Gone, Gone Beyond in San Francisco!

We are very pleased to announce that Gone, Gone Beyond will be screening in it’s home town San Francisco in May 2022 at Gray Area. We say it’s the “home town” because although we live in London, the piece was originally commissioned by Recombinant Media Labs for CineChamber, the structure which we then built a replica of in 2021 and have existing in the UK.

TICKETS: https://grayarea.org/gonegonebeyond/

All press inquiries should go to Gray Area, and if you have questions for People Like Us or Gone, Gone Beyond you can directly ask us.

Gone, Gone Beyond will screen at 6.30pm and 8.30pm each night.
On the 25th there will be an artist talk followed by one screening – tickets can be bought combined or separately: https://grayarea.org/event/vicki-bennett/

SCREENING DATES:

12, 13, 14, 19, 20 & 21 May 2022 (two screenings per night)
—- these screenings will be introduced by Naut Humon, original commissioner of Gone, Gone Beyond and creator of the CineChamber that houses our work.
25, 26 & 27 May 2022 (two screenings per night)
—- we will be present for these screenings and therefore will introduce the the 26th/27th, and it will be an artist presentation on the 25th.

All screenings are at Gray Area, Grand Theater, 2665 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 | info@grayarea.org | 415.843.1423

Covid policy: Full vaccination (no booster) | Masks strongly encouraged but not required 

Returning to Over The Edge on KPFA

29 November/30 November 2018 midnight on Thursday going into 3am Friday morning, California time. In the UK that is 8am-11am Friday
KPFA 94.1FM, online at https://kpfa.org/player?audio=live

We returned to the radio to guest with Jon Leidecker (Wobbly) on Negativland’s “Over The Edge” on KPFA Radio for the first time in 16 years, and this represents the 20 year mark of first appearing on Over The Edge.

You can tune in online, the show is 3 hours long.  https://kpfa.org/program/over-the-edge/

Since 1981, Negativland’s live mix, audio collage radio show, “Over The Edge,” has aired weekly for 3 hours at midnight, each Thursday on KPFA 94.1FM in Berkeley, California.  Mixed for 35 uninterrupted years by founder Don Joyce until his passing in 2015, the show continues on, now helmed by Wobbly (2nd & 4th Thursdays) and KROB (3rd Thursdays, as a frequently-broken rule).
 
OTE’s themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment. There is a plan and there is no plan. The mix consists of found sound of many kinds and from many sources put together on the run as the continuous audio collage progresses.
 

Over The Edge on DO or DIY on WFMU

Over The Edge
DO or DIY with People Like Us – Monday, 19 June 2017 – 6pm
https://wfmu.org/playlists/pl
From 1981 to 2015, Negativland‘s Don Joyce hosted Over The Edge, the longest running block of freeform live mix collage radio in broadcast history — a program which continues today, having been inherited by long time show participant and collaborator Jon Leidecker. In this very Wobbly interview, Vicki and Jon discuss the history of collage radio, and the slow evolution of the Edge, as well as its many possible futures, both True and False.
http://www.detritus.net/wobbly/ | https://archive.org/details/ote

A Tribute to Don Joyce

Don't Say Hello
Don’t Say Hello

Don Joyce (Negativland, Over The Edge) has merged with the radio waves.  Don was a close friend and amazing artist.  His influence on the work of People Like Us is beyond measure.  Here is a wonderful piece accurately conveying many of my own experiences, written by Jon Leidecker, who I also first met through Don. 

Don Joyce lived in a second story flat off Telegraph Avenue in what is now the thoroughly gentrified Temescal district in Oakland, but when I visited the Negativland home studio for the first time in July of 1987, after nightfall you had to watch yourself on the way from your car to the front door. I was there to drop off source materials and discuss the theme for the coming week’s episode of Over The Edge, which, after two years of avid fandom, I had finally been invited to play. Don still had his programming day job at that point, and I discovered him in his room tinkering with the GUI for a primitive typing tutor program on his Mac SE with his left hand, while his right hand hovered near the pause button on a cassette deck recording KGO talk radio. Occasionally, while talking to me and coding with one hand, he’d unpause or repause the recording with the other, seemingly randomly. But I soon realized he was precisely waiting for silences between the host and his callers, and making sure host and callers still alternated in sequence. The resulting tape would still sound as if it were a conversation; it just wouldn’t be even remotely close to the one that had actually happened.

This approach to multi-tasking wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who’s heard Over The Edge, which I’d randomly channel surfed into at 12:30 in the morning two years before; at first I’d assumed I’d hit one of those magic nodes on the analog dial where two stations were coming in clearly at the same time, and paused to enjoy the accident. The slow rush of recognition came on over the next twenty seconds as I realized it was actually five to ten things at once: talk radio recordings and advertisements cut in with each other and twisted into dialogues, all while loosely played guitars and keyboards mingled with fragments of pop and soundtrack albums. And only when the sound of a disconnecting line terminated the guitar riff did I make that final connection: a number of the lower fidelity instruments and tapes were being contributed by live phone callers. I stayed up until the show ended at three, that night and many nights to come.

Continue reading “A Tribute to Don Joyce”

CCCitations – a Citation City project

CCCitations is an offshoot of Citation City, an audiovisual performance by People Like Us.

Four artists, Jon Leidecker, Jason Willett, Gwilly Edmondez and Andrew Sharpley were given source material from Vicki Bennett’s Citation City a/v project and asked to make new work, interpreting the footage in a unique way.


Soundtrack: Gwilly Edmondez 00:01
Soundtrack: Jason Willett 02:47
Soundtrack: Jon Leidecker 05:23
Film: Vicki Bennett


Film and Video: Andrew Sharpley – using source material given by Vicki Bennett

About Citation City

Citation City sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?

Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual work is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time. By gathering and assembling such groups of similar yet unrelated, he revealed a hidden, magical encyclopaedia of affinities, a massive and labyrinthine architecture of a collective dream city. On reading Benjamin, his approach to editing astonished Vicki Bennett, and the similarity of their creative processes of cutting and collating extensive lists of subject matter by context.

In the live performance a series of story lines (convolutes) sit side by side with a soundtrack sourced both from the movie content, as well as new sample compositions thematically related to the visual content.

The result is a sweeping panorama of London, a London as represented through cinema – not the real city at all, but one that exists in the collective imagination of moviegoers throughout the decades. Filmmaker Magazine

Manchester NOTATIONS – video excerpts

Thanks to those that attended Manchester NOTATIONS at Kraak on 14 Nov 2013 – here are two small edits from the evening with M.C. Schmidt, Jennifer Walshe and Wobbly.  Thanks to Tusk and Sound & Music!

NOTATIONS TRAILER Manchester w/ M.C. Schmidt / Wobbly / Jennifer Walshe. Film by Vicki Bennett on Vimeo.

Notations Trailer, Manchester with M.C. Schmidt, Jennifer Walshe & Wobbly. Film by Vicki Bennett on Vimeo.

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.

GESTURE PIECE – a film with a score by 7 artists

A film by Vicki Bennett [2013]
Soundtracks by :
Andrew Sharpley [00:06] | Matmos [01:02] | Wobbly [05:08] | Gwilly Edmondez [07:48] | Dave Soldier [09:38] | Jason Willett [11:02] | Ergo Phizmiz [13:23]

Gwilly Edmondez, Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Andrew Sharpley, Dave Soldier, Jason Willett and Wobbly each composed a score for a chapter of GESTURE PIECE, without any knowledge of who else was collaborating on the project or what the rest of the film would look or sound like.

The completed film stitches back together the seven chapters with their individual soundtracks, creating new connections between apparently unrelated film sequences. The result is a fascinating and witty reinterpretation of familiar film footage, with scenes arranged in surprising and often very funny combinations.

The title of “Gesture Piece” is partly self-explanatory – within human communication it is part of our hard circuitry that for instance we use hand gestures to articulate our speech, which is essentially graphically describing/enforcing audio or spoken discourse. Even when spoken language is not present, a whole series of hand and facial gestures are available to us to communicate expressions. By making a film that both contains human gestures (hands, facial, movement) as well as gestures made by natural and mechanical occurrences we are setting up the conditions for a dialogue between the graphical elements on the films and the improvisers, both with the film as well as with each other.

Background info
Gesture Piece @Tyneside Cinema
Review in This Is Tomorrow Magazine
Interview with a-n Magazine
Interview with SyncTank
Interview with Dominic Smith

Screenings
October 2014 – Other Cinema, San Francisco
October 2013 – Gesture Piece at High Zero Festival, Baltimore

Click on thumbnails to download stills:
GESTURE PIECE-2GESTURE PIECE-5GESTURE PIECE-3

Diagram of subjects - created in the development of the film by Vicki Bennett
Diagram of subjects – created in the development of the film by Vicki Bennett
Still from Gesture Piece by Vicki Bennett
Still from Gesture Piece by Vicki Bennett

Gesture Piece has a sister project, Notations – a film created for live performance by selected improvising musicians and artists.  When these two projects began, they shared the same umbrella name of Gesture Piece (the live performance was tested at Tectonics Festival in Reykjavik and Tel Aviv), but as the work developed it felt natural to separate them out into different names as they became two unique and separate entities.

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Wobbly on DO or DIY

Wednesday 13th July 2011 on DO or DIY with People Like Us
Wobbly

On this week’s DO or DIY, it’s the turn of Jon Leidecker aka Wobbly to do a 25 minute guest DJ mix.

Since 1990 Jon Leidecker has performed appropriative collage music under the psuedonym Wobbly, aiming for extended narratives spun from spontaneous yet coherent multi-sample polyphony. This Variations podcast series at Radio Web MACBA Jon Leidecker reconstructs the history of sound appropriationism by looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and commercial media, and the convergence of all these trends today.

http://detritus.net/wobbly/
http://rwm.macba.cat/en/variations_tag/

First press coverage for Music For The Fire is very good!

Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Go Mag (July 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Magic (July 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Playground (June 2010)
Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Huw Stephens’ Radio show BBC Radio 1 (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Limewire Music Blog (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in MusicOMH (June 2010)
Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Stuart Maconie’s Radio show BBC Radio 6 (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in My Old Kentucky Blog (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Polychromic (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Beyond The Noize (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in aaamusic (June 2010)
Review of Music For The Fire (People Like Us & Wobbly) in Little Village Mag by Kembrew McLeod (May 2010)
Music For The Fire gets Radio 1 airplay (May 2010)