As before, so again. Just a week after the Cube saw Ergo Phizmiz’s playful, slightly barking lofi-opera ‘The Third Policeman’, QU Junktions bring another tirelessly brilliant underground icon to the creaking, faded seats. Vicki Bennett has been People Like Us for nearly 20 years now (and has actually collaborated with Mr Phizmiz), scalpel-ing audio and visual into disorientating and surreal new collages, films and music that are clever, queasy, funny and shot through with gently zinging humour. A big believer in free distribution of almost all her work (UbuWeb is bulging right now), Bennett’s work is equally suited to the Sonar festival as the Southbank Centre (where ‘Magical Misery Tour’ debuted), and is also cool enough to merit a weekly show on terrific US radio station WFMU. And you really have no excuse to miss a show that splices a bloody bath full of horror clips into a twitchy, mutant new whole. That’s a general life rule by the way, write it down.
People Like Us: Magical Misery Tour
Haunted Cinema from two contrasting visual and audio artists who wrestle new sight and sound lines from trailing edge technology and past-master material. From the deft and humorously subversive People Like Us comes a new ‘Horror Collage’, while via Japan/New York comes Aki Onda performing a rare set on his famous cassette Walkmans.
Look Behind You… She Is Back! Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us raids the tombs of HORROR films, plundering the Un-Dead and cutting up scared suburban teenagers amongst many victims into a delicious perverse A/V set which premiered at The Sound of Fear at da Southbank Centre under the working title of Horror Collage. The source material is 95% from horror movies, with the content portraying not so much a scary nightmare but a journey through the underworld of everyday human experiences. It is not true to say you do not relate to this kind of horror movie. Truth is stranger than fiction. Having said this, People Like Us, as ever, see the positive and sometimes humorous side of the most ghastly scenarios, and by accompanying the edited found feature film footage with new sample collage pop songs, elevate you from the swamp.
Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett 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.
The queen of the collage has blood on her hands, enjoy the horror of it all.
Aki Onda is an artist whose musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. He captures field recordings with the cassettes and then physically manipulates the tape machines with electronics in his performances to mesmerising effect. Strikingly poetic with ghosts of the physical, and invisible captured in his sound world, Onda re-examines moments of time he has spent wandering and recording. Maximising the micro-narrative/diary-like elements contained in his performances Onda fits perfectly a film festival.
Onda started making music with the sampler and computer, and formed Audio Sports with Eye Yamatsuka (of The Boredoms) and Nobukazu Takemura in Osaka in 1990. He then became a sought after producer before starting his travels and recording his cassettes, taking photos and collaborating.
