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Title: Streetwalking
Medium: C-Type Print on Matt Fuji Archive Paper
Dimensions: 914mm x 321mm
Year: 2011
Edition: 100 + 5 A/P
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Title: In Retrospect
Medium: C-Type Print on Matt Fuji Archive Paper
Dimensions: 671mm x 392mm
Year: 2011
Edition: 100 + 5 A/Ps
Co-published by Modern Empire and Vitrine Gallery
"Streetwalking" and "In Retrospect" form part of a new series of digital collage works included in Vicki Bennett's forthcoming exhibition at Vitrine Gallery. Bennett uses a unique technique to expand film scenes beyond their conventional screen ratio. The finished results reveal beautiful panoramic views of the background landscapes as captured by the panning camera, effectively allowing film scenes to be seen as never before.
Bearing a relation to the British Vorticism movement of the early 20th Century, Bennett takes a Futurist approach to image making, attempting to capture dynamic movement with still images. She often utilises digital technology to apply analogue techniques and for more than a decade has used rotoscoping in her short films and live audio-visual performance to mask, cut and place objects elsewhere on screen. During her commission for The Great North Run Cultural Programme 2009 she developed the process for expanding film outside its frame and began work on this new series shortly after.
More on the Vitrine Gallery solo exhibition The Doors Of Perception here:
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/2011/the_doors_of_perspection_people_like_us_exhibition.html
In Retrospect and Streetwalking are available as limited edition C-type prints. They can be purchased separately or as a pair.
In Retrospect
Price: 100GBP (unframed) including UK P&P (see note at bottom for overseas purchases)
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"Welcome Abroad" by People Like Us
Release date: 24 May 2011
Illegal Art IA124 http://www.illegalart.net
UK - price including P&P: $11.00
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EUROPE - price including P&P: $12.00
ELSEWHERE - price including P&P: $13.00
Download in MP3 or FLAC form, download videos
"Welcome Abroad is the soundtrack to a dream - overlaying a cabaret with the circus, a music hall with the radio, a nightclub with the movies. Finely tuned sounds from the collective unconscious, fitted together with care and clarity and skill, producing a hallucinatory landscape that shifts and slides, shimmering with each new sample. Julie Andrews duets with Jim Morrison? Damn." -Steinski
Vicki Bennett, under the People Like Us moniker, returns from several collaborations for her first solo album in several years. Stranded in the United States for an extended period after the Icelandic volcano eruption blocked her British homeland's airspace, Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere, from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. 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.
Taking a glance at just a few tracks from Welcome Abroad, songs from The Beatles, Ennio Morricone, Danny Kaye, Bob Dylan, Rod McKuen, Elton John, Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick, John Denver, Julie London, and Queen are all amalgamated. While recent 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.
With the release of Welcome Abroad, Illegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads. All label releases over the last five years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system. People Like Us also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old. Vicki Bennett is such a firm endorser of the gift economy that she is the top downloaded audio artist on UbuWeb.

As part of the Prints of Darkness exhibition at http://www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk/ from 17 July to 04 September 2010, People Like Us have been commissioned to make a vinyl picture disc responding to the title theme of the exhibition.
This Is Light Music will be available for shipping to you from the second week in August. You can pre-order here. Please note - if you are intending to buy the print that Vicki was commissioned to do, please contact Edinburgh Printmakers through the above website url, since they are offering the record free to the first 20 people buying a print. Prices below in US Dollars include postage and packing.
THIS ITEM IS SOLD OUT WHEN BOUGHT DIRECTLY FROM US. IF YOU WOULD LIKE A COPY PLEASE GO TO THE EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS WEBSITE AND ORDER FROM THEM. ALL REMAINING ORDERS WILL BE SENT FROM US TODAY (18 SEPTEMBER 2010)
http://www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk/
Please note - this LP costs more than some other merchandise you may have bought from us - this is because of the nature of the item, in that the gallery needed to cover costs, etc, plus it costs more to post this kind of item. We assure you we always try and make things available as cheaply as we can!

For more info on the exhibition and how we responded to the task here:
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/2010/people_like_us_new_record_and_print_in_edinburgh_exhibition.html
Dates of Exhibition: 17 July to 04 September 2010
Opening Hours: Weekly Tuesday - Saturday 10.00am - 6.00pm
CLOSED SUNDAY & MONDAYS
Admission: Free
Venue: Edinburgh Printmakers, 23 Union Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3LR
Telephone: 0131 557 2479
Website: www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk
Release date is 15 June 2010:
The fruit of many years of work, this album began as People Like Us & Wobbly collected and collaged their way through various depictions of misfired communications and heartbreak sourced from popular culture for a series of live improvisations. Music For The Fire is a plunderphonic concept album depicting the lifespan of a relationship, as told through samples of hundreds of different songs and voices who had no idea they were all telling the same story until they were all spliced together.
Strangely direct and evocative for an album assembled entirely from a patchwork of disparate sources and music both obscure and over-familiar, Music For The Fire comes with an illustrated lyric sheet which reproduces the countless sampled voices as a single if utterly schizophrenic text -- a bedtime story that is wildly inappropriate for actual children. No reliable narrators, just the familiar and absurd, which on different spins of the disc might strike you as either maudlin, poignant or almost painfully hilarious. There is a way out of the maze, but it's up to you to find it.
UK - price including P&P: $11.00
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EUROPE - price including P&P: $12.00
ELSEWHERE - price including P&P: $13.00
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Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. She has shown work at, amongst others, Tate Modern, the National Film Theatre, Purcell Room, Pompidou Center, Sonar in Barcelona, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the BBC and Channel 4, released albums of her work on labels such as Tigerbeat6, Soleilmoon and Touch, both solo and in collaboration with Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Christian Marclay and members of Negativland. 2010 will see the completion of a commission for the Edinburgh Art Festival as well as concert appearances at the AV Festival, MACBA, Liverpool Sound City, Copenhagen & Jerusalem.
Wobbly is the long-running collage project of Jon Leidecker (US), who improvises live with pre-recordings to coax the harmonies out of recorded sounds of individuals and animals from disparate cultures. Albums have been released on the labels Alku, Phthalo, Illegal Art, Tigerbeat6 and Vague Terrain. Previous and ongoing projects include the bands Chopping Channel, Sagan, the Freddy McGuire Show and Amen Seat, as well as various collaborations with Negativland, Matmos, Thomas Dimuzio, Blevin Blectum, Lesser, Tim Perkis & Xopher Davidson, Otomo Yoshihide and MaryClare Bryztwa. In 2009 he was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona to produce "Variations", a podcast and lecture series overview of the history of musical collage & sampling.
People Like Us & Wobbly have been collaborating since her first visit to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998. Early improvisations as a trio (with The Jet Black Hair People, aka Peter Conheim of Negativland) are documented by the online album What's The Use, as well as archives of numerous radio and concert appearances recorded both in California and London, including on BBC Radio 3's "Mixing It". The present album for Illegal Art is composed from live recordings, carefully and obsessively edited over a great deal of time, and is their funniest, darkest and yet somehow strangely compassionate work, Music For The Fire tells a story which every listener will recognize in their own unique way.
With the release of People Like Us & Wobbly's Music For The Fire, Illegal Art continues to embrace a pay-what-you-want business model for high-quality downloads. All label releases over the last four years have been issued (or reissued) under a the flexible payment system, and the entire Illegal Art back catalog should be subsumed by the end of 2010. People Like Us & Wobbly also have a history of offering free downloads of entire projects, both new and old. Vicki Bennett is such a firm endorser of the gift economy that she is the top downloaded audio artist on UbuWeb. Her online-only album Abridged Too Far (2004) garnered over 25,000 downloads in its first month, and she adamantly defends such free offerings as beneficial to both the artist and consumer.
Press Quotes:
PEOPLE LIKE US
"... a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick." - Phil England, The Wire
"Bennett has continued to impress us with her technical ability and her wonderful sense of the ridiculous." - Olli Siebelt, BBC
"... beautiful, compelling, funny, crazy stuff. I listen to [People Like Us] while sitting at my drawing board." - Matt Groening
"... it is that delirious adventure to tune in Disney cartoons while we administered a strong dose of amphetamines, LSD, and any other lysergic cocktail." - J. Carlos Vellamueva, Rolling Stone (Mexico)
"... after prolonged exposure to the alchemical work of Vicki Bennett, we see and hear our own everyday world as one big joke which is already cut to pieces. You'll laugh, you'll cry." - Drew Daniel, Matmos
"... warped-out easy easy-listening goddess and sample abuser extraordinaire." - Ben Willmott, NME
"Bennett has taken Eisenstein's montage collisions and refashioned them as bumper cars at a seaside carnival." - Jim Supanick, Film Society of Lincoln Center
WOBBLY
"If only one album were to be timecapsuled for the turn of this century, Wild Why would be a worthy candidate" - Pataphysics Lab
"The head is dazzling of all the cut up and collage which go by in highspeed" - Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
"It would be pointless to try and characterize any of the sessions because the range of material they draw on is so diverse that the tracks are constantly changing direction" - Ben Borthwick, The Wire
"An expert at sculpting cohesive harmonies out of seemingly disjointed fragment." - George Zahora, Splendid
"... a hewn diamond that, although beautiful, cuts through the most impermeable of solid bullshit." - Tobias C. Van Veen, Stylus
"Wild Why is a staggering deconstruction of commercial urban radio, breaking down mainstream hip-hop and R&B into a sludge of guttural samples and low-end goo... the rules holding our own world together bend wildly under even the slightest pressure." - Philip Sherburne, Needle Drops