North By Southwest 63 – Arte Oído with Philip Jeck and Vicki Bennett on experimental music

In this week’s edition of ‘North By Southwest’, Nicolas Jackson attends experimental music and sound art festival Arte Oído, programmed by La Nota productions and held at Madrid’s CaixaForum cultural centre. There, he meets UK artists Philip Jeck and Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) who discuss their work and the meaning of the terms ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’. We also hear about a 744-hour-long radio ‘boredcast’ and the virtues of ‘slow art’.

http://soundcloud.com/britishcouncil/north-by-southwest-arte-oido-experimental-music

Bristol Encounters International Film Festival

People Like Us – Magical Misery Tour at Bristol Encounters International Film Festival.
Cube Cinema, 4 Princess Row, Bristol, UK BS2 8NQ
20:00 17/11/2011
Doors 7:30 £6:00 advance (watershed only) £8:00 on door.

Bristol Encounters

People Like Us will perform The Magical Misery Tour at Bristol Encounters International Film Festival 2011.

Look Behind You!….. She Is Back! Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us raids the tombs of HORROR films, plundering the Un-Dead and cutting up scared suburban teenagers amongst many victims into a delicious perverse A/V set which premiered at The Sound of Fear at the Southbank Centre under the working title of Horror Collage.

The source material is 95% from horror movies, with the content portraying not so much a scary nightmare but a journey through the underworld of everyday human experiences. It is not true to say you do not relate to this kind of horror movie. Truth is stranger than fiction. Having said this, People Like Us, as ever, see the positive and sometimes humorous side of the most ghastly scenarios, and by accompanying the edited found feature film footage with new sample collage pop songs, elevate you from the swamp.
Also on the same night:

AKI ONDA
Aki Onda is an artist whose musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. He captures field recordings with the cassettes and then physically manipulates the tape machines with electronics in his performances to mesmerising effect. Strikingly poetic with ghosts of the physical, and invisible captured in his sound world, Onda re-examines moments of time he has spent wandering and recording. Maximising the micro-narrative/diary-like elements contained in his performances Onda fits perfectly a film festival.

Onda started making music with the sampler and computer, and formed Audio Sports with Eye Yamatsuka (of The Boredoms) and Nobukazu Takemura in Osaka in 1990. He then became a sought after producer before starting his travels and recording his cassettes, taking photos and collaborating.

http://www.cubecinema.com/cgi-bin/diary/programme.pl#6203

The Magical Misery Tour!

Introducing an excerpt of the new People Like Us live set entitled “The Magical Misery Tour”. This 45 minute concert was created between June and September 2011 and premiered at “The Sound of Fear” at London’s Southbank Centre on 3rd September 2011, under the working title of “Horror Collage”. Now that the full length live set has been completed we have changed the name to something more fitting with the content. The source material is 95% from horror movies, with the content portraying not so much a scary nightmare but a journey through the underworld of everyday human experiences. It is not true to say you do not relate to this kind of horror movie. Truth is stranger than fiction. Having said this, People Like Us, as ever, see the positive and sometimes humorous side of the most ghastly scenerios, and by accompanying the edited found feature film footage with new sample collage pop songs, elevate you from the swamp.

Magical Misery Tour

Press size version of above picture here
Magical Misery Tour collage for press
Interview with Vicki about this project here:
http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/five-questions-people-us
Download at UbuWeb

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More press photos: these below should be credited to “experimentaclub” – license details under the links.
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Some rights reserved by experimentaclub

Two film screenings at Merge Festival, London

People Like Us will screen two films at Merge Festival 2011 on London’s Bankside. Both films “Trying Things Out” and “Skew Gardens” are London-themed/based.
Date: 20th October 2011
Website: tapeworm.org.uk
Address: The Bear Pit, Bear Gardens, SE1 9EB London

Announcing a special evening of Bankside performances curated by The Tapeworm, as part of the Merge Festival.

London Town’s finest cassette-only label, The Tapeworm, presents its third annual event in the Capital. Exemplary music and much excitement is to be expected from a line-up of the label’s mates.

Mr Ken Hollings, a writer of note, shall be reading his text from the first Bookworm publication, to be launched on the same night. Sweden’s BJNilsen will be flying in and making a splendid noise for you all. A second Swede, CM von Hausswolff (he’s a King, dontchaknow…) will share a stage with Touch’s Mike Harding, in a reading of Edgar Allen Poe like none before… Cult vs. occult – former Medicine Head man Peter Hope-Evans and illustrator Savage Pencil will whip up a dark blue storm. Mr Pencil’s fine drawings shall also be on display. Hopping on the bus from Elephant & Castle is Zerocrop and his band; pop perfection from a local lad. And finally, a London eye – video installation by Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us.

Exhibition featuring work by Savage Pencil and Vicki Bennett Friday 21st – Sunday 23rd October 12 – 6pm

http://www.mergefestival.co.uk/programme/worm-eats-bear-special-evening-performances-tapeworm

Horror Collage at The Southbank Centre

People Like Us are currently developing a new live A/V set with a working title of Horror Collage*.

*Please note – this new live set now has a permanent name of “The Magical Misery Tour” – more details here.


People Like Us – “Horror Collage”
Live A/V performance from Vicki Bennett/People Like Us.
Sourcing from over 100 horror movies, People Like Us reflect upon narratives that occur and repeat within the horror genre. By grouping common concepts, and creating contextually related sample music compositions, entirely new stories emerge.
Horror Collage will be premiered at The Purcell Room in London’s Southbank Centre on

3rd September 2011 at “Sound Of Fear”.

We recommend you book tickets NOW for Sound Of Fear Part 1 via the link below, or contact the Southbank Centre box office on Box Office on 0844 875 0074. The Purcell Room isn’t that big and the festival may be quite popular – so you have been warned!
http://www.soundandmusic.org/projects/sound-fear-musical-universe-horror
Interview with Sound and Music here
http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/five-questions-people-us

People Like Us – Exhibited at Maxxi in Rome

People Like Us are currently exhibiting at Maxxi gallery in Rome. It includes a 20 minute screening of a previous People Like Us live a/v set entitled “Live Excerpts“, and also in the gallery space there is a monitor showing/airing People Like Us downloads from UbuWeb, and the video “The Sound of the End of Music“.
The exhibition is called Expanded Video.

EXPANDED VIDEO
21 April – 5 June 2011
curated by Anne Palopoli and Oscar Pizzo

Expanded Video presents an Italian preview of a number of video works and live performances by Jacob TV, Masbedo, Martha Colburn and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett). 
Organized in collaboration with the Music for Rome Foundation, the series arises from the confrontation and interaction between different forms of creativity that define a common idiom in which listening and seeing become analogous and equivalent episodes. 
The works of the selected artists, in which the diverse idioms fuse and integrate perfectly, are linked by a shared emancipation from the ties and conventions of the individual media. Sound becomes narration and the image dissolves in an ever-different rhythm.




EXHIBITING:
MAXXI, Gallery 5

Masbedo

Theorem of incompletion, 2008
5’38” – Music by Lagash, Borgar Magnason – editing Giuseppe Domingo Romano for Except s.r.l. – courtesy Noire Contemporary Art
Masbedo’s work stages the difficulties underlying the relationship between man and woman and the consequent destruction of intimacy: pieces of glass abandoned on a table in a desolate Icelandic landscape are destroyed by shouts and gunfire. Filmed in Iceland, a location in which the limits are tangible, the work tackles the theme of the conditioning to which man is subjected in contemporary society.

Jacob TV
THE NEWS, a reality opera, 2011 in progress
17′ circa – Jan Boiten, videos, scenography; Kristen Kerstens, videos – Courtesy Jacob TV
The News is the latest work by the Dutch musician that will be presented at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2012. At MAXXI Jacob Tv presents a preview of a selection from this opera in which images taken from the media are deconstructed and reconstructed with a syncopated rhythm.

Martha Colburn
Dolls VS Dictators, 2010
11′ – Musica/music composed by Greg Saunier (of Deerhoof) and foley sound by Michael Evans – courtesy Martha Colburn
In this video Martha Colburn stages the killing of a number of dictators from history. Thanks to the stop-motion technique, dolls and puppets traverse a fantastic landscape causing the spectator to fall into a surreal world in which the laws that inform reality are overturned.

Cosmetic Emergency, 2005
8′ – Musica/Music Jad Fair, Mick Hobbs, Hilary Jeffery, Coco Solid – courtesy Martha Colburn
Cosmetic Emergency focuses on contemporary society’s obsession with appearance. The idea of beauty is analysed through the presentation of images taken from current affairs and old films, paintings and documentaries. In a collage of sounds and representations the video investigates the motivations that push contemporary society in this direction.

People Like Us/Vicki Bennett

Live Excerpts, 2002-2007
16’27” – courtesy Vicki Bennett
People like us assembles scenes and sound familiar to us from films, documentaries and archive images in a sequence the breaks up the linear cinematographic narration. This work brings together five live tracks of significance from the British musician’s output.

The programme also included a live performance of Genre Collage at Auditorium of Rome.
24 May, 21.00
People Like Us – GENRE COLLAGE
Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Teatro Studio


Download more info:
Maxxi website 1
Maxxi website 2
Expanded Video exhibition info pdf
About Genre Collage
About Genre Collage 2