People Like Us
Soleilmoon Recordings
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."
Jim Haynes
last updated:
09/07/01
Similar Artists:
Barbed, Stock, Hausen, and Walkman, Negativland, John Oswald, Blectum from Blechdom, Johnny Pinkhouse
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