People Like Us

Vicki Bennett, the East Sussex-based DJ and multimedia artist, has created and performed as People Like Us since 1991. In the manner of her acquaintances and intermittent partners Negativland, Bennett constructs pieces that weave music, spoken passages, and retrieved audio from vintage vinyl, films, and downloads into evocative and witty arrangements. Labels such as “culture-jamming” and “plunderphonics” have been applied to her process, yet the results remain more compelling than any designation. Early People Like Us recordings, among them 1996’s Beware the Whim Reaper, pursued a preoccupation with easy listening and lounge styles before Bennett turned to country & western on A Fistful of Knuckles (2000) and Wide Open Spaces (with Matmos and Wobbly, 2003). Many of her strongest works, notably 2004’s Abridged Too Far, have fused disparate materials—polka, yodeling, soft rock, and glitch—into unified collages. Partnerships with Ergo Phizmiz, beginning with 2007’s Perpetuum Mobile, have propelled both artists toward heightened absurdity through dense, cartoonish assemblages augmented by their own vocals. Later solo efforts such as 2018’s The Mirror present surreal, dreamlike recombinations of familiar pop oldies.

Bennett’s output began with the 1992 album Another Kind of Humor Another Kind of Murder, a collaboration with Abraxas that already merged humor, menace, and kitsch within experimental yet approachable sound collages. Her appearances at international experimental music festivals and radio programs, together with projects alongside Negativland, the Jet Black Hair People, and MusikTerrorist, have earned critical praise, as have the Soleilmoon release Jumble Massive (1996) and the Staalplaat album Hate People Like You (1997). The 1999 remix collection Hate People Like Us gathered reworkings of her collages by numerous collaborators, while her seventh album, The Thermos Explorer, appeared in 2000. Recyclopaedia Britannica, issued in 2002, encapsulated the first ten years of her career.

That same year Bennett recorded Wide Open Spaces—joined by Wobbly’s Jon Leidecker and Matmos members Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt—inside the lecture hall of the San Francisco Art Institute; Tigerbeat6 released the album in 2003, the year People Like Us launched the long-running sound-art program Do or DIY on WFMU. In 2006 Bennett became the first artist granted unrestricted entry to the entire BBC Archive. She issued Perpetuum Mobile, the initial collaboration with sound artist and songwriter Ergo Phizmiz, in 2007. Another joint effort with Wobbly, Music for the Fire, came out on Illegal Art in 2010. Welcome Abroad, released in 2011, drew inspiration from Bennett’s extended visits to New York and Baltimore during the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which closed European airspace for weeks. The Keystone Cut Ups, a DVD made with Phizmiz, appeared in 2012. Bennett’s mashup-intensive Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice was issued by the Cutting Hedge label in 2013.

In 2017, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut album, the Discrepant label initiated a series of People Like Us reissues beginning with Abridged Too Far. Originally a 2004 digital release, the album incorporated pieces created for John Peel’s program and for WFMU. Discrepant also released Optimized!, a split LP with Porest, while its sublabel Sucata Tapes issued the cassette Early Radio Works, Vol. 1. Wide Open Spaces received its first vinyl edition from Discrepant in 2018. The Mirror, a CD comprising music from an audiovisual performance of the same name along with an immersive cinema work titled Gone, Gone Beyond, appeared on Cutting Hedge that year; Discrepant followed with an abridged vinyl version the next year.