Tag: wobbly

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SHARITY! Selected Works of People Like Us

https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/album/sharity-selected-works-of-people-like-us

A signed DOUBLE CD containing 1 hour 58 minutes of music we’ve selected through the years since we started releasing music. Contains remastered solo audio works from the past 30 years, and collaborations with our friends Ergo Phizmiz, Wobbly, Matmos, Mr Rotorvator and Gwilly Edmondez.

We’ve not released a retrospective since 2002 (Recyclopaedia Britannica), and we are aware that we will not be releasing the new album until early 2024 since we’ll not be working on that in full after we’ve made a new performance (in progress!). And we want to do something NOW! PLUS this will also help keep things ticking over for us later this year when the Indiegogo funds run out.

Please consider supporting our indiegogo here: 
www.indiegogo.com/projects/people-like-us-new-album-and-tour/

credits
People Like Us | Ergo Phizmiz | Wobbly | Matmos | Gwilly Edmondez | Mr Rotorvator

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Radio on the Radio – People Like Us & Negativland

OVER THE EDGE : “WWW Radio” broadcasting on KPFA
People Like Us & Negativland on KWCW
(with a prelude in the radio show featuring special guest Blevin Blectum)
17 March 2022 | KPFA.ORG | MIDNIGHT-3AM (PT)

Show archived here

A week long residency at Whitman College’s Sheehan Gallery brought Vicki and Negativland & Sue-C to Walla Walla, Washington. It all ended with college radio: a two and half hour long chartsweeping riot broadcasted live from the studios of KWCW containing Vicki, Mark, Wobbly and eventually, one receptacle guest calling in to sing. 98% of that broadcast you’ll hear on Over The Edge tonight, largely as it happened.

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PLU / MATMOS / WOBBLY Wide Open Spaces now on VINYL

People Like Us / Matmos / Wobbly “Wide Open Spaces” LP (CREP52)
Release Date: 23rd February 2018 (taking pre-orders now)
Discrepant is pleased to announce the reissue of a “Wide Open Spaces”, a collaborative LP by Wobbly, People Like Us and Matmos.
You can purchase directly from us through our bandcamp site:

https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/album/people-like-us-matmos-wobbly-wide-open-spaces

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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

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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.

Lyric Sheet

  1. Fiction
  2. Naked Little Girl
  3. Sheep Laid Out To Dry
  4. Partner
  5. Okay
  6. Giant Love Ball Song
  7. Goodbye
  8. Woman
  9. Female Convict
  10. Pick Up
  11. Everyone Alone
  12. Hello
  13. A New Baby
  14. Fertile
  15. Bad News
  16. Understanding You
  17. Pain
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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)

  1. Sing
  2. Happy Lost Songs
  3. Stuck in the USSR
  4. The Look
  5. Help Me To Help Myself
  6. What Will I Do
  7. Lost In The Dark
  8. Push The Clouds Away
  9. The Sound Of The End Of Music
  10. Wonderful Wonderful
  11. Driving Flying Rising Falling
  12. Ever
  13. Hush
  14. Wandering
  15. The Seven Hills of Rome (with Ergo Phizmiz)
  16. You’ve Got To Know When
  17. 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

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Don Joyce, People Like Us, Wobbly, Wetgate Live at Cell Space, San Francisco, 1998

Yes, the date there is correct. Just found this video, courtesy of Doug Wellman of Puzzling Evidence: Superstars of sample People Like Us, Wobbly, and C. Elliot Friday (Don Joyce) of Negativland join forces with projectionists Wetgate to layer lightly at the Cell Space one fine spring night to discern “what’s music?”…

Over The Wobbly Wetgate People Like on April 9 1998 from Puzzling Evidence on Vimeo.

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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”