Documentation of Copy Your Idols! Conference in Bilbao, June 2007
People Like Us featured in new Sonic Art book
Vicki Bennett/People Like Us will be featured significantly in a new book entitled “The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Design” by Tony Gibbs. You can buy it from many retailers including Amazon.
“Sonic Art and Sound Design is a technical and conceptually creative field with no one comprehensive definition; it encompasses music technology, computer programming, fine art and performance. It engages with the art of sound in ground breaking and exciting ways. The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design by Tony Gibbs is the first academic book of its kind and defines and teaches this subject in a creative and stimulating way. It explores the worlds of sonic art and sound design through their history and development as distinct subjects. Looking at new and radical approaches to sound recording, performance, installation works and exhibition. AVA proudly present The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design as the first academic text book that not only challenges what’s currently available but as with all AVA titles is created to visually stimulate as well as educate through an informative, comprehensive introduction to this exciting new subject.”
Trying Things Out – film download
People Like Us “Trying Things Out” 2007 Also at UbuWeb
During 2006-7 Vicki Bennett was one of the two artists awarded an Interact Artist Residency with BBC New Media, supported by Arts Council England and the Creative Archive Licence Group.
Vicki spent 4 months with “access all areas” to the BBC’s million strong archive. The result was a short film using imagery collaged from a number of documentaries made between 1951 and 1980 – featuring footage shot at The Festival Of Britain, also other footage portraying optimistic outlooks on post-war Britain. She tells the story, through layers of A/V collage, of how the artist can bring about positive change in culture. By juggling layers of imagery and context, much like a puppeteer, the film portrays the playfulness of the artist/director, moving images and scenery around with surprising results – “Trying Things Out”. It is partly autobiographical in that it reflects, by use of footage of people playing with machines and effecting imagery, that access to film archives can inspire new work, creating new dialogues where otherwise there may have been none. Sadly, both groups who had the vision to be setting up such forward-thinking projects (The Creative Archive and Interdisciplinary Arts – Arts Council England) were axed shortly before the completion of this film. May this film travel to all the places that these organisations would have liked, and thank you, Paul Gerhardt and Tony White.
Perpetuum Mobile CD
Released 23 April 2007 on Soleilmoon Recordings
SOL156 CD (now deleted)
download at ubuweb
“Perpetuum Mobile” is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic “open source” compositional process: the UK’s finest collage composers Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other’s work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but what makes this record different is that Ergo and Vicki then wrote and sang their own vocals on top of their Frankenstein creation. Here you will find slyly absurdist lyrics replete with monkeys, carousels, trousers, apple trees, tinkling bells, dogs, sausages, whiskey, and cannibalism. No matter how fraught with trauma, these ballads and ditties are sung with a straight face and mixed front and left, and the results feel like 1930s British music hall standards from an alternate universe: half Ivor Cutler, half George Formby. The astonishing thing is that for all this jiggery-pokery, “Perpetuum Mobile” makes for an exhilarating, remarkably fresh pop album. It works. On “Ghosts Before Breakfast” Ergo and Vicki proudly declare that they’ve got “quite a selection of pastry”, and if the profusion of cuckoo clocks, gunshots, horn farts, string vamps, and digital malfeasance which go hurtling through this opening track is any indication, that’s no idle boast. For sheer cornucopia of sonic raw materials, this track’s avalanche of information sets the tone for the overflowing, manic record that follows. There’s far too much to fully parse, but among the highlights: “Beyond Perpetuum” pushes off from the Comedian Harmonists’ take on the 19th century compositional craze for “moto perpetuo” runs of continuous notes at a rapid tempo, and folds found piano, voice and strings into an interlocking array of M.C. Escher harmonic stairways. “Air Hostess” is detourned lounge pop that stitches together Nelson Riddle’s “Ya Ya” theme to “Lolita”, “Walk Right In”, light operettas, organ, bachelor pad cha cha and mambo, and nervously twitching shards of Louis Armstrong. “Pierrot’s Persecution Mania” bravely explores the possibilities of a Montparnasse-via-Dixieland hybrid of can-can and bluegrass, with ridiculous canned strings colliding with jew’s harp boings, while “Soggy Style” rides banjo twangs, a digital bossa nova breakdown, and the “whooo-ooes” nicked from Terry Stafford’s “Suspicion”. Living up to the perpetual motion of its title and cock-a-hoop cover art, this is a frantically energetic music whose layered repetitions become cumulatively more disorienting and preposterous as they loop back. “Perpetuum Mobile” goes beyond the stealth-oldies nostalgia of the mashup scene and the “culture-jamming” rhetoric of plunderphonics, and shows Mr. Ergo and Ms. Vicki to be a potent, if Surrealist, songwriting team, and together they braid oddly affecting vocals and their trademark stolen audio into twenty-first century pop. Like the perpetual motion machines for which it is named, this collaboration will run and run and run and run and run and run and run . . . – Drew Daniel
Scans of reviews here:
Perpetuum Mobile – Music For Maniacs (October 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Geiger (September 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Bad Alchemy (August 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Brainwashed (June 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – RifRaf (June 2007)
Perpetuum Mobile – Rolling Stone (Mexico!!) June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Norman Records June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Jumbo June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Loop June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Boomkat June 2007
Perpetuum Mobile – Review in Cologne Choices June 2007
Re-Mixing It – for Mixing It on BBC Radio 3
In addition to making a 20 minute track for BBC’s last edition of Mixing It, People Like Us were invited to remix the microphone breaks of the Mixing It team. Here are the results, which the Mixing It duo were delighted with:
People Like Us – Re-Mixing It
We like to think we subverted their broadcasting technique forever!
At UbuWeb
On The Rooftops Of London – our Mixing It session
Was a session for the final edition of BBC Radio 3’s “Mixing It”, broadcast on 9 February 2007. This is a one track CD single – just under 20 minutes long. Thanks to Felix Carey, Philip Tagney, Mark Russell, Robert Sandall and Ergo Phizmiz.
Download it at UbuWeb
Mixing It – website
Where’ The Skill In That – webpage
Thanks to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog
Work, Rest & Play – a musical film by People Like Us
People Like Us – Work, Rest & Play (2007) is a video triptych exploring the themes of labour, leisure and industriousness.