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

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

The Doors Of Perspection – Photo Documentation

Here is some documentation of “The Doors Of Perspection” a solo exhibition held at Vitrine Gallery in Bermondsey Square, London, from July to September 2011.
Prints displayed in the gallery window are still available in a very limited edition (please contact us), and two smaller prints are still available from Modern Empire, details here.

List of Works in The Doors of Perspection
Mountage [2011]
C-type print on dibond, 1242mm x 235mm
Edition of 3, + 1 A/P
Commissioned by Touch
In Retrospect [2011]
C-type print on dibond, 1097mm x 638mm
Edition of 3, 1 A/P
Commissioned by Touch
Descending [2011]
C-type print on dibond, 1307mm x 645mm
Edition of 3, + 1 A/P
Commissioned by Touch
Time and Time Again [2011]
C-type print on dibond, 932mm x 264mm
Edition of 3, + 1 A/P
Commissioned by Touch
Streetwalking [2011]
C-type print on dibond, 1628mm x 567mm
Edition of 3, + 1 A/P
Commissioned by Touch
The Doors of Perspection [2011]
Single-channel HD video, length: 9:32
Edition of 5, + 1 A/P
Perpetuum Mobile [2011]
photo-collage, 1500mm x 355mm

Streetwalking Time and Time Again and Descending
Vitrine: Streetwalking, Time and Time Again and Descending
Time and Time Again
Time and Time Again
Descending and In Retrospect
Descending and In Retrospect
Vitrine Window
Vitrine Window
Vitrine Gallery
Vitrine Gallery and Bermondsey Square
Vitrine Gallery
Vitrine Gallery
Bermondsey Square
Bermondsey Square
Perpetuum Mobile
Making Perpetuum Mobile – this is not a dibond print but made by hand with individual photographs photomounted together

Print edition, in addition to the above works

This exhibition not only features large prints for sale on site at Vitrine Gallery, but also a special print edition featured here
Streetwalking [2011]
C-Type Print on Matt Fuji Archive Paper, 914mm x 321mm
Edition of 100 + 5 A/Ps
In Retrospect [2011]
C-Type Print on Matt Fuji Archive Paper, 671mm x 392mm Year: 2011
Edition of 100 + 5 A/Ps
Co-published by Modern Empire and Vitrine Gallery

Related posts:
Full info on The Doors Of Perspection
Video of preview of The Doors Of Perspection
Print edition coinciding with The Doors of Perspection

THE DOORS OF PERSPECTION – People Like Us Exhibition

Vitrine Gallery, Bermondsey Square, London
Fri 29 July – Sun 04 Sep 2011.
Daily 24‐hour. FREE.
Preview: Thursday 28 July 2011. 6‐10pm.

Vitrine Gallery presents The Doors of Perspection, an exhibition of new digital collage works by Vicki Bennett. The works are created using a unique technique developed by Bennett to expand film scenes beyond their conventional screen ratio. The finished results reveal beautiful panoramic views of the background landscapes as captured by the panning camera, effectively allowing film scenes to be seen as never before.

Bennett’s new works bear a relation to the British Vorticism movement of the early 20th Century, taking a Futurist approach to image making whilst attempting to capture dynamic movement with still images. Bennett often utilises digital technology to apply analogue techniques and for more than a decade has used rotoscoping in her short films and live audio‐visual performance to mask, cut and place objects elsewhere on screen. During her commission for The Great North Run Cultural Programme 2009 she developed the process for expanding film outside its frame and began work on this new series shortly after.

This exhibition not only features large prints for sale on site at Vitrine Gallery, but also a special print edition featured here:
https://peoplelikeus.org/2011/print-edition-by-vicki-bennett/

Title: Streetwalking
Medium: C-Type Print on Matt Fuji Archive Paper
Dimensions: 914mm x 321mm
Year: 2011
Edition: 100 + 5 A/Ps

Title: In Retrospect
Medium: C-Type Print on Matt Fuji Archive Paper
Dimensions: 671mm x 392mm
Year: 2011
Edition: 100 + 5 A/Ps

Co-published by Modern Empire and Vitrine Gallery
Bennett is renowned for her audio‐visual collage, successfully releasing albums and touring her live performances under the name People Like Us since the early 1990s. Her Surrealist approach to creating moving image work involves subverting elements of found footage in order to create new meanings and connections. This is reflected in the titles of her works, albums and exhibitions, where letters slip around and one slight twist can create an absurd change of meaning.

The Doors of Perspection is curated by Iain Pate. The exhibition is commissioned by Touch.

Since 1991, British artist Vicki Bennett 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. 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, Barbican, 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 a million listen again downloads since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.

People Like Us are currently touring their live audio‐visual set ‘Genre Collage’ and a new album, ‘Welcome Abroad’ was released on Illegal Art in May 2011.

Preview Event: Thursday 28 July 2011. 6‐10pm. Shortwave Cinema, Bermondsey Square. FREE.

A collection of short films by Vicki Bennett/People Like Us ‐ including Excerpts from “Genre Collage” ‐ will be screened on loop throughout the evening, with an introduction by the artist at 7pm. There will also be musical accompaniment provided by Osymyso and Mainwaring & Jurgensen in the bar.

Full list of films being screened at the Preview Event ONLY:
“Burning” [1999]
“Discovering Electronic Music” [1999]
“Music Of Your Own” [1999]
“We Edit Life” [2002]
“Nothing” [2003]
“The Remote Controller” [2003]
“Resemblage” [2004]
“Story Without End” [2005]
“Trying Things Out” [2007]
“Live Excerpts” [2002-2007]
“Work, Rest & Play” [2007]
“Skew Gardens” [2008]
“Parade” [2009]
“Mull of Kintyre” (with Ergo Phizmiz) [2010]
Excerpts from “Genre Collage” [2009/10]
“The Keystone Cut Ups” (with Ergo Phizmiz) [2010]
“2’00” The Movie” [2011]

Press Release in pdf form

VITRINE GALLERY Bermondsey Square, London SE1 3UN (tube: London Bridge) www.vitrinegallery.co.uk

Review: http://www.frontrowreviews.co.uk/news/vicki-bennett-the-doors-of-perspection-preview-report/9758
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/the-doors-of-perspection–picture-preview-2328362.html

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

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

Genre Collage in Rome

People Like Us will perform Genre Collage in Rome on 24th May 2011. There will also be film screenings by People Like Us accompanying this in the exhibition Expanded Video at MAXXI from April 22 to June 5, 2011.

The museum exhibition will be at MAXXI
http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/schede/expanded-video-exhibiting

Genre Collage will be performed as part of the above exhibition at
Auditorium of Rome
Teatro Studio

http://www.auditorium.com/eventi/4983131
Auditorium Parco della Musica, Viale Pietro De Coubertin, Roma, Italia