New HD film : The Doors of Perspection

The Doors of Perspection, 2011
Single-channel HD video
Length: 9:32
For screening enquiries use the contact form on this site

This film was originally screened as part of a solo show of the same name at Vitrine Gallery in London from July-September 2011.
https://peoplelikeus.org/2011/the-doors-of-perspection-people-like-us-exhibition

Download at UbuWeb

The work is created using a technique that expands film scenes beyond the conventional screen ratio. The finished result reveals beautiful panoramic views of the background landscapes as captured by the panning camera, effectively allowing film scenes to be seen as never before.

Vicki 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. Vicki 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 (see Parade vimeo.com/peoplelikeus/parade-2009) she developed the process for expanding film outside its frame and began work on this new series shortly after.

Kenny G at The White House Today

Our friend and collaborator Kenny G, aka Kenneth Goldsmith read his amazing poetry at The White House today, 11 May 2011. As well as being beautiful and engaging in its own right, Kenny’s work has been a gateway to understanding of so called “higher” forms of writing and reading to People Like Us and many other allies.

Watch and download the video archives here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2011/05/11/president-obama-poets-white-house
and
http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2011/05/11/poetry-student-workshop-white-house
More inspiration:
Kenneth Goldsmith
And from the larger umbrella:
UbuWeb
A People Like Us & Kenny G collaboration:
Nothing Special (CD)

Induction Is A Draft Is A Gust Of Air (2009) on Vimeo.

Jean Baudrillard Le Xerox et l’Infini – free download

These recordings were originally available on cassette on Tapeworm, but now that it is deleted we are making it available here for free.

Download at UbuWeb

Jean Baudrillard’s “Le Xerox et l’Infini” – originally published in Paris, 1987 – as read by Patricia and Ellen. Recorded on 12 July 2009 by Vicki Bennett in Hersham, England.
Translation: Agitac, London, November 1988.
The original text in French can be read here.

“Jean Baudrillard is perhaps the most important theorist of the ‘after modern’. Though he says himself he has ‘nothing to do with postmodernism’, many interpret him (along with Jean-François Lyotard) as among the most important prophets of a truly postmodern era. His works have attracted high praise and derision all over the world.”
plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard

Free download of Perpetuum Mobile with bonus film!

We are very pleased to announce that we are now giving a download of our album Perpetuum Mobile (by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz) away for free! This is still available as a CD with beautiful packaging, from our shop but if you like your mp3s then here they are… http://www.ubu.com/sound/plu_perpetuum-mobile.html
Here’s the artwork

Free film “Ghosts Before Breakfast” to go with Perpetuum Mobile
Also, “Ghosts Before Breakfast” from Perpetuum Mobile has a film to go with it! We are making it available for the first time ever now.

“Ghosts Before Breakfast” Hans Richter (1928) / People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz (2007) from Vicki WFMU on Vimeo.

Here’s the press release for this wonderful offering by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz:

“Perpetuum Mobile” is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic “open source” compositional process: the UK’s finest collage composers Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other’s work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but what makes this record different is that Ergo and Vicki then wrote and sang their own vocals on top of their Frankenstein creation. Here you will find slyly absurdist lyrics replete with monkeys, carousels, trousers, apple trees, tinkling bells, dogs, sausages, whiskey, and cannibalism. No matter how fraught with trauma, these ballads and ditties are sung with a straight face and mixed front and center, and the results feel like 1930s British music hall standards from an alternate universe: half Ivor Cutler, half George Formby. The astonishing thing is that for all this jiggery-pokery, “Perpetuum Mobile” makes for an exhilarating, remarkably fresh pop album. It works. On “Ghosts Before Breakfast” Ergo and Vicki proudly declare that they’ve got “quite a selection of pastry”, and if the profusion of cuckoo clocks, gunshots, horn farts, string vamps, and digital malfeasance which go hurtling through this opening track is any indication, that’s no idle boast. For sheer cornucopia of sonic raw materials, this track’s avalanche of information sets the tone for the overflowing, manic record that follows. There’s far too much to fully parse, but among the highlights: “Beyond Perpetuum” pushes off from the Comedian Harmonists’ take on the 19th century compositional craze for “moto perpetuo” runs of continuous notes at a rapid tempo, and folds found piano, voice and strings into an interlocking array of M.C. Escher harmonic stairways. “Air Hostess” is detourned lounge pop that stitches together Nelson Riddle’s “Ya Ya” theme to “Lolita”, “Walk Right In”, light operettas, organ, bachelor pad cha cha and mambo, and nervously twitching shards of Louis Armstrong. “Pierrot’s Persecution Mania” bravely explores the possibilities of a Montparnasse-via-Dixieland hybrid of can-can and bluegrass, with ridiculous canned strings colliding with jew’s harp boings, while “Soggy Style” rides banjo twangs, a digital bossa nova breakdown, and the “whooo-ooes” nicked from Terry Stafford’s “Suspicion”. Living up to the perpetual motion of its title and cock-a-hoop cover art, this is a frantically energetic music whose layered repetitions become cumulatively more disorienting and preposterous as they loop back. “Perpetuum Mobile” goes beyond the stealth-oldies nostalgia of the mashup scene and the “culture-jamming” rhetoric of plunderphonics, and shows Mr. Ergo and Ms. Vicki to be a potent, if Surrealist, songwriting team, and together they braid oddly affecting vocals and their trademark stolen audio into twenty-first century pop. Like the perpetual motion machines for which it is named, this collaboration will run and run and run and run and run and run and run… – Drew Daniel



People Like Us in another UbuWeb podcast

People Like Us features for a second time in Avant-Garde All The Time, an UbuWeb podcast. This time around the episode The Women Of The Avant-Garde (part 2) also features sound clips from Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Louise Lawler, Shelley Hirsch, Lauren Lesko, Forough Farrokhzad, Pauline Oliveros, and many more.
Women of the Avant-Garde (part 2)

Background
Poet Kenneth Goldsmith presents selections from UbuWeb, the learned and varietous online repository concerning concrete & sound poetry, experimental film, outsider art and all things avant-garde. Schedule: Every Six Weeks.
Subscribe to the podcast Avant-Garde All The Time here.
A continued thank you, UbuWeb!

Awful Fun with DO or DIY on WFMU

It’s the end of the Summer Season on WFMU and so time for DO or DIY to unplug the ethernet cable, give the ol’ modem a bit of a dust and take the next season off. But before we go we haven’t forgotten that it’s somewhat a tradition to make a downloadable collection of the best of all things avant retard for your ears and eye-pods, you lucky people – complete with downloadable artwork. So here it is. I always say there’s nothing like art, and this is nothing like art.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/10/people-like-us-end-of-season-album-download.html
For playlists and archives of DO or DIY going back to 2003, have a look at the WFMU website homepage for the show.

Also at UbuWeb

People Like Us featured in the latest UbuWeb podcast

All Avant-Garde All The Time – UbuWeb Podcast #9: The Sounds of the UK from the 1960s To Yesterday
Listen / Download

Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the latest in its podcast series, focusing on a dozen of Ubu’s hidden treasures, highlighting audio works that you really should know about about but most likely don’t. With this podcast, we continue our series focusing on the sounds of different regions. Here the focus is on the avant-garde language-based audio coming out of the UK. Beginning with Bob Cobbing and making our way through the the swinging London scene of the 60s, and the political / punk work of the 70s, and ending up with the electronics + samples of today, we cut a path through the London (and beyond) underground. Featured here are works by Bob Cobbing, Neil Mills, Lily Greenham, Cornelius Cardew, Christopher Logue, Richard Long, Art & Language + The Red Krayloa, Furious Pig, Momus, People Like Us, and Caroline Bergvall.
We really recommend subscribing to this excellent podcast. Find out more about each episode here. Subscribe here.

Rhapsody In Glue now available for free download!

We are very pleased to announce that the recently deleted “Rhapsody in Glue” digital album by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz from 2008 is now available for the first time for free download!

Many thanks to our friends at UbuWeb for hosting this album, which can be sourced here – http://ubu.com/sound/plu_rhapsody.html

You can also download the album by clicking on the links below.
1. Snow Day
2. Gary’s Anatomy
3. Pussycat Giantess
4. English Hunting Song
5. Blame It On The Waltz
6. Carmic Waltz
7. Troika Country Garden
8. Social Folk Dance
9. Smiling Through My
10. In The Waking
11. Dancing in the Carmen
12. Antisocial Boogie
13. Withers in the Whist
Artwork

For background on the album please read on.

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 (which we have also recently made available as an mp3 download). “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.

Later in 2008, the duo later went on to release a 7″ with Touch entitled “Withers In The Waking“.


Ergo Phizmiz
UbuWeb
WFMU