Vicki Bennett explores the processes of making audiovisual content, working with archives and found footage. Using collage as a compositional tool opens up endless opportunities to create and experience results that are more than the sum of their parts, opening doors (and windows) to let light in and move beyond limited and repetitive ways of creative thinking.
In this Somerset House Studios podcast, we revisit Vicki Bennett’s talk as part of The Wire magazine’s Music By Any Means series, which was part of Grounding Practice, a rolling programme shaped by and for creative practitioners and critical thinkers.
Part of The Wire: Music By Any Means.
Grounding Practice / Somerset House Studios
Audio produced by Weyland Mckenzie-Witter as part of The Creator in Residence Programme at Somerset House, supported by The Rothschild Foundation.
Listen With Your Eyes
We’ve just made available a new track from the hour-long Gone, Gone Beyond (work still in progress)… click above ^^^
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/
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.
NEW People Like Us CD! The Mirror
PEOPLE LIKE US “THE MIRROR”
LIMITED EDITION (500) CD & DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
Cutting Hedge SNIP002 (available initially mailorder only from us)
RELEASE DATE 1 OCTOBER 2018
This album contains all new audio work, sourced from both our live a/v performance The Mirror [2018], and also from Gone, Gone Beyond [2017+], our ongoing 360 surround cinema work. It also contains additional tracks composed during the creation of these pieces that never were used.
We are joined on two tracks by Ergo Phizmiz, and the packaging has artwork from the above works and also specially made for the CD. Two collages are made in collaboration with other artists Peter Knight and Hearty White. The CD was mastered by Mark Gergis.
NEW People Like Us album – CITATION CITY OST
Yes! A NEW PEOPLE LIKE US ALBUM! The never before released soundtrack to the People Like Us live a/v performance (and now stand alone film) Citation City.
Buy it here now on bandcamp:
https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/album/citation-city-ost
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.
Interview on KALX
People Like Us (Vicki) and Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) paid an impromptu visit to KALX in Berkeley on 3 October 2017 to go on Carnacki‘s radio show. Here is the 3 hour conversation about Recombinant Festival, immersive media, collaborations, radio and vaporwave.
Music For The Fire by People Like Us & Wobbly
Music For The Fire [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. Originally released on CD on Illegal Art. Thanks to UbuWeb for hosting this.
Radio V&A at Victoria & Albert Museum and Resonance FM
V&A presents Friday Late : Radio V&A
Friday 26th February, 6.30-10pm FREE
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/f/friday-late/
Radio V&A broadcast live on Resonance – on 104.4FM and on DAB in central London.
Update: listen here:
The Sound of Silence by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us)
Transmitting from speakers within the bookshelves of the National Art Library
The library encourages silence, yet it is full of words. The broadcast medium is similar – it is all around us yet we have to tune in to actually hear it.
The radio show fishes from the wide spectrum picked up when using a radio receiver, from outer space to our inner world.
There really is no such thing as silence. Only when we begin to be quiet do we really start to hear what is going on.
People Like Us Guest On BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction
Tuesday 5 January 2016
23:00 BBC RADIO 3
Now that the archive has expired we’re making it available here so you can still hear it
As part of Radio 3’s New Year New Music, Max Reinhardt is joined in the studio by the experimental musician and multimedia artist Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us whose audio collage work involves the manipulation and reworking of sampled material. Presented by Max Reinhardt – Vicki will be on around 11.30pm. Late Junction – BBC Radio 3
UbuWeb new addition: Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice
Yes, now available for free download courtesy of and thanks to UbuWeb:
Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice
http://www.ubu.com/sound/plu_thinktwice.html
- Music Sounds Better With Me
- Free Rod McKMoon
- I’m Dreaming
- Blue By You
- Summer Music For An Almost Equinox
- Crazy
- Stand By Your
- Once A Pun A Time
- Break Me, Break My Horse
- Recycling Is Nothing New
- Oh Moon
- Trains and Blackbirds
- Free (As A Chapel In The Moonlight)
- Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice
- Singin’ Femme Fatale (with Ergo Phizmiz)
- Abridge
- The Atlantic Conveyor
- Panic As Usual And Avoid Shopping
- Eve Of Sunshine
Release date: 31 October 2013
Cutting Hedge SNIP001
The music on this album was composed between 2006 and 2013 initially for five different live performances of moving image and sound.
Performance sources:
Lyrics in Libraries (2006) | Genre Collage (2009) | People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz Live at Cafe Oto (2009) | The Magical Misery Tour (2011) | Consequences (One Thing Leads To Another) (2013)
Some of the tracks listed above also have a moving image representation in People Like Us in UbuWeb Film
RELATED RESOURCES:
UbuWeb new addition: Welcome Abroad
Another People Like Us album now available for free download over at UbuWeb:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/plu_welcome.html
Welcome Abroad {2011)
- Sing
- Happy Lost Songs
- Stuck in the USSR
- The Look
- Help Me To Help Myself
- What Will I Do
- Lost In The Dark
- Push The Clouds Away
- The Sound Of The End Of Music
- Wonderful Wonderful
- Driving Flying Rising Falling
- Ever
- Hush
- Wandering
- The Seven Hills of Rome (with Ergo Phizmiz)
- You’ve Got To Know When
- The Atlantic Conveyor
Release date: 24 May 2011
Illegal Art IA124 http://www.illegalart.net
Press release
“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.
Thanks to Ergo Phizmiz, Jason Willett, M.C.Schmidt (Matmos), Virginia Pipe and Wobbly for contributing instruments, audio parts and multitracking to this album.
Lyrics on The Seven Hills of Rome by Ergo Phizmiz.
Some of the tracks listed above also have a moving image representation in People Like Us in UbuWeb Film
RELATED RESOURCES:
Ergo Phizmiz in UbuWeb Sound
Jon Leidecker (Wobbly) in UbuWeb Sound
People Like Us in UbuWeb Film