People Like Us

by Heather Phares East Sussex DJ and multimedia artist Vicki Bennett has performed and composed under the name People Like Us since 1992. Much like her friends and sometime collaborators Negativland, Bennett's works mix music, dialogue and found sounds from old vinyl into expressive, amusing compositions. Her approach has had several interesting names applied to it, including "culture-jamming" and "plunderphonics," but none are as intriguing as the work itself. Starting with her first album, 1992's Another Kind Of Humor Another Kind Of Murder, which was a joint effort with Abraxas, Bennett's works have combined humor, menace and kitsch into experimental yet accessible sound collages. Her contributions to international experimental music festivals and radio shows and collaborations with Negativland, the Jet Black Hair People and MusikTerrorist are critically acclaimed, as are albums like 1996's Jumble Massive and the following year's Hate People Like You, which were co-released by the Soleilmoon and Staalplaat labels. The 1999 remix album Hate People Like Us featured many of Bennett's collaborators reworking her collages, and her seventh album he Thermos Explorer came out later that year.