Welcome Abroad, by People Like Us

Welcome Abroad

by People Like Us

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FoxPuppy Really interesting song collages that manages to craft something new and creative while respecting the source material.

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
PEOPLE LIKE US
Welcome Abroad LP on Discrepant [CREP84]
Releases 4th JUNE, 2021, taking pre-orders from 31st MARCH 2021
(digital download straight away and we send the LP as soon as we get them)

Discrepant Press Release: Continuing our ambitious People Like Us vinyl reissue program with Welcome Aboard – a strangely relevant 10-year-old album (originally released in May 2011 on Illegal Art) when People Like Us aka Vicki Bennett became stranded in the US after the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption closed much of northern Europe’s airspace.

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.

Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. Now strangely echoed by the Covid-19 outbreak and the various grounding of planes and stay at home policies worldwide.

While the general mashup culture often centres 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. No one could have predicted how relevant this album would have been 10 years later.

Volcanoes or Viruses, Welcome Abroad is what happens when you’re stranded due to a freak natural occurrence trapping people all over the world
and causing mass plane cancellations.

LP TRACKLIST:
A1. Sing
A2. What Will I Do
A3. Push The Clouds Away
A4. The Sound Of The End Of Music A5. Wonderful Wonderful
B1. Hush
B2. Driving Flying Rising Falling
B3. The Atlantic Conveyor
B4. Wandering
B5. Ever

This is the LP vinyl version with an instant mp3 download of the longer CD version of the album.

500 Units

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

Includes unlimited streaming of Welcome Abroad via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

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£15 GBP or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Digipak on Illegal Art

Includes unlimited streaming of Welcome Abroad via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 3 days

4 remaining

£11 GBP or more
Full Digital Discography

46

releases

Get all 46 People Like Us releases available on Bandcamp and save 85%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Thermos Explorer (2023 reissue), Sharity! Selected Works of People Like Us, Rhapsody In Glue LP, In Concert : Kings Place London 2008 - Video and Audio Download, 108, In The Waking (2022 extended mix), Free Sunshine (on Heaven's Lathe), The Fundamental Questions, and 38 more. , and , .

Purchasable with gift card

£33.15 GBP or more (85% OFF)

1.	Sing 03:24	buy track
2.	Happy Lost Songs 03:09	buy track
3.	Stuck In The USSR 00:37	buy track
4.	The Look 07:37	buy track
5.	Help Me To Help Myself 01:49	buy track
6.	What Will I Do 04:46	buy track
7.	Lost In The Dark 02:35	buy track
8.	Push The Clouds Away 02:57	buy track
9.	The Sound Of The End Of Music 03:37	buy track
10.	Wonderful Wonderful 05:59	buy track
11.	Driving Flying Rising Falling 05:34	buy track
12.	Ever 02:35	buy track
13.	Hush 02:15	buy track
14.	Wandering 07:34	buy track
15.	The Seven Hills Of Rome 04:47	buy track
16.	You've Got To Know When 01:34	buy track
17.	The Atlantic Conveyor 02:51	buy track

about

Originally released on CD on Illegal Art in 2011

“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.

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audiovisual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio.

People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over three quarters of a million hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.

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.

Press Quotes:
“… 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

credits

released May 24, 2011

Illegal Art

license

about

People Like Us London, UK

Since 1991, Vicki Bennett has been repurposing pre-existing footage to craft a/v collages, seeing sampling as folk art in the age of mechanical reproduction, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant. ... more

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