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LP
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CREP 084LP
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Continuing Discrepant's ambitious People Like Us vinyl reissue program with Welcome Abroad -- a strangely relevant ten-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 Willett (of Half Japanese) and M.C. Schmidt (of Matmos) via her extended stay. Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. Now strangely echoed by the Covid-19 outbreak and the various grounding of planes and stay at home policies worldwide. While the general 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. No one could have predicted how relevant this album would have been ten years later. Volcanoes or Viruses, Welcome Abroad is what happens when you're stranded due to a freak natural occurrence trapping people all over the world and causing mass plane cancellations.
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LP
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CREP 069LP
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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 an undefined number of other songs from other artists. It sounds familiar because that has been the modus operandi of People Like Us since the early 1990s. But The Mirror plays with the notion of the familiar, driving around a collection of famous pop songs/artists, messing around with the memory of the listener and, of course, one's unique comprehension of those specific songs applied in a new context. Because of the use of familiar pop sounds, The Mirror is often grandiose, like an epic film with only highs, never letting the listener down or letting them doubt the power of pop. Even, of course, when the coordinates are twisted, mixed, over or underrepresented. Each moment feels like something that could only happen in a parallel universe. Although that may sound naïve, it's just a lost thought of reaction to the beautiful collages of People Like Us in The Mirror. This mirror doesn't reflect an image of ourselves or an image of pop. But an image on the way memories drift and are being constant rebuilt. An unfinished collage. Mastered by Mark Gergis; vinyl cut by Rashad Becker.
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Cassette
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SUC 008CS
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Vicki Bennett's People Like Us began life as a three-hour radio show on Brighton's Festival Radio in 1990 called Gobstopper. She went on to release around 20 solo albums based on her radio sound collages, and after a decade working primarily with sound, has increasingly worked with film and images. She has recently produced collage and multi-screen, multi-speaker work, including 2013's touring film and performance piece Notations, a film used as a score for improvising musicians, and Gone, Gone Beyond (2017), a ten-screen, eight-speaker, immersive cinema work for Recombinant Media Lab's Cinechamber. Bennett is also the host of long-running radio show DO or DIY on WFMU. Early Radio Works Vol.1 is a re-compiled re-issue of her early radio collages from the '90s and early 2000s, originally first broadcast on the radio then released on CD and vinyl. The set is an enlightened insight into Vicki's early radio collage work and a perfect addition to the People Like Us work cannon. Side A is a new collage created from People Like Us radio works from between 1992-1999. Originally released on Lowest Common Dominator (1994), Jumble Massive (1996), Beware The Whim Reaper (1996), Lassie House (1997), Thermos Explorer (2000), and A Fistful Of Knuckles (2000). Side B is from Guide To Broadcasting (1994) and Thermos Explorer (2000).
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LP
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CREP 041LP
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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 media and technology, with the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Abridged Too Far is the first of a series of vinyl by Discrepant to celebrate 25 years of People Like Us publishing albums. Abridged Too Far was first released in digitally in 2004 exclusively for UbuWeb, this album includes Vicki's session for John Peel and performances for WFMU, amongst others, from 2003. Packaged with brand new artwork designed by Vicki Bennett. RIYL: Porest, Ergo Phizmiz, WFMU.
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CD
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MESS 001CD
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Selected works from 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 men and call it subversion. Happily, Vicki Bennett has yet to fall down either precipice, but yodels down contentedly from her own Alpine audio-cottage. There, with loving care, she snips and tucks at the lycra jumpsuit until the fit is snug, places every plastic shrub on the Happy Valley Ranch just so, and throws another dance record on the bonfire. Undercutting her own utopian mirages with formal breakdowns and sneaky semantic pranks, Vicki Bennett is One Funny Lady, with a deadly sense of comic timing that puts her in my personal pantheon of edit intensive music makers: Steinski and Mass Media, Hank Shocklee, Tod Dockstader, Teo Macero, the Hanatarash, John Oswald, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. Serving her birthday cake with a turd, her gags are always lined with a virulent creep factor. One minute you're laughing until tears roll down your face at toilet humor, cheese chat and absurdly drawn out attempts at 'making conversation', and then you notice the flashes of aging, obsolescence, isolation and breakdown darting in amongst the ruthlessly snipped 'ums', 'ahs', and 'hmms'. You get the feeling that the vacancy and pointlessness of empty speech is being lampooned and mourned in equal measure. In sticking to this balance of celebration and critique, People Like Us genuinely hates and loves People Like You. The least you can do is head up to the Happy Valley Ranch for a spell and have a listen." -- Drew Daniel
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