People Like Us (musician)

People Like Us is the stage name of London DJ multimedia artist Vicki Bennett. She has released a number of albums featuring collages of music and sound since 1992. In recent years, she has performed at a number of modern art galleries, festivals and universities.

Musical career

Since 1991 Vicki Bennett has been making CDs, radio, and A/V multimedia under the name People Like Us. By animating and recontextualising found footage collages Vicki gives an equally witty and dark view of popular culture with a surrealistic edge. People Like Us broadcasts an ongoing experimental arts radio and podcast show on WFMU, called "DO or DIY", which, since it began in 2003, has had over three-quarters of a million RealPlayer hits.

Vicki has shown work at, amongst others, Tate Modern, The National Film Theatre, Purcell Room, The ICA, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Sonar in Barcelona, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the BBC and Channel 4. She has also performed radio sessions for the BBC's John Peel, Mixing It, and also CBC, KPFA and many more in the US. There have been features in The Observer, The Wire, NME, BBC website and Bizarre Magazine. People Like Us have been commissioned by The Arts Council England, The BBC, Sonic Arts Network, Forma, LUX and Lovebytes amongst others (see further down for full list).

The almost entire People Like Us back catalogue is also available for free download, which is hosted by UbuWeb in conjunction with PennSound, and also WFMU. PLU has been released on labels such as Tigerbeat6, Soleilmoon, Sonic Arts Network, Touch, Staalplaat and For Us Records (Rough Trade), both solo, and also collaborating with Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Wobbly, members of Negativland and Christian Marclay.

Spring 2008 saw a Retrospective of People Like Us at alt.gallery and a PLU curated CD entitled Smiling Through My Teeth, with Sonic Arts Network. The June 2008 edition of The Wire featured a 4-page interview, and the July edition featured a review of Smiling Through My Teeth.

Vicki completed the Great North Run Moving Image Commission 2009, and a live A/V set premiered in October 2009 at Vancouver New Music Festival. The UK premiere was performed at BFI Southbank in December 2009.

Vicki worked on a commission for Edinburgh Printmakers to be exhibited as part of the exhibition "Prints of Darkness", coinciding with Edinburgh Art Festival in July 2010. People Like Us recently curated "Nothing Is New, Everything Is Permitted" at AV Festival, and will soon perform concerts of "Genre Collage" at MACBA, Liverpool Sound City, Bristol Arnolfini, Copenhagen and Jerusalem (amongst others). In June 2010 she released the album "Music for the Fire" with Wobbly on the Illegal Art label.

From 2003 to 2011, and again since December 2013, the WFMU radio show DO or DIY, programmed by Vicki Bennett, has appeared weekly on a seasonal basis. WFMU has created a 24-hour-per-day radio stream of sound collage and music chosen by Bennett. Her WFMU programs are also available as podcasts.

In January 2015 her audiovisual performance Citation City premiered at transmediale, Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual work is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time.[1]

Workshops/Residencies/Commissions/Collaborations

Album/Single Releases

External links

References

  1. ↑ "Citation City". InEnArt. Retrieved 21 January 2015.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, March 22, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.