People Like Us: New Life for Old Tech

I caught up with Vicki Bennett when her solo project, People Like Us, performed at Subterranean in Chicago. While her live performances now include found video footage in addition to sound, Bennett has concentrated on her sound collage techniques over the last ten years. She's incorporated found sounds and live performances into these pastiches, and gradually adjusted her means of working as she's acquired new technology. Film projector trio Wet Gate opened the show, and projectionist Peter Conheim helped me with the interview.

"I've always been recording things, but it didn't start with sound — as an adult, it started with visual materials. I've always been using collage in the way that I work. When I started using time-based media, I was using video. When I was in college, I was doing video collage. When I left college, I couldn't use an edit suite anymore because it's too expensive, so I resorted to sound recording as an art form, because it's the only thing I could do. But it's not just that. At the same time I was also getting into doing radio in Brighton. I was given the opportunity to have a radio show, just at the right time, which kind of gave me enthusiasm because I knew I had a public outlet for what I was doing. So basically it was a combination of DJ'ing and then realizing also that it could go beyond the public entertainment and actually making it into an art form in itself."

She started creating her collages with turntables, a DJ mixer, and a reverb unit. "Then I started borrowing someone's 4-track, just a cassette 4-track, Fostex thing. I started thinking about things more in terms of a soundscape. That was still while I was DJ'ing. And then in '91, I bought my friend's Amiga 500 computer. I bought it with the intention of bumping up the graphics and doing video editing, which I didn't actually manage to do for another 8 1/2 years, because he was using it for music. This bloke is actually on my double remix CD, he's Katy Brown [Kevin Browning], and this is who I bought my computer off of 8 1/2 years ago."

"I basically carried on using sound because it was too expensive in the end to actually bump it up to doing video. I was using this tracker program which everyone used to use, which is basically this program which runs vertically on a computer screen. You can improvise live with your samples, and keep changing the rhythms of the samples being triggered. It's very easy and you don't have to use MIDI or anything — it's all internal. And then I bought this sampler that you plug in the back of your computer, called Techno Sound Turbo. It's an 8-bit sampler, cost me 26 pounds. I basically did my first two albums on that: 'Another Kind of Humor Another Kind of Murder,' a split album with Abraxas on Serpent, and the second 'Lowest Common Dominator.' They were both done on 8-bit samplers, not because I was being romantic, but because it was a financial constraint that I had."

"The Amiga 500 started off about 1/2 a Meg, and it got upgraded to one Meg [of] hard disk. It's a games computer. So all the samples were within this 1 Meg of sound, all the samples I was using were already in there. This program [was] called Med, and then there was this upgrade called Octamed. Med was a 4-track, tracker program. There were loads of different programs called trackers, which ran vertically on a screen, not horizontally like programs now. You would be able to assign certain points running down the screen, where you could actually write in what samples you wanted triggered as it rolls past you."

"It rolled like a will, so you would punch in sample numbers that you wanted by bringing them up on the screen. You'd select your samples as it was playing, and you'd punch them in by pressing your computer keyboard. It would assign the number or you would assign the number, and you would use your computer keyboard as a 2 1/2 octave key range, and you would stick tape on to the first and third keys of your computer, and use it like a piano."

"You could manipulate the samples, by going into another bit of the program. It was a great program. I wish you could get it in 16-bit, I'd still be using it! You'd be able to boost the sample, echo the sample, filter the sample. It was all in 8-bit, and so it had this kind of weird sound to it. I bought this reverb unit, and once you put things through that, it wasn't quite as dreadful. It was good enough to use." She would run her finished mixes through the reverb. 

"I didn't improvise them, but it would contain bits that were improvised in the Amiga, which was being recorded. At that point I got hold of a Teac 4-track, which was a really nice thing." She describes the Teac 234 as "a big rack thing. I actually got it off of Coil, and they recorded bits of their first album, 'Scatology,' on this 4-track. I had their 4-track, which had some of my bips and bops from the Amiga in there. And then I'd have this really old cassette deck on pause, it was on pause/record. I could do things channeling through that for another point, because I only had the DJ mixer."

"I tried a few times to make an album on the Teac, [layering] as a 4-track, and I felt that it didn't have the live element, I felt it didn't have the magic to it, and it felt really stale." Instead, she used the Teac "to compose pieces I had done on my Amiga where I didn't have enough memory in the Amiga to do everything I wanted to do. That 1 Meg only goes so far." For mixing, "it's output into a cassette deck for my master, or if I managed to borrow a DAT recorder, my master would be on DAT."

"If I was using my 4-track, there would be a certain amount of mixing going on with the volumes of things, bringing channels in and out on my cassette, in the 4-track as well. If you listen to 'Beware the Whim Reaper,' the last third of it is a big soundscape of 4-track on Amiga and 4-track on the Tascam. It would be partly on the Amiga and it would be partly on the cassette, and then going through the DJ mixer, and I'd be waiting with a cassette, inside the cassette recorder, for the next track that was going to play. The whole thing that would be the nightmare would be switching from track to track. It's kind of worth watching in a way. 'Lassie House' was [also] done live."

"I've always worked with long lists. In the old days when I was constructing my spoken word pieces for radio, it was very very methodical. I'd collect a 90-minute cassette of spoken word samples, and then I'd go through the cassette and write down all the words from the samples onto paper. I'd cut up the paper into all the sentences, lay them all over the floor like a jigsaw and then I'd make a story on the floor before even starting the piece. Once I've made the story, then I'd stick it all together with cello tape, and then I'd make the tape, the audiotape. That's how I did 'TV Dinner', which is on 'Guide to Broadcasting,' all the bits on 'Jumble Massive,' all the bits on 'Lassie House' — they're all done on paper. I still do that to a certain extent, but I'm a bit more freeform in the way I work now."

When she makes her albums, "my friend Simon always sits with me, because otherwise I get deranged. Simon has been with me for every album I've made, apart from the last one because he has to sit and tell me what I'm doing. Actually, I sit and say to Simon, 'OK, so I'm going to do this now, aren't I?' And he'll just look at me, and I'll go, 'Yeah I am, aren't I?' He'll sit and be my mirror. It would take me about six hours to mix down the album right and I'd get to the last five minutes and then suddenly I'd accidentally hit something and it'd all go wrong and I'd have to start again." Since her albums flow continuously, she completes the entire album as one take without interruptions, and it takes her many tries to finish a performance to her satisfaction.

For her live performances, Bennett "started off strictly as a DJ, but I've never been a normal, inverted commas, DJ. I've never been a slave to the public. In fact the thought has always disgusted me. I've played in a lot of clubs and bars, and whenever people have started to dance, or even were standing with their drink and swinging their hips, I'll immediately turn it off and put something else on. I wasn't put on this earth to entertain people in that way. I want to make people think in the way that I work, and to make people swing their hips is not thinking as far as I'm concerned. So I started up DJ'ing, but I was working with collage in a live situation. My idea of live is that you're there doing it, that's what I call live. People used to say to me, for years, they'd say, 'Do you play live, or do you DJ?' and I said 'I do both, I DJ live.' I don't sit there like a robot entertaining, slave to master, at people's request. That isn't live as far as I'm concerned."

"I mean, I'd say that I actually started to really differentiate when I started really messing with record players when I was DJ'ing, and that was in 1996. I'd say the first point at which I could truly say that I was messing with sound in a really hands-on way would be in summer, 1996. I did the Staalplaat Festival in Berlin, and I DJ'ed for 7 nights in a row, for between 3 and 6 hours each night. I got to the point of exhaustion where I would actually be going much much further, and really pushing much further with the way I was working. It was at that point that I met someone called Sniper, who was really using record players in a quite violent matter, using the needle in ways that I had not really worked with. It was at that point that I started using live video as well, where I was bringing the audio through from that, which I'd also say was a very

live element. There was the manipulation of the needle on the record, scratching as well, but in a really crude way, that made me really feel like I was working in a live way. In 1997 I bought my first Mini-Disc player, where you can basically make your own loop points. That's the point where I started thinking I'm going to move away from this thing using vinyl, because I didn't feel I was getting the respect and the attention I deserved in a live situation. I didn't want people coming up to me in the middle of my set asking me for things. I'd always feel really insulted when people would come up to me and make requests when I was obviously working very hard. I thought if I cross over and use a different kind of medium which isn't associated with the entertainer in a passive way, then people will shut up and they'll watch . It was at that point that I actually started using video in a lot more. I started using the video as the focus for people's eyes, rather than me, or their drinks, and also I stopped using other people's audio unless it was in a manipulated, looped fashion. It's the Mini- Disc that made me transfer."

"I bought this Roland DJ 17 in May of '94, which was made for DJs because it's a really really fast, keyboard-based, sampler. It's a sampler — you've got filters, LFOs, and all the other stuff like that. You can take your sample, you can record it in by just pressing a button. And then, [you can] press a button to start the sample, press a button to stop it, and it's immediately on your keyboard. You don't have to move inside the sampler and start deciding where you're going to put it. It's there for you. Once you've got that you can go into the filter section of the sampler and you can really mess with the samples. 'Beware the Whim Reaper' is the first album that I did using this sampler. And it's probably the one where I've used the manipulations within the sampler the most. And by coincidence, or not coincidence, my most ambient, inverted commas, album, because I was using all these things like LFOs that basically a lot of ambient people are using. It's a live tool as well."

"When I was learning to use my sampler, it was basically me playing things at double the octave or half the octave so you get double or half the speed. Whereas now I'm a little bit more sophisticated in the way that I work, and I'll get a calculator out and work out sample lengths that way. It's a good way of working — with a Roland sampler, you get a little LCD screen with a waveform on it, and you can make loop points where you can make the samples go backwards and forwards or whatever. The sample has a numeric value to the left rather than a time value. Your sample might be 16 thousand long, and then you'll get a calculator and divide it by three, and then suddenly you get very interesting lengths of sample coming along which you wouldn't have thought of. A lot of my ways of working, I kind of counteract my lack of academic musical ability by getting out calculators and doing it by math."

"There's one section in the sampler where you can use it as a piano. Every single note that you press will be triggering the same sample, and that's very nice because you can make chords and see the way that they jar with each other. If you go into another bit of the sampler which is called the patch bay, you can assign one sample to one and then you assign different samples to different [keys], or the same sample to any key. You're able to control each key in a separate way. Once you're able to do that, you're able to go into the filter section, where you can decide what kind of swell you're gonna have, depending on how hard the press you key. The harder you press the key, the more effect you'll have on any filter you've set."

"I work a lot with this chap called Adrian Phillips, he's called Mr. Motivator, he's on the double-version of the remix CD. I first met him in 1989, and he was the first person that I met that was using skimming records, by lifting the needle up and letting it skim records. He's been doing that ever since — I've known him 11 years now. I've been working with him that long. We jam just in my house where basically he'll be on the record player and I'll be on the sampler. He feeds the output through the sampler. He'll be skimming things there; I'll be sampling bits and looping them. We record it onto DAT or Mini-Disc or whatever, and then I'll cut up bits of that edit and loop bits. 'Hate People Like You' is a big example of basically jamming and then editing what I've been jamming with. I'd say that that constitutes 50 percent of People Like Us is editing what I've been jamming."

"In 1990, my first release was under the name The Please Disease. It was on a label called Cold Spring in England. They've released Psychic TV and that sort of thing. Their first release was a compilation called 'And the Wolves Shall Lick Their Jaws from Your Belly.' It's got the Hafler Trio on it and the Grey Wolves and all these sort of post-industrial people, and we're on it. It's basically me and Mr. Motivator, although he wasn't called that then, and my then

boyfriend Julian, and it's us DJ'ing. We were messing around with records and old tapes of 'The Goon Show' and stuff like that. We were just so naïve that we just gave him the tape and there's a track on there."

In addition to manipulating found footage, Bennett incorporates original performances into her collages. "I've got a friend called Rik Patten, who has occasionally played violin or keyboards. He's played with a few pretty famous people but I just can't remember any of their names. He's one of those people who can just pick anything up and play it." Patten currently works with Arthur Brown, who is best known for the Crazy World of Arthur Brown's hit "Fire". "Arthur Brown lives in my town, he lives one street away from me in Lewes, in Sussex."

With Bennett, "he's played flute, he's played Hammond organ. He's got a Hammond organ, which he played on 'Hate People Like You,' on 3 or 4 tracks. He's got a Leslie speaker with a Hammond organ, and then I just hung two [Realistic] PZMs down." She plugs the microphones "straight into my 4-track." Patten "lives in a basement flat in Brighton, and to get his Hammond organ into his house he had to chop out a section of his doorway to get it around the corner. So when you go there now, there's just this big chunk missing out of the doorway which has all been cemented over, so that he'd get it around the corner, and it just stayed like that."

"I build the pieces in my imagination because my Roland sampler is 4 meg, which means that you can get 22 seconds of stereo samples or 44 1/2 seconds of mono, and that isn't enough to make a track, even looping. [A track] will start off where I'm putting my samples into my sampler. There's a real-time recorder within my sampler, which means that you're using it like a tape recorder. It's got a thing called a sequencer in it, but it's got a real- time sequencer, which means if you get it wrong you have to do it again — it's like a cassette. You can record up to 8 takes, one over the next, like an 8-track, where you're looping all your tracks. You'll go on to track one, you'll do a series of loops on that. Then you'll do track 2, and you do some loops or just play on the keyboard or play some notes. And then once you've done that, you get to a certain point where you run out of memory, because you've only got 4 Megs. That's the first section of the song. You save that on to disk, take that out, and then you start section number 2 of the song. You put it on to 3 1/2" floppy disk in your keyboard. My tracks generally

consist of 3 separate sections because of the memory problem. Once I've made my separate tracks, the 3 separate tracks go on the ADAT to make the whole track." Starting with her latest release, The Thermos Explorer, Bennett uses a computer for the final step in organizing her material. "I put lots of tracks onto the ADAT, and then I put it into the computer, and that's like part 3 of me putting my album together is done in the computer."

Bennett does not own an ADAT, which has presented problems in the past. "I actually had to hire one for 'Hate People Like You' for 100 pounds. I had to drive to London to get it. I had it for a week and caught a cold on the second day of hiring it, and so I did zero until the last two days and made my album in two days."

In addition to these musical collages, Bennett's work includes spoken word sections. "The spoken word pieces generally are just spoken word pieces on their own. I've tended not to mix spoken words with music. I tend not to get spoken word people to do my guest vocals. I don't know why, but it's not my style a lot of the time, except for in the live situation, in which case the people that are speaking are actually on the video and you can see them talking. It's something that I want to separate myself from and I don't even know why, but the idea of getting samples to speak verbally, on top of music, there's a lot of people doing that, [but] it's something I really don't want to do so much. Unless they're making noises, in which case I'll use it. If they're making slurping noises or sex noises or something then I'll use it. I only use MiniDisc for spoken word on a master recording because it doesn't notice."

While Bennett categorizes her recent Hate People Like Us as a remix record, it varies from most other remix records. "When I asked people, I said, in my mind, a remix isn't necessarily using my material. It's gonna be using something in the way that I work, or with the material that I work. To me a remix is some kind of an homage to something. And really it doesn't matter what you're doing, just to have that in your mind when you're making it. The audio, it doesn't matter what you use. If you look at a lot of the artists who have used my material on there, there's no resemblance to anything I do or my working methods or the spirit of what I do."

"There's no getting away from the fact that it was done as a publicity exercise. But having said that, I think compilation albums are potentially boring, and compilation remix albums are doubly boring. I thought, if this is going to happen, I've got to do something to it to make it unlike other remix albums to a certain extent. That's why I put my own little link-up pieces in between, little sketches. I thought, that's going to actually sew it together in a way that I would have put an album together myself. The problem with normal remix albums or compilations is that they have no identity, even if they're a tribute to a certain subject or group. It's just like there's too many different kinds of people on it, and different kinds of music, and there's nothing sewing the patchwork quilt together. It's fraying at the edges. So I thought if anyone is going to stamp their personality on it, it may as well be me." The link-up pieces "already existed, but [through sequencing] I was commenting on the people's tracks."

"When I approached [Boyd Rice], he said, 'Oh, well I've got loads of really great audio, and it would be really good if you did some music with me for it.' That was the very beginning stage of the remix CD. This remix CD has taken a year and a half of my life. It's me that compiled it. At that stage I was kind of open to actually working with the artists remixing me. Then I just got to the stage where I thought, "This is impossible." Basically Boyd gave me a load of audio and he said to me that he liked a track on 'Hate People Like You called' "Just Hate to Say". He said, well it would be really good if you put that underneath. But then later on in the project when he had given me the stuff, I started getting confused about what this remix project was, and so I didn't do that. And so his track is something that isn't finished in his eyes. It's raw material. He's absolutely fine about it, but when we spoke after it, he goes, 'Oh I thought you were gonna put some music on that.' And then, it's like, 'Oh shit, I was, wasn't I? Sorry. I didn't forget. It's just I changed my mind about [it].' You have a certain concept about the way you're working when you're compiling something, so I had to remove myself from the album, in a way."

Bennett has many People Like Us releases due in the near future. Due first, The Thermos Explorer will "be on the Hot Air label, which is run by Matt from Stock Hausen & Walkman. There's gonna be some reissues of all my deleted albums this year. I've left the Staalplaat label, who I was with for a number of years. All my material that's on Staalplaat is now deleted, that's one of the reasons why I left them. A large extent of the major releases are being reissued this year on a sub label of Soleilmoon called Caciocavallo. In March there will be a reissue of 'Jumble Massive' and 'Lassie House,' and then later on in the year there'll be a reissue, a double album reissue of 'Lowest Common Dominator' and 'Beware the Whim Reaper,' and then at some point there'll be a reissue of 'Hate People Like You,' because they're all deleted."

"I'm doing a country and western album called 'A Fistful of Knuckles,' which is scheduled to come out in May, but somehow I don't think I'm gonna make that. There's gonna be a track on the next Touch sampler done with the Jet Black Hair People [Peter from Wet Gate, who helped with this interview] and Wobbly. That's coming out in a couple of months maybe. There's a book coming out in Austria, on sampling, [and] I'm doing a track for a compilation CD that's coming out with that. I'm doing a remix of Balkan music, these people in New York called Egoplastica." Due to a misunderstanding of the word "Balkan", the remix will also include Vulcan music. "I'm doing a Vulcan Balkan. It's [Nimoy] singing on Star Trek. I'm not even done with that yet."

"Playing live has always been a bit of a problem for me, because it's never gonna be right, ever. I just know it won't be. And if it is, then I may as well give up. Whereas with recording I can get it as right as can be. But then there's something missing too, so I guess I'm never gonna be satisfied."