People Like Us has a Bandcamp page

We now have a Bandcamp page, where you can purchase selected old releases in digital form.  We make our best effort to put a lot of our stuff online for free but here you can get it in higher quality for a cheap price, and help offset our costs so we can make more work.

https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/

We’ve been inspired by the range and vastness of DIY music that has been put onto this platform.  The most important thing is networking and access to networks and information.

https://bandcamp.com/band_follow_button_deluxe/894332760

Music For The Fire now online at UbuWeb

The 2010 collaboration between People Like Us & Wobbly which became the CD “Music For The Fire” is now available for mp3 download at UbuWeb.

The fruit of many years of work, this album began as People Like Us & Wobbly collected and collaged their way through various depictions of misfired communications and heartbreak sourced from popular culture for a series of live improvisations. Music For The Fire is a plunderphonic concept album depicting the lifespan of a relationship, as told through samples of hundreds of different songs and voices who had no idea they were all telling the same story until they were all spliced together.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/plu_fire.html

It is still available for purchase in CD and FLAC form at Illegal Art.

The Keystone Cut Ups now digital audio download

The audio from our new DVD “The Keystone Cut Ups” is now available in audio form as an album, in digital audio form!  You can download at our label Illegal Art’s site, and good news is they have a “pay what you want” policy – from 0$ to XXXXXX$$$$$$!

Download now:  http://illegal-art.net/shop#release131

Simply add to basket, scroll to the mp3 option and then select the amount you’d like to pay.  There is also the option of getting the higher quality FLAC file.

“Welcome Abroad” – People Like Us (Illegal Art 2011)

“Welcome Abroad” by People Like Us
Release date: 24 May 2011
Illegal Art IA124 http://www.illegalart.net

UK – price including P&P: $11.00
Buy in UK

EUROPE – price including P&P: $12.00

Buy in rest of Europe

ELSEWHERE – price including P&P: $13.00
Buy in rest of world

“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

Vicki Bennett, under the People Like Us moniker, returns from several collaborations for her first solo album in several years. Stranded in the United States for an extended period after the Icelandic volcano eruption blocked her British homeland’s airspace, Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere, from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. 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.

Taking a glance at just a few tracks from Welcome Abroad, songs from The Beatles, Ennio Morricone, Danny Kaye, Bob Dylan, Rod McKuen, Elton John, Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick, John Denver, Julie London, and Queen are all amalgamated.  While recent mashup culture often centers 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.

With the release of Welcome Abroad, lllegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads. All label releases over the last five years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system. People Like Us also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old. Vicki Bennett is such a firm endorser of the gift economy that she is the top downloaded audio artist on UbuWeb.

Welcome Abroad by People Like Us

“Welcome Abroad” by People Like Us
Release date: 24 May 2011
Illegal Art IA124 http://www.illegalart.net

UK – price including P&P: $11.00
Buy in UK

EUROPE – price including P&P: $12.00

Buy in rest of Europe

ELSEWHERE – price including P&P: $13.00
Buy in rest of world

Download as mp3s, FLAC, plus some video downloads
“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

Vicki Bennett, under the People Like Us moniker, returns from several collaborations for her first solo album in several years. Stranded in the United States for an extended period after the Icelandic volcano eruption blocked her British homeland’s airspace, Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere, from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. 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.

Taking a glance at just a few tracks from Welcome Abroad, songs from The Beatles, Ennio Morricone, Danny Kaye, Bob Dylan, Rod McKuen, Elton John, Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick, John Denver, Julie London, and Queen are all amalgamated.  While recent mashup culture often centers 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.

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audiovisual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio.

People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over three quarters of a million hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.

With the release of Welcome Abroad, Illegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads. All label releases over the last five years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system. People Like Us also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old. Vicki Bennett is such a firm endorser of the gift economy that she is the top downloaded audio artist on UbuWeb.

Press Quotes:
“… a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick.” – Phil England, The Wire
“Bennett has continued to impress us with her technical ability and her wonderful sense of the ridiculous.” – Olli Siebelt, BBC
“… beautiful, compelling, funny, crazy stuff. I listen to [People Like Us] while sitting at my drawing board.” – Matt Groening
“… it is that delirious adventure to tune in Disney cartoons while we administered a strong dose of amphetamines, LSD, and any other lysergic cocktail.” – J. Carlos Vellamueva, Rolling Stone (Mexico)
“… after prolonged exposure to the alchemical work of Vicki Bennett, we see and hear our own everyday world as one big joke which is already cut to pieces. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.” – Drew Daniel, Matmos
“… warped-out easy easy-listening goddess and sample abuser extraordinaire.” – Ben Willmott, NME
“Bennett has taken Eisenstein’s montage collisions and refashioned them as bumper cars at a seaside carnival.” – Jim Supanick, Film Society of Lincoln Center

right click on thumbnails to download large images

People Like Us & Wobbly – Music For The Fire

Release date 15 June 2010

The fruit of many years of work, this album began as People Like Us & Wobbly collected and collaged their way through various depictions of misfired communications and heartbreak sourced from popular culture for a series of live improvisations. Music For The Fire is a plunderphonic concept album depicting the lifespan of a relationship, as told through samples of hundreds of different songs and voices who had no idea they were all telling the same story until they were all spliced together.

Strangely direct and evocative for an album assembled entirely from a patchwork of disparate sources and music both obscure and over-familiar, Music For The Fire comes with an illustrated lyric sheet which reproduces the countless sampled voices as a single if utterly schizophrenic text — a bedtime story that is wildly inappropriate for actual children.  No reliable narrators, just the familiar and absurd, which on different spins of the disc might strike you as either maudlin, poignant or almost painfully hilarious. There is a way out of the maze, but it’s up to you to find it.

Update (2013) – now available for download at UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/sound/plu_fire.html

Update (2015) – this CD is now deleted

You can now download this on bandcamp should you wish to make a donation to our running costs: https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-the-fire

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. She has shown work at, amongst others, Tate Modern, the National Film Theatre, Purcell Room, Pompidou Center, Sonar in Barcelona, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the BBC and Channel 4, released albums of her work on labels such as Tigerbeat6, Soleilmoon and Touch, both solo and in collaboration with Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Christian Marclay and members of Negativland.  2010 will see the completion of a commission for the Edinburgh Art Festival as well as concert appearances at the AV Festival, MACBA, Liverpool Sound City, Copenhagen & Jerusalem.

Wobbly is the long-running collage project of Jon Leidecker (US), who improvises live with pre-recordings to coax the harmonies out of recorded sounds of individuals and animals from disparate cultures. Albums have been released on the labels Alku, Phthalo, Illegal Art, Tigerbeat6 and Vague Terrain.  Previous and ongoing projects include the bands Chopping Channel, Sagan, the Freddy McGuire Show and Amen Seat, as well as various collaborations with Negativland, Matmos, Thomas Dimuzio, Blevin Blectum, Lesser, Tim Perkis & Xopher Davidson, Otomo Yoshihide and MaryClare Bryztwa.  In 2009 he was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona to produce “Variations”, a podcast and lecture series overview of the history of musical collage & sampling.

People Like Us & Wobbly have been collaborating since her first visit to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998.  Early improvisations as a trio (with The Jet Black Hair People, aka Peter Conheim of Negativland) are documented by the online album What’s The Use, as well as archives of numerous radio and concert appearances recorded both in California and London, including on BBC Radio 3‘s “Mixing It”.  The present album for Illegal Art is composed from live recordings, carefully and obsessively edited over a great deal of time, and is their funniest, darkest and yet somehow strangely compassionate work, Music For The Fire tells a story which every listener will recognize in their own unique way.

With the release of People Like Us & Wobbly‘s Music For The Fire, Illegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads.  All label releases over the last four years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system, and the entire Illegal Art back catalog should be subsumed by the end of 2010.  People Like Us & Wobbly also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old.  Vicki Bennett is such a firm endorser of the gift economy that she is the top downloaded audio artist on UbuWeb.  Her online-only album Abridged Too Far (2004) garnered over 25,000 downloads in its first month, and she adamantly defends such free offerings as beneficial to both the artist and consumer.

Press Quotes:

PEOPLE LIKE US
“… a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick.” – Phil England, The Wire

Bennett has continued to impress us with her technical ability and her wonderful sense of the ridiculous.” – Olli Siebelt, BBC

“… beautiful, compelling, funny, crazy stuff.  I listen to [People Like Us] while sitting at my drawing board.” – Matt Groening

“… it is that delirious adventure to tune in Disney cartoons while we administered a strong dose of amphetamines, LSD, and any other lysergic cocktail.” – J. Carlos Vellamueva, Rolling Stone (Mexico)

“… after prolonged exposure to the alchemical work of Vicki Bennett, we see and hear our own everyday world as one big joke which is already cut to pieces.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.” – Drew Daniel, Matmos

“… warped-out easy easy-listening goddess and sample abuser extraordinaire.” – Ben Willmott, NME

Bennett has taken Eisenstein’s montage collisions and refashioned them as bumper cars at a seaside carnival.” – Jim Supanick, Film Society of Lincoln Center

WOBBLY
“If only one album were to be timecapsuled for the turn of this century, Wild Why would be a worthy candidate” – Pataphysics Lab

“The head is dazzling of all the cut up and collage which go by in highspeed” – Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

“It would be pointless to try and characterize any of the sessions because the range of material they draw on is so diverse that the tracks are constantly changing direction” – Ben Borthwick, The Wire

“An expert at sculpting cohesive harmonies out of seemingly disjointed fragment.” – George Zahora, Splendid

“… a hewn diamond that, although beautiful, cuts through the most impermeable of solid bullshit.” – Tobias C. Van Veen, Stylus
Wild Why is a staggering deconstruction of commercial urban radio, breaking down mainstream hip-hop and R&B into a sludge of guttural  samples and low-end goo…  the rules holding our own world together bend wildly under even the slightest pressure.” – Philip Sherburne, Needle Drops

Available now!!! A new album from People Like Us & Wobbly

Available for pre-order now! A new album from People Like Us & Wobbly. The release date is 15 June 2010 but you can buy it at our shop now.
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/shop/


People Like Us & Wobbly

Music For The Fire (CD)
Illegal Art

Release Date:
June 15, 2010

Bio:

The fruit of many years of work, this album began as People Like Us & Wobbly collected and collaged their way through various depictions of misfired communications and heartbreak sourced from popular culture for a series of live improvisations. Music For The Fire is a plunderphonic concept album depicting the lifespan of a relationship, as told through samples of hundreds of different songs and voices who had no idea they were all telling the same story until they were all spliced together.

[more]

Media Links & Downloads:

"Giant Love Ball" (MP3)

"Pick Up" (MP3)

People Like Us Films

Hi-Res Photos:

300 dpi JPG
L-R Vicki Bennett, Jon Leidecker. Photo credit: Courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

Hi-Res Cover Art:

300dpi JPG
4 x 4 in

On The Web:

www.peoplelikeus.org
www.detritus.net/wobbly
www.myspace.com/wobbbly
www.illegalart.net
www.facebook.com/illegalart
www.myspace.com/illegalart
www.twitter.com/illegalart
www.fanaticpromotion.com

Bio (Continued):

Strangely direct and evocative for an album assembled entirely from a patchwork of disparate sources and music both obscure and over-familiar, Music For The Fire comes with an illustrated lyric sheet which reproduces the countless sampled voices as a single if utterly schizophrenic text — a bedtime story that is wildly inappropriate for actual children.  No reliable narrators, just the familiar and absurd, which on different spins of the disc might strike you as either maudlin, poignant or almost painfully hilarious. There is a way out of the maze, but it’s up to you to find it.

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. She has shown work at, amongst others, Tate Modern, the National Film Theatre, Purcell Room, Pompidou Center, Sonar in Barcelona, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the BBC and Channel 4, released albums of her work on labels such as Tigerbeat6, Soleilmoon and Touch, both solo and in collaboration with Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Christian Marclay and members of Negativland.  2010 will see the completion of a commission for the Edinburgh Art Festival as well as concert appearances at the AV Festival, MACBA, Liverpool Sound City, Copenhagen & Jerusalem.

Wobbly is the long-running collage project of Jon Leidecker (US), who improvises live with pre-recordings to coax the harmonies out of recorded sounds of individuals and animals from disparate cultures. Albums have been released on the labels Alku, Phthalo, Illegal Art, Tigerbeat6 and Vague Terrain.  Previous and ongoing projects include the bands Chopping Channel, Sagan, the Freddy McGuire Show and Amen Seat, as well as various collaborations with Negativland, Matmos, Thomas Dimuzio, Blevin Blectum, Lesser, Tim Perkis & Xopher Davidson, Otomo Yoshihide and MaryClare Bryztwa.  In 2009 he was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona to produce “Variations”, a podcast and lecture series overview of the history of musical collage & sampling.

People Like Us & Wobbly have been collaborating since her first visit to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998.  Early improvisations as a trio (with The Jet Black Hair People, aka Peter Conheim of Negativland) are documented by the online album What’s The Use, as well as archives of numerous radio and concert appearances recorded both in California and London, including on BBC Radio 3‘s “Mixing It”.  The present album for Illegal Art is composed from live recordings, carefully and obsessively edited over a great deal of time, and is their funniest, darkest and yet somehow strangely compassionate work, Music For The Fire tells a story which every listener will recognize in their own unique way.

With the release of People Like Us & Wobbly‘s Music For The Fire, Illegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads.  All label releases over the last four years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system, and the entire Illegal Art back catalog should be subsumed by the end of 2010.  People Like Us & Wobbly also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old.  Vicki Bennett is such a firm endorser of the gift economy that she is the top downloaded audio artist on UbuWeb.  Her online-only album Abridged Too Far (2004) garnered over 25,000 downloads in its first month, and she adamantly defends such free offerings as beneficial to both the artist and consumer.

Press Quotes:

PEOPLE LIKE US
“… a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick.” – Phil England, The Wire

Bennett has continued to impress us with her technical ability and her wonderful sense of the ridiculous.” – Olli Siebelt, BBC

“… beautiful, compelling, funny, crazy stuff.  I listen to [People Like Us] while sitting at my drawing board.” – Matt Groening

“… it is that delirious adventure to tune in Disney cartoons while we administered a strong dose of amphetamines, LSD, and any other lysergic cocktail.” – J. Carlos Vellamueva, Rolling Stone (Mexico)

“… after prolonged exposure to the alchemical work of Vicki Bennett, we see and hear our own everyday world as one big joke which is already cut to pieces.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.” – Drew Daniel, Matmos

“… warped-out easy easy-listening goddess and sample abuser extraordinaire.” – Ben Willmott, NME

Bennett has taken Eisenstein’s montage collisions and refashioned them as bumper cars at a seaside carnival.” – Jim Supanick, Film Society of Lincoln Center

WOBBLY
“If only one album were to be timecapsuled for the turn of this century, Wild Why would be a worthy candidate” – Pataphysics Lab

“The head is dazzling of all the cut up and collage which go
by in highspeed” – Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

“It would be pointless to try and characterize any of the sessions because the range of material they draw on is so diverse that the tracks are constantly changing direction” – Ben Borthwick, The Wire

“An expert at sculpting cohesive harmonies out of seemingly disjointed fragment.” – George Zahora, Splendid

“… a hewn diamond that, although beautiful, cuts through the most impermeable of solid bullshit.” – Tobias C. Van Veen, Stylus

Wild Why is a staggering deconstruction of commercial urban radio, breaking down mainstream hip-hop and R&B into a sludge of guttural  samples and low-end goo…  the rules holding our own world together bend wildly under even the slightest pressure.” – Philip Sherburne, Needle Drops


People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz “Rhapsody in Glue” album

Online-only album
Released 15 May 2008 through bleep.com PLURGO1

Following the success of the critically acclaimed “Perpetuum Mobile” CD of 2007, renowned UK collagists / composers People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz reunite for “Rhapsody in Glue”, a cycle of bricolage-ballet-music, skewed-waltzes, and skewiff-pop.
There is a story behind every album, and with “Rhapsody in Glue” we find a unique approach to constructing a record. Both long-term contributors to New York radio station WFMU, 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” is the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.

“Rhapsody in Glue” continues in the bizarre ballroom vein of their previous efforts together, however, increasing the sonic palette into textural depths previously uncharted in their work. If “Carmic Waltz” is an expressionist painting by aged ballroom dance teacher who’s eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms in her soufflé, then “Gary’s Anatomy” is a slice of pure absurdist pop shot through with slabs of exotica and Ethel Merman. Recurring through the record is an apparent obsession with Prokofiev’s “Troika (Sleigh Ride)”, which merges and mashes with Burt Bacharach and Queen on “Snow Day”‘ and lapses into pure fantasy on the almost entirely acoustic “Withers in the Whist”, jarring with Ergo’s strange, Victoriana obsessed lyrics. Then on “Dancing in the Carmen” we discover what happens if Nana Mouskouri is thrown into a pot with Peggy Lee and let simmer for 10 minutes, whilst “In The Waking” shimmers along on multitracked guitars, meandering melodies, and music boxes.

REVIEWS:
Rhapsody in Glue – Liability (March 2009)
Rhapsody In Glue review – Goute Mes Disques (November 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – Blow Up (September 2008)
Rhapsody In Glue review – Pop News (September 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – O Dominio Dos Deuses (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue/Smiling Through My Teeth Review – Incendiary Mag (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – Octopus (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – Skug (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – D-Side (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – Choices Cologne (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – The Wire (July 2008)
Rhapsody in Glue review – Titel-Magazin / CD of the Week (June 2008)