People Like Us
Recyclopaedia Britannica
** 2021 Stock ** Sucata Tapes presents Recyclopaedia Britannica by People Like Us. Amazing to think it is almost 20 years later that we write this. This represents an earlier life of PLU, some of which carries through to now, some left long behind... We've supplied artwork and text (by Drew Daniel, Steve Thrower and Graham Duff) for both versions of the release.
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish past…
Welcome Abroad
Continuing our ambitious People Like Us vinyl reissue program with Welcome Aboard – a strangely relevant 10-year-old album (originally released in May 2011) when People Like Us aka Vicki Bennett became stranded in the US after the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption closed much of northern Europe’s airspace. 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…
The Mirror
Previously released on CD accompanied by Gone, Gone Beyond, The Mirror is the dreamy soundtrack of an a/v project from collage artist extraordinaire Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us.With The Mirror Bennett continues her eternal disassembling of popular music by exploring how the narrative of familiar sounds / songs can change dramatically under a new context, with that context always changing, in a never-ending flow.Each song is singular. And each song is a collage of and undefined number of oth…
Wide Open Spaces
Originally released on CD in 2003. The hour-long performance on this disc was captured live on October 5th, 2002 when Wobbly, People Like Us, and Matmos circled their wagons in the lecture hall of the San Francisco Art Institute. Having mutually agreed upon a country and western theme, Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), and Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt (Matmos) pored over their archives of honky tonk classics, chopping and dicing Nashville's finest almost beyond recogniti…
Optimized!
Third volume in Discrepant's irregular split series. This time, they pair two artists at the top of their "collagist" game: People Like Us and Porest. The Parallel Broadcasts presents Porest's recordings from the covert sector of his archives. Culled from shortwave and FM broadcasts, these selections were intercepted via prepared radio -- finely tuned to receive what is known in certain circles as parallel broadcasting. Content explores the trauma of emerging global consciousness, acute cultural…
Abridged Too Far
People Like Us is audiovisual collage artist Vicki Bennett, who has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, performances, gallery exhibits, and online streaming for 25 years. Since 1992, she has developed an immediately recognizable aesthetic repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and appropriation as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary m…
Moon Magic Illegal Art
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz composed 45 minutes of music that is simultaneously whimsical & poignant. Once the soundtrack was in place, visuals were assembled around the audio in order to create a stimulating assault on the mind that evokes a sense of the surreal and fantastical. These two cuts are pressed on limited edition 7-inch vinyl containing audio from "The Keystone Cut Ups" DVD on Illegal Art.
Perpetuum Mobile
“Perpetuum Mobile” is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic “open source” compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers (collage-posers?) 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 d…
Recyclopaedia Britannica (Selected Works 1992-2002)
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly "topical" audio-jokes at the expense of one's raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being "groovy", the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw m…
Lassie House / Jumble Massive
This CD compiles two long out of print, obscure vinyls by People Like Us. Almost all (maybe all) were recorded as commisions for Dutch radio. People Like Us plunders her way through the wastelands of vinyl nobody buys, collages them into mostly strange, and at times funny pieces of music. Unlike other plunderphonics, People Like Us keep the voice/spoken word segments to a minimum, which I most hearthly welcome. Extensive spoken words are usually hilarious, but after repeated listening don't hold…
Hate People Like Us
Remixes of PLU music by Coil, Negativland, Farmers Manual, Bruce Gilbert, Boyd Rice, Dummy run, Rehberg & Bauer, Stock Hausen & Walkman, Death in June, Christoph Heemann, Sons of Silence, Barbed and Mika Vainio. "Radio shows and kitsch 60's Easy Listening, found sounds, overheard conversations, all subjected to a malicious clown's fiendish tinkering and manipulation of texture and tempo... Wild but wonderful." -- Paul Stump in The Wire.
Thermos Explorer
2000 release, cheap and lovely "No really, she's laughing with you... With all the sneaky charm of a car commercial that leaves you inexplicably in tears, this latest romp from People Like Us serves up the emotional complexity of, say, the complete works of Proust, crammed into bite-sized snacks for the easily distracted. In some sense Vicki Bennett's work could be seen as companion volumes to Neil Postman's incisive mid-eighties critique "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age …