Vicki Bennett has been working under the name People Like Us since 1991. Her technique of sampling, collaging and repurposing cultural ephemera has been deployed across various media, including radio, film, art installations and music releases. But in whatever form they have taken, their effect has always been to make us reconsider our understanding of these sources and our emotional response to them. Bennett sees People Like Us as part of a folk art tradition, her appropriation of mass-produced media in keeping with its egalitarianism and economy. But in repositioning and modifying the context of cultural artefacts, her work also subverts their original meaning or intent, creating something completely new in the process.

People Like Us
“Guide To Broadcasting/I’m 89”
From Early Radio Works Vol 1 (Discrepant) 2017, rec 1992–2000

Bennett’s work first appeared on the show Gobstopper, which was broadcast on Brighton Festival Radio in 1990, and this record brings together a selection of her collages from around that time up until the early 2000s. “Guide To Broadcasting/I’m 89” begins with the sound of British RP television announcements over steel drums and sci-fi sound effects, and the speed of transition and impact of each odd juxtaposition are dizzying and often hilarious. Set together in collage, the banality of television continuity, vacuous radio phone-ins and the saccharine tones of easy listening music dissolve into one surrealist fever dream.

People Like Us
“Another Kind Of Humour – Intro”
From Recyclopaedia Britannica (Selected Works 1992–2002) (Free Music Archive/Sucata Tapes) 2018

While Bennett’s pieces often elicit an acute emotional response, rerouting the innate melancholy or bittersweet joy of her source material into new directions, she’s not averse to taking her audience down to the gutter – a fact that’s particularly evident in these earlier works. “Another Kind Of Humour – Intro” begins with a countdown, as though it has been culled from the inside of a Bond villain’s base or a secret island owned by a family of marionettes. But between each number, we hear a fart noise of increasing intensity, suggesting that someone’s bum is about to launch like a rocket. Finally, a gargantuan raspberry thrusts the action skyward, the voice of the countdown exclaiming, “Maximum power!”.

People Like Us
“San Frandisco”
From Hate People Like You (Bandcamp/Staalplaat) 1997

Relying less on chopped up conversations and garbled announcements to deliver its message, Hate People Like You is more rhythmically and dynamically coherent, its samples frequently transitioning with a disarming glide rather than an alarming clunk. “Sanfrandisco” drops the opening bars of Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)” in to a locked groove, stabs of discordant organ and circling brass transforming it from a sun-drenched trip to something more ominous. The record slightly pre-dates the Do Or DIY radio which the artist began producing for WFMU in 2003, but Bennett’s description of the program as a “mixture of pop and avant-garde side by side, sometimes on top of one another” provides an apt definition of this record and also PLU in general.

People Like Us
“24T4 PLU & ME Part 2”
From Lassie House/Jumble Massive (Staalplaat/Soleilmoon) 2000

Released on 10" vinyl in 1997, Lassie House was reissued in 2000 as a double album with Jumble Massive from 1996. Filled with disconnected conversations that glitch out all coherent information, while sickly Muzak loops trundle below, there’s a sense of futility sunk into the mixture. “24T4 PLU & ME Part 2” blends snippets of public information and advertisements into one grand non-sequitur, each nonsense utterance pulped together into one fevered tract. It’s disorientating – lounge-y loops prop up odd dialogue about how to care for your sewing machine and stern evangelical rantings, their contrast against the insipid music that surrounds them rendering each sample as strange and disturbing as the other.

People Like Us & Kenny G
“Give Up It’s Mine”
From Nothing Special (Bandcamp) 2003

Sculpted from a three-hour radio show produced by herself and fellow WFMU DJ Kenneth Goldsmith, “Give Up It’s Mine” is the most unsettling thing on Nothing Special. Petula Clark’s “Geh In Die Stadt” (her German language version of “Downtown”) plays while someone – not Clark – wails gutturally across it. The combination of hearing an unfamiliar version of such an ubiquitous song and the sickening screams that rip through its bittersweet melody renders it completely dislocating. Bennett’s work revels in this type of shock to the system, the cognitive dissonance of something warm and inviting turned instantly alien, modified by juxtaposition with something brutal or bawdy, obscuring its original meaning and effect. The piece ends with KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up” squeezed into an elastic loop, the lyric of the title appearing to urge the previous unidentified shrieker to consider silence.

People Like Us & Wobbly
“Hello”
From Music For The Fire (Illegal Art) 2010

The opening chords of Lionel Richie’s “Hello” lock in rotation against atonal noodling, resembling the incidental music of a horror movie. An unseen protagonist proclaims “I love you!” and, when set against snippets of orchestral, almost concrète spookiness, Bennett and Wobbly (San Franciscan musician Jon Leidecker) transform the tone from unrequited love song to something resembling the sound of a relationship being salvaged via a séance. With Richie’s garbled vocal chopping in and out, it’s as though the medium’s connection keeps losing the signal. As choral voices rise to the top of the mix, the protagonist’s dialogue is reduced to sighs and gasps, deeply uncanny and far removed from the heartache of Richie’s original.

People Like Us
“Stuck In The USSR”
From Welcome Abroad (Bandcamp) 2011

Some songs are so culturally ubiquitous that listeners know each detail of its structure and shape instinctively, anticipating the delight of a chord change or lyric like Pavlov’s dog anticipating food. Bennett exploits this throughout her work, but to notable effect on “Stuck In The USSR”. The opening riff of The Beatles’ “The Ballad Of John & Yoko” rolls around and, instead of Lennon’s opening vocal, the riff continues to roll. It rolls for a few seconds more and, mid bar, Bennett drops in the “Christ!” from later in the first verse. And as Englebert Humperdinck’s “Release Me”, Bennett maintains a balance between frustration at the everywhereness of these cultural behemoths and the playful goading of a sacred cow. It recalls Cassetteboy’s “Duck Breath” – where John Lennon’s “Imagine” receives a toasting by Crazy Frog, driving an unidentified bystander to madness – but delivered with considerably less bile.

People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz
“Machines”
From The Keystone Cut Ups (Bandcamp) 2012

This is just one of several collaborations that Bennett has produced with musician and artist Ergo Phizmiz, including “Withers In The Waking” released in 2008 by Touch as part of their Touch Sevens series and “Rhapsody In Glue”, released the same year by Plurgo. The Keystone Cut Ups is quite different in tone to her more collage-based work, but no less noteworthy. Conceived as a live performance and video collage alongside this musical component, its aim was to explore early avant garde and silent cinema. “Machines” stacks layers of raspy synth sounds into a heroic loop, its Casio grandiosity and Bontempi bombast undercut by the almost comically lo-fi nature of the electronics.

People Like Us
“I’ve Got You”
From Abridged Too Far (Bandcamp) 2017

Abridged Too Far reprograms the emotional effect of its source material in much the same way that Bennett employed and perfected on 2018’s The Mirror. On “I’ve Got You”, Bennett barrels the exoticism of Getz and Gilberto’s “The Girl From Ipanema” into some seedier invocation of the swinging 60s. While Sinatra coos “I’ve got you…” above the cool accompaniment of Nelson Riddle’s orchestra, bursts of tropical percussion increase the tension, like a heartbeat raised in panic. But as Sinatra’s “I've Got You Under My Skin” melts into Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera” by, the cinematic sheen of the former gives way to the wide-grinning stoicism of the latter, but it’s an unnatural blend that suggests the presence of something more unsettling just beneath the surface.

People Like Us
“Free (My Prayer)”
From The Mirror (Bandcamp) 2018

Sourced from live performances of her audiovisual project The Mirror, this is Bennett’s most recent full album release, but also her most affecting. In order for Bennett to subvert the emotional effect of source material, to rewire its psychic impact, it must already have accrued significant cultural resonance. These appropriated samples have become so embedded in the mass consciousness that when she severs them from their original connotations it causes a kind of cognitive dissonance. And out of the listener’s shock and surprise, she is able to take the source material somewhere entirely different. This could be in the form of humour or an unexpected emotional response, but always by transcending the connotations of the original. “Free My Prayer” recycles some of her often used sources. Dean Martin’s “In the Chapel In The Moonlight” circles around the warm familiarity of The Beatles’ “Free As A Bird”, both of which collapse under the combined weight of their nostalgia and emerge into hazy reverie via Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills Of Your Mind” and Bing Cosby’s “White Christmas”.

You can read Abi Bliss's feature on People Like Us in in The Wire 447. Subscribers to The Wire also read the article online via the digital archive.