People Like Us now have an additional official website, for handling t-shirts, tote bags, greeting cards, postcards, prints and mugs. We’re continuing to use the same supplier but this time directly, so this change allows us to offer the same high-quality organic cotton t-shirts but at significantly lower prices.
Additionally, we have a brand-new t-shirt and tote bag design featuring a sneak peek of artwork from our upcoming CD, called “Copia”, set to release in May 2024.
Recently when compiling tracks for our retrospective double CD “Sharity!” we noticed what unique energy the Thermos Explorer (2000) period of People Like Us has. It represents to us the time when quite a lot of changes were happening, the dawn of fast internet and affordable computers, napster and email, and for People Like Us the same time marks personal changes – having been seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident and spending much of the time making this being pretty immobile (hence inner sleeve artwork, by Matt Wand!), and once out of hospital deciding to go to the US for the first time to visit various friends made as a result of all the networking that had suddenly become possible.
Also, that time brought an interesting transition for technology from analogue, early digital (MiniDisc) editing, having a wonderful Roland DJ70 sampling keyboard, yet not quite having a fast enough computer yet…
Thermos Explorer was originally released in 2000 on the wonderful Hot Air label, and that first edition went out of print maybe 15 years or so ago. So here we are bringing this special album back to life. People Like Us has changed quite a bit over the years, and this is a time capsule of a new century and lots of new opportunities, new collaborations, and new friends.
A signed DOUBLE CD containing 1 hour 58 minutes of music we’ve selected through the years since we started releasing music. Contains remastered solo audio works from the past 30 years, and collaborations with our friends Ergo Phizmiz, Wobbly, Matmos, Mr Rotorvator and Gwilly Edmondez.
We’ve not released a retrospective since 2002 (Recyclopaedia Britannica), and we are aware that we will not be releasing the new album until early 2024 since we’ll not be working on that in full after we’ve made a new performance (in progress!). And we want to do something NOW! PLUS this will also help keep things ticking over for us later this year when the Indiegogo funds run out.
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 & ERGO PHIZMIZ – Rhapsody in Glue Limited edition 12” lathe cut clear vinyl LP & download Release Date: 26 November 2022 Pre-order on Bandcamp from Friday 7 October 2022
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz are pleased to announce the release of a new limited edition vinyl album, “Rhapsody in Glue”.
Rhapsody in Glue began its journey as part of the Codpaste podcast on New York tri-state area radio station WFMU in 2008. With Rhapsody in Glue we find a unique approach to constructing a record. People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album “in the open”, presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition – informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the Codpaste free podcast series. Rhapsody in Glue was the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.
The album was initially released as an online-only release on Bleep in 2008, and now for the first time ever we are making it available in a Limited Edition of 100, hand numbered copies on 12” high quality remastered stereo lathe cut vinyl, hand cut by Bladud Flies! It comes with 300gsm inserts, lyric sheet, digital download codes, both for this, and also the original digital album release from 2008. The vinyl will ship with a polylined inner sleeve.
The vinyl will ship within a polylined inner sleeve. Includes a ‘lathe cut’ care card. Limited edition of 100, hand numbered.
An extended, taking-a-line-for-a-walk remix of People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz “In the Waking”, created for one of the opening concerts of King’s Place, London in the late 2000s. The song, a lullaby of a summer place, was created through the Codpaste podcast sessions which led to the collaborative album “Rhapsody in Glue”, and was later released as a 7″ on Touch. This unreleased version lets the song twirl off into a gentle polyphonic fantasia.
Free Money | Eve of Sunshine Limited Edition 100 copies (no digital-only downloads, but digital download comes with vinyl purchase) Heaven’s Lathe HL14 Release date | 01/07/2022 6pm
People Like Us are releasing a single on Graham Duff’s label Heaven’s Lathe. Heaven’s Lathe is dedicated to bringing out the highest quality lathe cut seven inch singles, featuring both influential artists and emerging performers in a sweep of genres. From June 2021, Heaven’s Lathe will be releasing a new limited edition single each month. Each release is a strictly limited to an edition of 100. All singles are lathe cut on either black or transparent vinyl. Heaven’s Lathe artists are curated by writer, broadcaster and DJ Graham Duff. All lathe cutting and engineering by Michael Lawrence (Bladud Flies!). Designed by Lauren Winton (Bladud Flies!). limited edition – order it here:
We have some prints that we made for our 2011 solo show The Doors of Perspection – each was made in an edition of just one, and we are selling them. We have six different ones that we will gradually put up.
One sold earlier, here are the second two that we’ve just put up, more being added:
Welcome Abroad LP on Discrepant [CREP84] Releases 4th JUNE, 2021, taking pre-orders from 31st MARCH 2021 (digital download straight away and we send the LP as soon as we get them)
Discrepant Press Release: Continuing our ambitious People Like Us vinyl reissue program with Welcome Aboard – a strangely relevant 10-year-old album (originally released in May 2011 on Illegal Art) when People Like Us aka Vicki Bennett became stranded in the US after the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption closed much of northern Europe’s airspace.
Volcanically marooned in Baltimore and NYC, Bennett utilized some of her “free” time to work on the album and even gained audio contributions from fellow experimental musicians Jason Willett (of Half Japanese) and M.C. Schmidt (of Matmos) via her extended stay.
Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. Now strangely echoed by the Covid-19 outbreak and the various grounding of planes and stay at home policies worldwide.
While the general mashup culture often centres on the instant gratification of seamlessly juxtaposing hooks, People Like Us tracks transform the source material into collages that are equal parts dissonance and pleasure, making artful commentaries on our culture and Bennett’s own existential amusement within such a wondrous world. No one could have predicted how relevant this album would have been 10 years later.
LP TRACKLIST: A1. Sing A2. What Will I Do A3. Push The Clouds Away A4. The Sound Of The End Of Music A5. Wonderful Wonderful B1. Hush B2. Driving Flying Rising Falling B3. The Atlantic Conveyor B4. Wandering B5. Ever
This is the LP vinyl version with an instant mp3 download of the longer CD version of the album.
500 Units
Welcome Abroad is the soundtrack to a dream – overlaying a cabaret with the circus, a music hall with the radio, a nightclub with the movies. Finely tuned sounds from the collective unconscious, fitted together with care and clarity and skill, producing a hallucinatory landscape that shifts and slides, shimmering with each new sample. Julie Andrews duets with Jim Morrison? Damn.” – Steinski
Includes unlimited streaming of Welcome Abroad via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Duchamp Is My Lawyer The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb Kenneth Goldsmith Columbia University Press
Really honoured to be in our good friend Kenneth Goldsmith’s book, he gave us a whole chapter. Click on the link below to find out more and purchase one. Or DOWNLOAD! Review here.
Also have been updating our bandcamp with some more items, both digital and merchandise, including adding the option of buying the full digital discography with one click of a button, enabling you to get a 40% discount by doing so.
As ever, you can if you wish access a lot of our work for free online from various places, it is very important for us ethically to continue to be generous with the “sharity” ideal even if we are low in income ourselves. HOWEVER, by buying from us you contribute to keeping us going financially and enabling us to produce more. We do this for a living, we don’t have a fancy side job, as is also the case with a lot of the artists we collaborate with! So if you can chip in we more than appreciate it.
