Guests People Like Us and Wobbly drop in for an extended cancellation concert of unexpected music, mixed, in this case, with an extensified, supercharged completion of the Sturgeon story begun two weeks ago. This is a nice show for all-around modern interest. It’s truly a golden age of iritainment for all. We’d like to give you a free kitchen with this one, but you wont need it because this one cooks all the way through. Chew with your ears. Run time2h:56m:8s
Here’s an edit of a session done for KFJC by People Like Us & Wobbly in 2002. It formed the foundation for a later release by the duo entitled Music For The Fire.
10 Years of People Like Us (CD on Mess Media – MESS1) – 2002 SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE
The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly “topical” audio-jokes at the expense of one’s raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being “groovy”, the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw men and call it subversion. Happily, Vicki Bennett has yet to fall down either precipice, but yodels down contentedly from her own Alpine audio-cottage. There, with loving care, she snips and tucks at the lycra jumpsuit until the fit is snug, places every plastic shrub on the Happy Valley Ranch just so, and throws another dance record on the bonfire. Undercutting her own utopian mirages with formal breakdowns and sneaky semantic pranks, Vicki Bennett is One Funny Lady, with a deadly sense of comic timing that puts her in my personal pantheon of edit intensive music makers: -Steinski and Mass Media, Hank Shocklee, Tod Dockstader, Teo Macero, the Hanatarash, John Oswald, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. Serving her birthday cake with a turd, her gags are always lined with a virulent creep factor. You get the feeling that the vacancy and pointlessness of empty speech is being lampooned and mourned in equal measure. In sticking to this balance of celebration and critique, People Like Us genuinely hates and loves People Like You. The least you can do is head up to the Happy Valley Ranch for a spell and have a listen.
Drew Daniel
Here are a couple of tracks that People LIke Us made in 2001 but didn’t release. They are quite poor quality in their sample rate – put this down to the amazing napster, in the days when people were sharing files at a lower bit rate.
