
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.
We have added a new live date to the list for Citation City – at SMUP in Parede (near Lisbon), Portugal on 17 April 2015. Here’s a radio interview we did this week with Lisbon’s stress.fm http://stress.fm/post/115943376554/people-like-us
Now that we have moved forward slightly into our current new performance Citation City, we can now put online some parts of our previous performance Consequences (One Thing Leads To Another). Not to say this performance is retired, but the chances of you seeing it performed anywhere are considerably less now. You can find the music to some of this on our album Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice, which we have a few copies left of, should you wish to purchase it.
Bridge by People Like Us [2012].
Jump! by People Like Us [2012].
We have a new print available for sale – it was recently created while making the a/v performance Citation City, collaging movie content of a segue from a scene of hands at a typewriter cutting across to the playing of a piano. We have sized it as such that it will fit into an IKEA frame which you can buy yourself (IKEA: RIBBA 23cmx23cm). We are selling at an affordable price (see below in US dollars), postage INCLUDED.
SOLD OUT
We’ve just made a “teaching pack” to accompany Citation City. This is written in inverted commas because we don’t claim any formal knowledge when it comes to teaching, but it is good to share information about the creative process. What we have done is make a document explaining the process of making this work. The pdf is intended as a companion to the audiovisual work, giving examples of the process one might undertake to create new work when sourcing from a large media database. This particular example relates to moving image and musical composition, but the methods can translate to other platforms that use composition, directing, editing, creative narratives and story telling.
Citation City education/teaching pack
PDF download: citation city teaching pack