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People Like Us at the WFMU Record Fair

Here’s some live video of a special concert People Like Us performed at the WFMU record fair. For those of you who have never been there, it’s the time of year, one of many that all DJs and volunteers do their best not only to raise money for the station but have a great time at the same time.

Live at the WFMU Record Fair (2003), shot by Corey Smith. The work has been carefully constructed using industrial and documentary film footage from 1940-1975.
live at fmu

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People Like Us, Matmos and Wobbly – Wide Open Spaces

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.

01. Morning
02. Dolly Pardon
03. Clawing Your Eyes Out Down To Your Throat
04. Shenandoah
05. Holler
06. Tremble Valley Peady
07. Chicken Legs
08. Cattle Call
09. Unshackled
10. Arkansas Explorer
11. Calling
12. I Must Die
13. Wide Open Spaces

Tigerbeat6 website
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Stifled Love – LP

Here’s a whole album working around the concept of cutting people trying to express themselves. Imagine that.

This LP is long deleted but you can download it from bandcamp:


Mess Media through Soleilmoon website

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Recyclopaedia Britannica – Selected Works 1992-2002

10 Years of People Like Us (CD on Mess Media – MESS1) – 2002
SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE

recyclo

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

01. Another Kind Of Humor intro
02. OB & Cha Cha
03. Guide To Broadcasting excerpt
04. Smash & Grab
05. The Sacred Erm
06. Sing With Melodious Inarticulate Sound…
07. A Crossed Line excerpt
08. Clippety Cart Horse
09. In The Panto
10. Ursula Fährt Ski
11. T424PLU excerpt
12. More Plunderblunders excerpt
13. Ski Heil excerpt
14. We Believe
15. T424PLU excerpt
16. Sound Escape excerpt
17. Sound Escape excerpt
18. Handjob
19. If Someone Touches You (with The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly)
20. Music Of Your Own
21. Millenium Dome
22. My Son Jim
23. More Plunderblunders excerpt
24. Oompah Pumpah
25. I’m 89
26. Take A Walk
27. Morning Pedro
28. We Believe excerpt
29. Bran Mash & Crushed Beans
30. We’re Gonna Be Around
Mess Media through Soleilmoon website

recyclo

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