Friday, December 01, 2006

PEOPLE LIKE US LIKE PEOPLE LIKE US

Vicki Bennett wears two hats: as host of the WFMU radio show "Do or D.I.Y.," home of all things "avant-retard," she spins everything from ethnic music to kitschy novelties to the work of experimental "composers," revealing the musics' connections and obliterating any artificial genre classifications in the process.

As People Like Us, she anticipated the mashup scene by years, creating surreal audio and visual collages that burst with an almost childlike glee, but, as on gorgeous tunes like "SwingLargo," can also be strangely moving.

Occasionally both worlds collide when she uses her radio show as a testing ground for her People Like Us releases.
During one segment last Sept. 18, she mixed Hawaiian steel-guitar music, South American Indian chanting, and Carl Stalling's cartoon sound effects to such glorious effect I recorded it off the station's audio stream. When I asked Vicki if I could post it here, she said, "I laughed my head off doing that section, I actually wanted it to go on the whole hour. It is actually becoming a People Like Us track in it's own right on an album I'm releasing with Ergo Phizmiz next Spring." Yay!

People Like Us: "Do or DIY excerpt 9-18-06"

Although Do or DIY is usually a summer-season show, there will be a
three hour WFMU-web special on 14th December, 6-9am EST, to be later archived as a Realplayer stream.

1 comment:

XNet said...

Hey! I just listened to the episode from September 18th yesterday. In my opinion it was one of the best episodes of last summer season!ar