Sent an IndieGoGo Perks update last week, but went for a walk in the sun today so decided to shoot a little video! Music under the video is our collaboration with Ergo Phizmiz, on The Library of Babel gig and our forthcoming album.
We made a fundraiser to help us spend time this year to create a new touring audiovisual performance and album, with a whole list of very exclusive merchandise and experiences in connection with that. Hope you can lend a hand and take this show on the road with us 🙂 The initial campaign is now completed but for now, you can still get a whole bunch of exclusive merch and recordings and help us to keep things going this year while making the new work. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/people-like-us-new-album-and-tour
People Like Us return to WFMU for 3 hours on 28 December 2022, filling in for Station Manager Ken. It broadcasts live from 9-Noon NY time, that is 2-5pm UK time. Live playlist and comments here when it’s on.
People Like Us will perform The Mirror at Electric Spring Festival at Phipps Hall, University of Huddersfield on Saturday 18 February 2023. Also on the bill is our old friend and collaborator Jon Leidecker AKA Wobbly.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, November 29th 2022, 7pm Immersive audio-visual performance The Mirror by People Like Us Post-performance discussion: Vicki Bennett, Olga Goriunova & Marcell Mars (moderated by Tomislav Medak)
The first edition of the new‘Intangible’ festival, takes place from October 27 to November 62022 in Lleida, focuses on creative arts and welcomes British multimedia artist Vicki Bennett as a special guest. It includes the solo exhibition MIND MAPS: THE ART OF VICKI BENNETT which first showed at Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla earlier in 2022. https://intangible.paeria.cat/#
People will have the opportunity to delve into Bennett’s creative universe with a solo exhibition, as well as enjoy a conference at Lleida CaixaForum gallery and an audiovisual performance of The Mirror live at Espai Orfeó. The event’s artistic director, Antoni Pinent, said that Intangible offers “a wide range of activities” aiming to reach different types of audiences and not only art experts. The festival “wants to be informative but reflective and critical at the same time,” he added.
People Like Us will be performing The Mirror live at Santa Cruz in Tenerife at Keroxen on Saturday 19 November 2022. More details here: https://keroxen.com
People Like Us fill in for Station Manager Ken this Wednesday 17 August from 9am to noon, NY time (that’s 2pm to 5pm UK time) on our favourite radio station, WFMU.
People Like Us has made a brand new 22 HOUR radio piece for Radio Art Zone, a radio art project by Radio ARA and Mobile Radio for the European Capital of Culture Esch2022
“Well, you know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment – very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which probably as you say, were intrusions, they drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios, even a single one, not just twelve at a time…I think, well, they’re just playing my piece!” – John Cage (and Morton Feldman in Conversation, WBAI, NYC (1967))
In Buddhism, according to Bhante Gunaratana this number is reached by multiplying the senses smell, touch, taste, hearing, sight, and consciousness by whether they are painful, pleasant or neutral, and then again by whether these are internally generated or externally occurring, and yet again by past, present and future, finally we get 108 feelings. 6 × 3 × 2 × 3 = 108.
Radio Art Zone is a 100-day radio art station for Esch2022, which will be broadcast in the south of Luxembourg by Radio ARA on 87.8 FM. It will also be live-streamed for a worldwide audience and transmitted by a network of international partners.
The Radio Art Zone schedule consists of two daily programmes: newly-commissioned 22-hour radio productions created by more than 100 international and local artists, and 2-hour live shows from kitchens in the community.
Radio Art Zone is on air from 18th June — 25th September 2022
A programme of film shorts by People Like Us Q&A Vicki Bennett & Emily Bick (The Wire) Live performance to a new film score by People Like Us with Gwilly Edmondez & Ergo Phizmiz
THE WIRE 40: An Evening with People Like Us @The Cube Microplex (01/07)
Perhaps better known for her audio work, the opening night of The Wire’s 40th birthday celebrations focused on Vicki Bennett’s (aka People Like Us) films.
The evening started with an overview of the artist’s work including maximalist explosions of old industrial documentaries, tongue in cheek pop culture mashups, and recent immersive experiences. For me the extracts of longer works didn’t work so well, never having enough time to fully get into what was going on, but many of the short films were brilliant – from the hilarious mashup of The Hills Are Alive from Sound of Music and This Is The End from Apocalypse Now (The Sound of the End of Music), to the really quite moving combination of depictions of the moon in early experimental and comedy films, with music by Ergo Phizmiz (Moon). What was surprising and delightful was the lack of any cynicism – throughout, Bennett celebrated films from commercials to classics, with an obvious love of the moving image, and the people who made them.
The night really started to come alive with the Q&A with Bennett. The way she talked about her work confirmed her genuine joy in working with existing material. ‘Films want to be friends,’ she replied to questions about how she got things to fit so well together. ‘You do one thing for a long time and magic happens.’
Crowning the evening was a new work, with live performance by Bennett, Ergo Phizmiz and Gwilly Edmondez. It fulfilled the promise teased in the earlier clips, and showed the excellence of Bennett’s work when allowed the space to stretch out, by turns joyous and strange and beguiling. It seemed almost like a celebration of her own career, with clips returning to repeated motifs from earlier work; corridors and cameras, doorways and dreams. As a final encapsulation of the magic Bennett talked of we saw a satanic ritual mixed with a Dadaist poetry exercise; art as a demonic summoning, drawing something from the ether and binding it to yourself.
For this evening Bennett has put together a programme of her rarely-seen short films from the current century. The films will be followed by a discussion between the artist and Wire Deputy Editor Emily Bick, and then the premiere live performance to a new specially-made film score by PLU by the trio of Bennett, Gwilly Edmondez and Ergo Phizmiz.
Emily Bick is Deputy Editor at The Wire magazine.
Gwilly Edmondez is a performer whose primary aesthetic is Wild Pop, active both solo and in numerous collaborations. As Gustav Thomas he is one half of the duo YEAH YOU with Elvin Brandhi. Originally from Wales, he is mostly based in the North East where he has been on the staff of the music department of Newcastle University since 2004.
Ergo Phizmiz is a composer, writer, collagist, radio playwright, opera designer and director, who has created a vast body of work across media since 2000. They are currently designing moving images for The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music, and working on the opera Adapting Don Quixote as a PhD at the University of Bristol.
The Wire 40 @ The Cube is a weekend of events marking The Wire magazine’s 40th anniversary. Other Wire 40 events are happening in London, Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow and streaming online during the month of July. See The Wire for more details.
