Buy People Like Us!
iPod download in our shop
It has occurred to us how nice films look when viewed on an iPod Touch or iPhone, especially of course ours! So we have made all the People Like Us films we can find (nearly 2.5 hours worth) into files that will fit onto that lovely little screen, and zipped them up, ready for you to purchase through Paypal at an extremely reasonable price.
Firstly make the purchase by Paypal, and then we will email you a weblink to two zipped folders, which you can download. Please note, the total size of these combined zips are 487MB, and once unzipped they contain multiple small mp4s, the right size for your iPod/iPhone. ONLY make the purchase if you have access to broadband! We cannot provide these files individually.
Once your iPod or iPhone is connected to your computer and iTunes is open, all you need to do is drag the films into the relevant iTunes folder, in the same way you would add any other media from within your computer.
Here is the list of films contained within:
Worldwide - price: $5
Jean Baudrillard - Le Xerox et l'Infini
The Tapeworm # TTW#02 [Cassette]
Cassette only - limited edition of 250 copies
available from our shop
Track listing:
A: Part One - 17m12s
B: Part Two - 15m07s
Jean Baudrillard's "Le Xerox et l'Infini" – originally published in Paris, 1987 – as read by Patricia and Ellen. Recorded on 12 July 2009 by Vicki Bennett in Hersham, England. Translation: Agitac, London, November 1988.
“Jean Baudrillard is perhaps the most important theorist of the 'after modern'. Though he says himself he has 'nothing to do with postmodernism', many interpret him (along with Jean-François Lyotard) as among the most important prophets of a truly postmodern era. His works have attracted high praise and derision all over the world.”
Patricia and Ellen were born in Reims, north-eastern France, on July 29, 1929. They told interviewers that their grandparents were peasants and their parents were civil servants. They became the first of their family to attend university when they moved to the Sorbonne in Paris. There they studied German, which led to them to begin teaching the subject at a provincial lycée, where they remained from 1958 until their departure in 1966. While teaching Patricia and Ellen began to publish reviews of literature, and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Wilhelm Mühlmann.
Later on, with the development of the magnetic tape recorder, Patricia and Ellen used these new means in order to manipulate their performances and expand the possibilities of language sound transformations. Patricia and Ellen continue to actively perform their work, the contextual quality of which is enhanced by their idiosyncratic delivery.
Reviews
Jean Baudrillard Le Xerox et l'Infini - Hard Format (August 2009)
Jean Baudrillard Le Xerox et l'Infini - Aquarius Records (August 2009)
UK - price including P&P: $8.75
EUROPE - price including P&P: $9.50
ELSEWHERE - price including P&P: $10.00
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Withers in the Waking" 7"
Released October 2008
on Touch (TS08)
The 8th in the series of Touch Sevens, and the first to introduce melodic narrative. Both songs are results of the WFMU podcast series "Codpaste", in which Vicki & Ergo publicly composed a series of collage compositions, deconstructing their respective practices, and a live soundtrack to Christian Marclay's "ScreenPlay". The series and soundtrack resulted in the online only album "Rhapsody in Glue", from which these two songs are alternative versions.
"Withers in the Whist" takes one of Vicki & Ergo's current staple obsessions: the melody line of Prokofiev's 'Troika' from the Lieutenant Kije soundtrack (originally used in V & E's work during a particularly snowy sequence of the Marclay film). This treatment dispenses with sampling entirely, instead using instruments to create variations on Prokofiev's deceptively simple melody-line, tied together with impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. It is playing with Prokofiev like a bad child who loves it's toys.
"In The Waking" began with Ergo replaying with multitracked guitars the main melodic motifs Vicki collaged in the composition "Carmic Waltz", with Vicki then ornamenting the guitars with splashes of colour like a real painter of sound, all blended into a pot of carnival steam with Ergo's wordplay. It is a fantasy for the dream the fairground has when the world is sleeping, but only takes place five minutes before the carousel wakes up
Side A: In the Waking 5:55 [Locked groove]
Side B: Withers in the Whist 4:27
UK - price including P&P: $8.50
EUROPE - price including P&P: $9.50
ELSEWHERE - price including P&P: $10.50
People Like Us "On The Rooftops Of London" CD Single
Mailorder Only 2007
People Like Us "On The Rooftops of London" was a session for the final edition of BBC Radio 3's "Mixing It", broadcast on 9 February 2007.
This is a one track CD single - just under 20 minutes long, hence at a lower price.
Thanks to Felix Carey, Philip Tagney, Mark Russell, Robert Sandall and Ergo Phizmiz.
You can download this as an mp3 elsewhere on this site.
UK - CD price including P&P: $8.50
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $9
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $10
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Honeysuckle Boulevard" 10"
Originally released for free between January and March 2007
We have a few copies of "Honeysuckle Boulevard" 10 inch record left - which we originally gave away for free in exchange for downloadable vouchers. If you would like to hear more from this period for free then go to our download page and point your cursor towards BOOTS!
We're making this available for what we think is a good price. We don't have enough budget left to give any of these spares away for free though, so bad luck if you missed out on the offer.
A. "Harpo Honeysuckle Suite"
1. Harpo Boulevard
2. Beyond Perpetuum
3. Honeysuckle Rose & Perpetuum Mobile
b: Merry Go Mambo Suite"
1. Merry Go Round
2. Fat Henry's Mambo
3. Oh No Not Another Cha Cha
This collaboration proved to be a very good warm up for what then went on to become the CD entitled "Perpetuum Mobile".
UK - price including P&P: $11
EUROPE - price including P&P: $12
ELSEWHERE - price including P&P: $15
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Perpetuum Mobile" CD
"Perpetuum Mobile" is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic "open source" compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other's work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but what makes this record different is that Ergo and Vicki then wrote and sang their own vocals on top of their Frankenstein creation. Here you will find slyly absurdist lyrics replete with monkeys, carousels, trousers, apple trees, tinkling bells, dogs, sausages, whiskey, and cannibalism. No matter how fraught with trauma, these ballads and ditties are sung with a straight face and mixed front and center, and the results feel like 1930s British music hall standards from an alternate universe: half Ivor Cutler, half George Formby. The astonishing thing is that for all this jiggery-pokery, "Perpetuum Mobile" makes for an exhilarating, remarkably fresh pop album. It works. On "Ghosts Before Breakfast" Ergo and Vicki proudly declare that they've got "quite a selection of pastry", and if the profusion of cuckoo clocks, gunshots, horn farts, string vamps, and digital malfeasance which go hurtling through this opening track is any indication, that's no idle boast. For sheer cornucopia of sonic raw materials, this track's avalanche of information sets the tone for the overflowing, manic record that follows. There's far too much to fully parse, but among the highlights: "Beyond Perpetuum" pushes off from the Comedian Harmonists' take on the 19th century compositional craze for "moto perpetuo" runs of continuous notes at a rapid tempo, and folds found piano, voice and strings into an interlocking array of M.C. Escher harmonic stairways. "Air Hostess" is detourned lounge pop that stitches together Nelson Riddle's "Ya Ya" theme to "Lolita", "Walk Right In", light operettas, organ, bachelor pad cha cha and mambo, and nervously twitching shards of Louis Armstrong. "Pierrot's Persecution Mania" bravely explores the possibilities of a Montparnasse-via-Dixieland hybrid of can-can and bluegrass, with ridiculous canned strings colliding with jew's harp boings, while "Soggy Style" rides banjo twangs, a digital bossa nova breakdown, and the "whooo-ooes" nicked from Terry Stafford's "Suspicion". Living up to the perpetual motion of its title and cock-a-hoop cover art, this is a frantically energetic music whose layered repetitions become cumulatively more disorienting and preposterous as they loop back. "Perpetuum Mobile" goes beyond the stealth-oldies nostalgia of the mashup scene and the "culture-jamming" rhetoric of plunderphonics, and shows Mr. Ergo and Ms. Vicki to be a potent, if Surrealist, songwriting team, and together they braid oddly affecting vocals and their trademark stolen audio into twenty-first century pop. Like the perpetual motion machines for which it is named, this collaboration will run and run and run and run and run and run and run… - Drew Daniel
UK - CD price including P&P: $16
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $17
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $17.50
People Like Us "All Together Now"
Released October 2006
Mailorder Only
People Like Us proudly present 27 minutes of new songs following visits to several music libraries, and appropriating favourites from the western world into a musical pantomime.
Contains:
1. Blue Bayou
2. Everyday
3. Crazy
4. Stand By Your
5. Green, Green Grass
6. I Walk The Line
7. Singin' In The Shower
Buy the CD here or download it elsewhere on this site.
UK- CD price including P&P: $10
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $10.50
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $11
People Like Us "Story Without End" DVD
Released Autumn 2005
4 Short Films by People Like Us
Design by Joerg Hartmannsgruber & People Like Us
Sonic Arts Network proudly presents a collection of short films by leading British A/V artist People Like Us, a true champion of a particularly English sense of humour. The DVD shows a journey though a multi-layered 20th Century, represented by bright eyed and enthusiastic images of the modern world, concluding with the new Sonic Arts Network commission 'Story Without End'.
Contains:
We Edit Life
The Remote Controller
Resemblage
Story Without End
UK - DVD price including P&P: $10
EUROPE - DVD price including P&P: $11
ELSEWHERE - DVD price including P&P: $12
People Like Us & Wobbly "There Goes Nothing"
Released 2002 (Mailorder only CDR) – an edit of People Like Us and Wobbly's live session on KFJC
01. The Way In
02. Naked Little Girl
03. Sheep Laid Out To Dry
04. Okay
05. Goodbye
06. Woman
07. The Working Title For Our Opera
08. SwingLargo
09. A New Baby
10. Bitter Dregs
11. Pain
You can download these tracks as mp3s elsewhere on this site.
UK - CD price including P&P: $8
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $8.50
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $9
People Like Us "24 Hours Like Ours"
Released August 2004 (Mp3DVD001) - mailorder only
Yes, you can find a lot of this for free online, and we wholeheartedely encourage to go get it! But if you would like us to do the work for you, then here is around 24 hours of PLU, in mp3 form, on a data DVD.
IMPORTANT! This is NOT a CD! You will need a DVD drive and a computer to access this day and night of PLU delight.
FEATURES MP3s OF:
Another Kind of Humor * 1992 * LP mini album
Lowest Common Dominator * 1993 * CD album
Guide To Broadcasting * 1994 * 3 inch
Beware The Whim Reaper * 1995 * CD album
Hate People Like You * 1997 * CD album
WhatÕs The Use - Live * 1999 * online album w/ The Jet Black Hair People/Wobbly
Hate People Like Us * 1999 * CD double remix album KZSU - Live * 2000 * w/ The Jet Black Hair People/Wobbly
Lassie House/Jumble Massive * 2000 * CD reissue of 95/96 vinyl
WhatÕs Love * 2000 * track for Love Is This compilation CD
Thermos Explorer * 2000 * CD album
A Fistful of Knuckles * 2000 * CD album
Home Roam Play/Work All Day * 2000 * 12 inch w/ Matmos
Swinglargo/Going Out Of My Town * 2000 * 7 inch
Live on Other Worlds * 2001 * ABC Radio National w/ Irene Moon & The ECC
Like * 2002 * Remix of Kamahl for Why Are People So Unkind? 3 inch CD
Preserved Cowgirl * 2002 * Remix for Tipsy Remix Party CD
The National Humm * 2002 * Remix of The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland
PLU & Friends Volume 1 * 2002 * mailorder CD album w/ V/A
There Goes Nothing * 2002 * mailorder CD album w/ Wobbly
Recyclopaedia Britannica * 2002 * CD album
Stifled Love * 2002 * LP album
Over The Edge - Live * 2002 * w/ Don Joyce and Wobbly
Tremble Peady * 2003 * Remix of Wobbly
PLU Messer Chups Remix * 2003 * for Messer Chups Crazy Price CD
John Peel Session * 2003 * BBC Radio 1
Nothing Special * 2003 * CD album w/ Kenny G
Wide Open Spaces * 2003 * w/ Matmos and Wobbly
Gongexeva * 2003 * track for Ergo Phizmiz CD
Session for Remixology on WFMU * 2003 * WFMU
When I Was Young/Downtown Once More * 2003 * 7 inch
Live on Mixing It * 2004 * BBC Radio 3
Abridged Too Far * 2004 * online album
UK - DVD price including P&P: $11
EUROPE - DVD price including P&P: $11.50
ELSEWHERE - DVD price including P&P: $12
People Like Us "Recyclopaedia Britannica - Selected Works 1992-2002"
Released April 2002 - Mess Media (thru Soleilmoon) MESS1
SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE
“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. 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
UK - CD price including P&P: $7
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $7.50
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $8
People Like Us "Thermos Explorer"
Released Autumn 2000 on Hot Air AIRHEAD002
1. Music of Your Own
2. Take a Walk
3. I'm 89
4. Snippy
5. People Like You
6. Ipanmnmna
7. Millenium Dome
8. Uh Dear
9. Cream Crackers
10. Moronically Yours
11. Sugarbeat
12. Whistle Song
13. Caciocavallo
14. Pauline
15. Kitten
16. Importance of Mistakes
17. Sardines
18. Dolphy
19. Sugar and Splice
20. Nobody Does
21. ILY
22. People Like You
23. Serenade
You can download this album as mp3s elsewhere on this site.
UK - CD price including P&P: $5
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $5.50
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $6
People Like Us "A Fistful of Knuckles"
Released Winter 2000 on Caciocavallo/Soleilmoon Recordings CAD10
"People Like Us is simply too good. Why it presents us again and again CD, like a circus. One must win something distance from this music, thus her one not flatly with the endless heavily meaning basic sounds and memories. Here to the world between American white diapers, Pferdchen those the world mean, Kleinkinderklukluxklansofties and other one like Country, donkeys, sakeless Schubidus and cold kriegern in a leckeren soup. People Like US is like cinema, like which old humans at MTV finds so exciting always, these many cuts, only the cuts are not cuts, but, deeply inside into this world from sound the world of the television offers precise interventions to surgical quality, without it would refer to expressly drauf that that really like that it is but supplies actually only for People Like US material, which so unconsciously passed through quasi by us that one can cannibalize it ever further and further. Carefully naturally and with a Manie CUT copy paste of the Artworkings, which one, once belonged never again loose will. " A Fistful OF Knuckles " is the terminator point of a long long search to the praised country, which ran from the east coast in long Trecks to the west coast, made a stopover with John Wayne over in People Like US to end." - translation from de-bug magazine
You can download this album as mp3s elsewhere on this site.
UK - CD price including P&P: $7
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $7.50
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $8
People Like Us "Lassie House/Jumble Massive"
Released Autumn 2000 on Caciocavallo/Soleilmoon Recordings CAD9
There is an air of both humor and impending doom within the works of People Like Us. From her first release in 1991 People Like Us has created or contributed to more than 25 CDs and records as well as several collaborative releases and numerous compilation tracks. Lassie House/Jumble Massive is a mid-price reissue of two limited edition releases from Staalplaat and Soleilmoon. The name Jumble Massive describes the music perfectly. This album contains a hodge-podge mish-mash of spoken word snippets and accidental vocalization that have been skillfully edited together to make something inconceivably peculiar and wonder. There are some tracks which are more musical, but again, collage is the preferred method of creation. People Like Us have defined a new musical territory with an atmosphere primarily composed of nitrous oxide and adrenaline.
You can download this album elsewhere on this site in mp3 form.
UK - CD price including P&P: $7
EUROPE - CD price including P&P: $7.50
ELSEWHERE - CD price including P&P: $8
