We spoke with Vicki Bennett a couple of months ago, which in the moment of working towards our exhibition shows, I completely forgot to do a follow up write-up from my notes.
For the sake of working towards some sort of bio for myself, which may prove useful for my DPS year. Here is the full bio from the People Like Us website, Vicki’s moniker;
“Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, 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.
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, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi 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 a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.”
In the 90s, Vicki Bennett started a late-night radio show in Brighton. “Making radio out of radio”. Vicki would record Sussex Radio, as they had to constantly speak causing strange conversations to take place as the presenters had to speak unnaturally to fill the time. Bennett would take the samples of this speech and repurpose them into her show. “Boring waffle, but interesting in a John Cage kind of way”. I found this very enlightening, as I have a radio show in Brighton where I piece together mixes regularly and after listening to her speak, I am considering starting a new show where I can explore some more experimental practices.
“The Sound Of The End of Music”
–inspired by mash up culture. The Doors, Apocalypse Now, blended with The Sound of Music. Pre-existing material has a previous life. “Ideas are not linear” Originality isn’t important, Uniqueness, Energy, Experience. “Ideas are endless if you are open to them”. We grow up to mimic that’s how we speak. “You’re always sampling”.
“By accusing someone of stealing by sampling, you aren’t letting people learn, or letting them be inspired.”
Self imposed limitations = Good
Environmental Limitations = No romanticism, can work for some people.
As Vicki Bennett felt the need to distance herself from the term, I do wonder whether these Artists consider themselves plunder phonics. Some more examples of musical collage I think off on the top of my head are Holger Czukay from Can. Movements from songs are spliced into his own recordings and used as solos and flourishes. Frank Zappa would repurpose unused solo’s on different tracks, enjoying the different phrasings that would occur from taking the sound from its context.
This Ambient piece by Terre Thaemlitz contains very hidden samples of Bronski Beat ‘Smalltown Boy’, alongside the main lyrical sample of ‘Falling’ and ‘Runaway’ the samples within the track, help meditate potentially on themes of queer loneliness through the connotations of including those tracks. Collage aligns a collection of similar emotions from disparate genres under the unifying guise of a dance track. I believe Thaemlitz usually works under genre of Ambient and not plunder-phonics, but I am not entirely sure. We will be covering Ultra-Red soon in class so will refelct on Thaemlitz (a collaborator) then.
In regards to John Oswald and this idea of plunder phonics, I can see Vicki Bennet’s decision to distance herself from this concept, claiming it was ‘too political’. The album John Oswald created with the tag of his created genre features quite a problematic image of Michael Jackson naked with a woman’s body. The image of Michael Jackson accompanies a complete discectomy of musical elements, as they are ground up and repurposed. It feels a bit like MJ is the butt of the joke.
Whilst the music itself is quite interesting, I find it difficult to really decipher the intent with the Artwork (which you could argue as racist, transphobic or sexist if the intent is read as debasement).
Vicki Bennett effectively sees recorded music as material for collage and is interested in the dichotomy between sample source and the transformation through collage they undertake. Bennett sees this approach of the reusing of material as no different from other artistic forms of collage. Plunderphonics whilst of a similar anti-copyright sentiment, takes things onto a sort of grandiose revelatory place which contrasts Bennett’s low-key insistence that she is like any other collage-based artist. Even though her work can at times decontextualise ideas into quite epic new proportions (See the Hills Are Alive.), the explanations she gives for the work are much less so. Her work is more accessible and striking in it’s re-contextualisation of samples and more understated. Multiple sounds and samples are combined in a long-form way. Themes from the original works stay intact but are often juxtaposed in a kind of ‘mash-up’ with another cultural artefact to create a new meaning. Plunderphonics is a lot more short-form, fitting tons of second-long snippets into a disorientating-ly rich tapestry. It’s a more challenging listen with a more epic explanation.
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/vicki-bennett-queen-digital-folk-underground
Vicki Bennett’s work is concerned with propagating or decontextualising materials into sound events, but more recontextualised into new and different narratives. She stated her main reason for distancing herself from Plunderphonics was the politicisation of ‘collage’.
I find the Plunderphonics use of manifesto pretentious. For comparison, Richard Pheonix writing the manifesto “DIY is a privilege” for how we can be more inclusive in music scenes and spaces for disabled people, earns a right to demand its importance, because its a manifesto that seeks to guide the music world out of concepts which upkeep oppressive, ableist structures. Whilst I like the effect of hearing these sounds cut away from their source materials and context, If I had been working simultaneously at this time on media collage (ideas that have been in play in experimental music since tape machines were invented) I would probably take issue with being bundled in with plunder-phonics, if not for anything else but the dodgy cover and the over-reaching importance of collage as some world-breaking phenomenon.
“The reuse of existing recorded materials is not restricted to the street and the esoteric. The single guitar chord occurring infrequently on H. Hancock’s hit arrangement “Rocket” was not struck by an in-studio union guitarist but was sampled directly from an old Led Zepplin record. Similarly, Michael Jackson unwittingly turns up on Hancock’s follow-up clone “Hard Rock”. Now that keyboardists are getting instruments with the button for this appropriation built in, they’re going to push it, easier than reconstructing the ideal sound from oscillation one.” – In this excerpt from the Plunderphonics manifesto, I take issue with the use of the word appropriation. By this logic, Led Zeppelin writing songs inspired by blues music is the appropriation/sampling of blues music. So is it appropriation when black artists reuse that material or re-appropriation? or maybe even reclamation? If attempting to write music influenced by other music is a sample, How do you account for the ancestry of a sample? It’s simple to say, when I try and sound like Bruce Springsteen, I am sampling Bruce Springsteen, but it fails to account for my hardware (political), my voice (political), my musical knowledge (political) and my musical ability. It also fails to account for subconscious musical influence and the layers of other artists I may be bringing from. No artist can sit down and truly write another artists song. There is clearly a distinction. I may be missing some nuance to this text, as Oswald does mention ‘layers of authorship’. But I feel like this term means very different things to us. For him, this means, everything is plagiarised so nothing is. Which I agree with to an extent, but when we think about unethical practices of anthropology and appropriation, layers of authorship can mean something that perhaps should be protected, which has ownership to a society. If there is historical proof to these thefts (e.g blues music) having happened, is it okay to use that as an excuse for it to continue?
“Is a timbre any less definably possessable than a melody? A composer who claims divine inspiration is perhaps exempt from responsibility to this inventory of the layers of authorship. But what about the unblessed rest of us?” – Plunderphonics, John Oswald
As Sound Artists, we repurpose and abstract sound. Most of us have experimented with field recording, but even when using it practically to create a ‘truth’ we crop, EQ and cut. All sound is effected and processed, therefore abstracted. Timbre of any recording has an unquantifiable amount of artefact that can be repurposed. Layers of Authorship is an interesting concept to me. When thinking about the ethics of sampling, I would personally work intersectional feminist principles into a debate into these ethics, look at myself and where I stand within these oppressive systems as a guide to that process.
Bennett’s work takes big culturally significant materials and repurposes them, so often what we are seeing or hearing is something we already have a relation to. “I’m not taking from underground artists and certainly not unpublished artists”, Bennett hates the ‘policing’ of creativity, and says anything that is published has its rights in the public domain, thus becomes a material to be played with, for new artists to use and repurpose. Thinking of an idea as its own life-form separate from an artist, that almost deserves to be repurposed and played with. “We grow up to mimic” and “We are always sampling”. For the most part I agree whole-heartedly with these sentiments, collaging and sampling recycle old ideas and timbres which cannot exist today, due to technology and just shifts in musical trends but also the personnel.
I think Bennett is a well-spoken artist with concerns over the exclusivity of the art world, an exclusivity over information. Bennett refers to her work as collage, which may be due to it using video and audio mostly, but I wonder if its also due to the unloaded, simplicity of that term. ‘Call a spade a spade’ type rejections of pretentious ‘art-speak’ and the academia surrounding Plunder-phonics and even Musique Concrete. I think when I talk about plagiarism, I mean, when a new artist makes a piece of music that sounds incredibly similar to a pre-existing musician, who hasn’t been credited, and that artist is set to make money of not being creative enough to come up with their own idea – That is the crux of what I dislike about plagiarism, when someone else gets rich of it.
I think in a sense, I agree with Vicki Bennett, but I think like any kind of anthropology, there is a code of conduct. When sampling a sound, you take with it political context of that sound. If I sampled Michael Jackson now for example, it comes with all that horror that we have come to think of when hearing his name or hearing his songs. Oswald when talking about H.Hancock sampling Led Zeppelin fails to navigate race critically. There is a known subtext or context to a sample that as an artist I must be aware of. Kanye West samples King Crimson on a song about Power – it could be argued there is a deeper context to that choice of sample, King Crimson being a band of middle-class men from England. It also is a much lauded progressive rock album that is only given new life to a completely new audience. A Tribe Called Quest sampled a lot of European Jazz Fusion, arguably giving that genre a completely new lease of life and context. Ultimately, post-modernism drives all forms of art into material to be used, but I think that it also drives with it political context. Everything is material, but not all material should be on the table… to everyone. In the same way you would call out a upper-class fine artist for wearing Burberry ironically, it’s important to remember that context is key…