Mr Gav’s July Dancefloor roundup Part 2

People Like Us And Ergo Phizmiz – Rhapsody In Glue (Bleep.com) V/A – Smiling Through My Teeth (Sonic Arts Network) http://www.peoplelikeus.org/

Vicki Bennett makes the best mixtapes ever. No really, even better than John Peel and Peaches Geldof and the one you did with all that Goa trance culminating in the glorious entirety of Space Is The Place. Marrying exotic flavours with absurd musical elements and AM radio nostalgia, she splices and dices her own little worlds awkwardly into shape, plonks a full sized Godzilla down on the town square, slaps three fuzzy felt suns into the sky and colours in the ocean with scribbles of dayglo orange. Sounds pretty good, non? Good enough to earn her a plateau among the gods of cut’n’paste (Dicky Goodman, John Oswald, Negativland, Osymyso, Listen With Sarah) and send gathered masses into a frothy-gobbed fit of enthusiasm every week like clockwork as she glides effortlessly across NJ station WFMU’s sandpapery schedule.

Rhapsody In Glue is the result of her experiments with multi-instrumentalist Ergo Phizmiz on a podcast called Codpaste (get it?). The idea was to create sound collages in the public eye, then wade in with violins, spoons, whatever, while discussing their concepts and methods in exhaustive detail ("I’ve got something that sounds like a giant walking"). And the fruit of their collective loin is psychedelic, maaaaan, with recognisable patterns popping out of the patchwork left, right and centre, (maaaaan). Take opening gambit Snow Day for example, a five minute show off session which flits between easy-listening stalwart Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head and the controlled orchestral explosion that is Troika, before underpinning a selection of famous "hello"s from the obligatory Lionel to (seminal drag duo) Kiki and Herb’s inspired rendering Smells Like Teen Spirit / Suicide Is Painless, with Queen synths. Then there’s the ramshackle Gary’s Anatomy, a straight up skiffle pop classic with runaway ukuleles and Can-Can blasts, but in place of a chorus are random ill-fitting samples conjuring the naif experiments of Afrika Bambaata and co. And that’s not to even mention Carmen melting on her bones, their aggressive waltz and whoa – did a giant just walk through the mix? Back too, thankfully, are the sweded versions of popular classics which made 2007’s Perpetuum Mobile such an exciting ride; a truly angelic English country garden, nonsense rhyme interpretations of instrumental favourites ("standing on your head your nose is trembling, ottomans writhe in the past, the yellow tendrils of the little butcher man were confined in a plaster cast" to the tune of Troika), Charlie Chaplin’s Smile performed with closed mouths, you name it. Every step of the way our partners in (actual) crime apply pop aesthetics by way of exploring avant-garde territory, rearranging Hula dance, showtunes and pretentious sound art alike (if the RIAA liked music enough to unpick the list of unsolicited covers and samples, this tag-team would be looking at thousands of consecutive life sentences) into a standard verse / chorus model. These are the methods which take them up a step in the world of plunderphonics.

Recent times have also seen the release of Smiling Through My Teeth, the latest in a string of lovingly themed compilations for Sonic Arts Network, which hangs somewhere between a collection of hard to find noise rarities and names well-associated with Vicki’s adventures in radio. The theme is humour, that biggest and blackest of musical taboos under which so much quality audio is flat-out rejected. Without wishing to give the game away (because, of course, you’re feverishly typing details into paypal already) the first track is by Spike Jones and his City Slickers – patron saints of dramatic composition, comedy timing and inventiveness on a ridiculous scale.

If legends are to be believed, a young Spike, expressing zero interest in his father’s workplace, taught himself to play on the railway lines. His cork-popping, banjo-wanking, tempo-shiftery opens a section of music which could be the one jazz band going bananas; Japanoise legends Ground Zero’s life-affirming skronk, Nurse With Wound shaming the world of drunkard crooners in You Walrus Hurt The One You Love and the absolute joy that is The Most Unwanted Song, a painstakingly researched collection of known musical turn-offs including that famous wet squib operatic hip-hop. At this point, consistency goes out of the window, and in crawl the unlikely pairing of Wobbly and Freddy (pronounced 3D) Maguire, some kind of trippy improvisational sing-song-ness with record decks floating through space; a logic unto itself. "If you have a round face, don’t wear a round hat", she warns. Good advice. The downright dadaist peaks and troughs which follow include ranting granddads, the Nihilist Spasm Band ("There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing, nothing I can do, I’m not responsible, I can’t help it"), Thai Elephant Orchestra’s stirring rendition of lovely lovely Ludwig Van’s Pastorale Symphony First Movement, and the sonic rasberries of Justice Yeldham who plays a contact mic’d shard of glass with his own bloodied face.

Basically this month, if you buy one mind-bending cacophony of lunatics annoying casual listeners across a fair old stretch of time and space, consider this.