People Like Us is the name Vicki Bennett adopted in 1991 in the UK for her plunderphonics, sound-collage and audio-visual collage position. The position has sustained continuously across the 33+ year career through the early 1990s lineup, the 2000s sustained partnership with the transatlantic plunderphonics and sound-collage roster, the 2010s audio-visual collage working extension, and the 2020s continuing position. The Bureau files the position at Tier I on the strength of the sustained life, the position's documented convergence-document partnerships (the 1999 Hate People Like Us remix document the centrepiece), the DO or DIY WFMU position (2003 onward), and the documented BBC Archive partnership (2006 unlimited working access, the first such partnership the BBC partner has granted).
The method: People Like Us's position runs through the plunderphonics tradition (the John Oswald-coined mode; the Negativland-adjacent tradition) with audio-visual collage working extension, mashup vein and the position Bennett has articulated as ‘sampling as folk art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. The premise the partner has documented is that ‘all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an original or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant’. The Bureau reads the method as distinct from the early UK industrial tradition (the Throbbing Gristle / Cabaret Voltaire / Nocturnal Emissions original lineup): the Bennett position operates through the populist / mass-media idiom rather than the transgressive / confrontational early manner, while the position remains adjacent to the experimental tradition the Bureau has chronicled.
The convergence document is Hate People Like Us (1999), the remix position that constitutes one of the Continental and transatlantic experimental tradition's most-documented working-roster convergence documents. The partners across the remix position include Coil, Negativland, Death in June, Barbed, Christoph Heemann (the Mirror / H.N.A.S. partner), Bruce Gilbert (the Wire first partner), Stock Hausen & Walkman (UK collage partner the Vomit Lunchs tradition has cited as antecedent), Rehberg & Bauer (Pita / Mego first partner), Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic partner), Dummy Run, Farmer's Manual, Sons of Silence, Cyclobe (the Coil-adjacent partner), Req1, V/VM, Sniper, Mr Rotorvator, Felix Kubin, Xper.Xr, Venoz [TKS], Katy Brown and Dr P Li Khan. The 2CD format additionally documents an unreleased position by Andy Votel (Badly Drawn Boy) which was excluded from the released document for documented legal reasons. The convergence document is significant: the Bennett position is the nodal lineup through which the transatlantic experimental roster's 1999 positions converge.
The DO or DIY WFMU position (2003 onward) constitutes the sustained broadcast partnership the Bennett partner has cultivated with the American experimental-radio tradition. The weekly seasonal position has documented the transatlantic experimental and sound-collage tradition through the playlist and selection method; the WFMU partnership additionally maintains a 24-hour-per-day radio stream of sound-collage and music chosen by Bennett (the unofficial ‘People Like Us stream’ configuration). The 2006 partnership with the BBC Archive (the first artist granted unlimited working access to the BBC Archive) constitutes one of the partnerships the UK public-service-broadcasting partner has documented across the experimental tradition.
The sustained collaborative partnerships: the Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) partnership across Wide Open Spaces (2003, Tigerbeat6, additionally with Matmos' Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt; San Francisco Art Institute lecture-hall recording position) and Music for the Fire (2010, Illegal Art); the Ergo Phizmiz partnership across Perpetuum Mobile (2007, Soleilmoon SOL156, handmade-paper digipak; documented ‘open-source compositional process’ method through uploaded-and-downloaded shared-server lineup), Rhapsody in Glue (2008, bleep.com, a Grants for the Arts commission), the Codpaste WFMU podcast position (2007 onward, Grants for the Arts commissioned lineup) and The Keystone Cut Ups DVD (2012); the Matmos partnership across Wide Open Spaces 2003 and the recent Copia 2025 position; the Negativland partnership as sustained transatlantic plunderphonics partner.
The Bureau's editorial reading: People Like Us is filed at Tier I as the British plunderphonics and audio-visual collage position. The 33+ year sustained life, the partnerships across the 1999 Hate People Like Us convergence document (Coil / Negativland / Bruce Gilbert / Mika Vainio / transatlantic plunderphonics roster), the WFMU and BBC partnerships, the sustained collaborative partnerships (Wobbly, Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Negativland) and the method's position as ‘sampling as folk art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ constitute the significance the Bureau files. The position is one of the UK experimental tradition's sustained configurations and constitutes one of the partnerships between the UK sound-collage tradition and the American Negativland-adjacent plunderphonics tradition.