More weird and wonderful stuff -
People Like Us & Wobbly - Women
Artists: People Like Us & Wobbly
Album: Music For The Fire
Label: Illegal Art
"... a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick." --
Phil England, The Wire
Plunderphonic goddess Vikki Bennett links with her American counterpart Wobbly aka Jon Leidecker to create an album of obsessive sample contexturology. Between them, Bennett and Leidecker have fashioned a vast back catalogue of dadaist sample collages, shredding the fabric of popular culture via fractions of extracted audio and visual nuggets that strangely and humorously reflect the world about us. Their work has been recognised by many of the world's leading art institutions including Tate Modern, The ICA, Pompidou Centre, Barcelona's Sonar festival and the excellent WMFU radio station, where Vikki holds a regular show.
As the artists themselves explain "'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", the end result is a relentlessly fractious affair, commanding your attention like some illicit, under-the-counter Hanna-Barbera production that's been left inside a vat of lysergic yoghurt for the last 40 years. Commendably, they do manage to stick to the narrative of their mandate, which will become clear with repeated listens, but the initial thrill is evocative of some half-remembered hallucination that never quite makes itself lucid, retaining a Lynchian sense of humour and febrility that'll warrant much closer scrutiny. In other words, it's a chuffing mental listen that you'll get a massive kick out of if you like Ergo Phizmiz, Girl Talk or Matmos.
People Like Us - What's Music (reworked by Negativland)
Popular culture's junkyard -- full of cast-away late-night TV commercials, '60s game show kitsch, and the stiff docudramas of after-school special high moralism -- is the sonic junkyard for the mongrel plunderphonics of People Like Us. The sole work of British samplist Vicki Bennett, People Like Us giddily recounts pop culture's follies as a never-ending stream of conscious joke told through a Dadaist reshuffling of cut-up source material. Bennett's fiendishly funny proto-electronica collages are diced with gasping oohs and aahs, highly suggestive vocal snippets from suave announcers, well placed fart noises, and punctuations of brash Herb Alpert-esque horn blasts. Her aural pranks build a context that is downright naughty without ever relying on a punchline.
The
Hate People Like Us album isn't really a remix album, nor is it simply a compilation with a common thread. Bennett asked a handful of fellow cultural pirates to take the music of PLU and do whatever they wanted to it. The artists featured on Hate People Like Us include Coil, Negativland, Farmers' Manual, Bruce Gilbert, Boyd Rice (NON), Dummy Run, Rehberg & Bauer (includes Peter Rehberg of Pita), Stock, Hausen, and Walkman, Death in June, Christoph Heemann, The Sons Of Silence, Barbed, and Mika Vainio. The resulting album is a twisted reconstruction of cultural oddities, from Negativland's piece "What Is Music?" to the raunchy silliness of Barbed's "Barbed 4 People Like Us" to the dreamy surrealism of Coil's "The Gimp/Sometimes." Bennett linked each submission with short humorous interludes such as the suggestively titled "Handjob."
Enjoy
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