Recorded as part of Vicki and Felix’s residency at FACT in Liverpool in February 2004, spending two weeks with selected 12 year old pupils from Croxteth Comprehensive School, making a half hour radio piece with them. We’ve not been able to make it available before this point, but now we feel that people should hear it. We encourage you to play this on the radio! Thanks to FACT, Bosco, Croxteth Comprehensive School, and particular thanks to Ross, Maria, Shaun, Natalie, Adam, Michael, David, Amy, Chantelle, Laura and some of the infant voices who we are unable to identify. Molaradio Felix Kubin website
FACT website
DO or DIY Xmas Special on WFMU with special guest Ergo Phizmiz
Tis the season not only of Good Will, but also of Irritainment Music – but we don’t agree that all Xmas music is bad! So just to illustrate the point, here is a chance to not only hear but download the Xmas edition of DO or DIY with People Like Us from 2003, with Special Guest and now WFMU DJ, Ergo Phizmiz! Pour yourself a nice drinky and careful you don’t crack your nuts. Wishing you a pleasant Xmess!
People Like Us have contributed to Gongexeva (CD) – which includes mixes by Ergo Phizmiz, Xper. Xr. and People Like Us). Released on Mukow, 2003 – it features sound-collages based around sacred music from around the world. Gongexeva
Mukow website
The hour long performance on this disc was captured live on October 5th 2002 when Wobbly, People Like Us and Matmos circled their wagons in the lecture hall of the San Francisco Art Institute. Having mutually agreed upon a country and western theme, Vicki Bennett (PLU), Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), and Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt (Matmos) pored over their archives of honky tonk classics, chopping and dicing Nashville’s finest almost beyond recognition, and collectively restitching the mangled shreds in a kind of crazed digital quilting bee. Several tense rehearsals and strong pots of tea later, the foursome shuffled on stage and delivered the goods: from panoramic twangfests to offkilter waltzes to barn burning stompers. Flickering and tranquil one moment, and wildly slapstick the next, Wide Open Spaces hits the sweet spot between song forms and improvisation, and showcases the qualities that all three collaborating artists share: absurdist humor, baroque sample manipulation, and stuttering rhythmic frameworks that lurch and sway. While the presence of five samplers, four laptops, three CD players and a pedal steel guitar on one stage could have led to a tediously ego-driven “jam” or simply cacophany, the results feel lushly detailed but not cluttered, and swing naturally between structure and freedom. It’s an international media magpie summit where country’s chick-a-boom meets tech house’s boom-tschak, and tearjerking sentiment and patriotic hokum are subjected to a dense shower of coughs, sputters and rude noises. Listening back to the recorded results, all three musical units agreed that this concert was mighty fine, and worth sharing.
