Voices carry

Vicki Bennett's People Like Us

The depressing thing about Tony Scott watching Francis Ford Coppola's '70s classic The Conversation and then turning it into last year's Enemy of the State was what it seemed to be saying about the death of audio culture. All of the phone taps, boom mikes, and reel-to-reel tape decks that Gene Hackman used to capture a clandestine dialogue in a lunch-hour city square suddenly looked eight-track next to Enemy's high-res digital cameras and video tracking. The good old-fashioned techno-art of voice surveillance had, once and for all, been superseded by gear-happy visual spying.

But a funny thing happened a few months later when cum shots and hand-rolled Cubans became part of the national chat -- the audio returned with a witch-hunt vengeance. We all obsessed on the visuals of the Oral Office high jinks, but the real goods came from evil Linda's phone tap of the unsuspecting Monica (who, remember, is a phone-sex booster and even gave El Shmucko a copy of Nicholson Baker's ode to fiber-optic eros, Vox). No matter how surrounded we are by handi-cam memory preservation, craning security cameras, and desktop scanners, we're still fascinated, even terrified, by the enduring power of recorded voices.

East Sussex's Vicki Bennett is an audio artist who likes to manipulate such voices. Although virtually unknown in the states, she has since 1991 been making some of the decade's most entertaining and playful sample collages under the moniker of People Like Us. A new compilation, Hate People Like Us (Soleilmoon), pays long-overdue tribute to Bennett's work by inviting other artists to reinterpret PLU collages.

Unlike her compatriot Scanner -- who's made a career out of purloining and looping cell-phone conversations and then transforming them into eerie ambient pastures -- Bennett doesn't eavesdrop on voices so much as she scavenges for them in thrift shops and junk bins. To be fair to Bennett's actual range, I should say that fiddling with voices is not all she does: Beware the Whim Reaper (Staalplaat), one of PLU's more popular recordings, is almost all instrumental tweaker lounge kitsch and warped advert collage.

Her all-voice masterpiece to date is the first side of 1996's vinyl-only Massive Jumble (Soleilmoon), where we're treated to a recombinant, piecemeal gallery of boosted Britspeak: BBC broadcasts cutting into echoplexed radio interviews about snooker, ads for Bendix auto washers interrupting looped excerpts of soap-opera melodramas. It's all random dialogue cut up and scrambled with such fluidity and fun that something as innocuous and proper as a woman saying "Sorry, Debbie, excuse me a moment" can become a compositional building block.

In this respect, Bennett is the UK cousin of US culture jammers and media terrorists like John Oswald and Negativland, themselves torchbearers of a much longer tradition of found sound collage and mass cult recycling that can be traced back to dada and the Cubists on up through Warhol and DJ Kool Herc. But Bennett has a longer attention span than Oswald with his plunderphonic pointillism, and she cares less about songwriting and current events than Negativland do. Her thrill is making voices that have nothing to do with each other enter into unexpected, revealing, and hilarious conversations.

Bennett's only formal contributions to Hate People Like Us are what she calls "plulinks," mini speech and advert splicings that vary from a proper Englishman getting a hand job from an equally proper Englishwoman and then accidentally producing a bowel movement to an ode to the digestive benefits of stewed prunes. A word junkie as dedicated to her craft as beatminers like DJ Babu and Rob Swift are to theirs, Bennett's turntablism merges the witty, dexterous play of hip-hop and sampledelia with the more scowling and self-consciously artful recombination of the avant-garde (see Christian Marclay, John Cage, David Shea). She treats language and talk as chunks of sound just waiting to be twisted into new combinations where words get spun backwards and phrases repeat at strategic intervals.

On Hate, what Bennett's micro-tracks link are cuts by sound weirdos like Stock, Hausen & Walkman (they stutter voices into a grinding electro-boogie cum altered-state mind trip on "Keep Going Wee Wee"), Sons of Silence (they bring out the big beats on "Cockahoop"), and Negativland, whose "What's Music" makes one of the Shangri La's into a spokeswoman for "music powered by lycra." But no matter the guests, it's still Bennett's show throughout. When Coil leave her an answering-machine message saying that their track is late, she goes ahead and uses the message as the track itself. Yet one more case of the words of another finding their way into an art of her own.