MISCHIEVOUS MISAPPROPRIATORS

What happens when three of the world’s most inventive sonic magpies decide to rummage through the same box of musical fragments? Enter Mischievous Misappropriators: the wonderfully unruly meeting of Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and Carl Stone — three artists united by a shared fascination with found sound, sampling, transformation and the delicious possibilities of taking things slightly out of context.

Vicki Bennett, working as People Like Us, has spent decades gleefully dismantling and reassembling the cultural detritus around us. Her work is a surreal collision of music, film, speech and popular culture, where fragments are sampled, spliced and rearranged until familiar things become gloriously unfamiliar. Funny, strange and often mischievously subversive, Bennett has made an art form from discovering the unexpected hiding inside the supposedly ordinary.

Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) has likewise built a career around listening to the world as raw material. Since the early 1990s, his work has travelled freely between electronic music, composition, installation, dance, film and the gallery, transforming environmental sounds, voices, transmissions and fragments of everyday life into immersive sonic worlds. For Scanner, nothing is quite background noise: everything potentially contains another composition waiting to emerge.

Then there is Carl Stone, one of the pioneering figures of live computer music and sampling. Since the late 1970s, Stone has developed a singular approach to manipulating recorded sound in real time, creating intricate, constantly shifting collages from fragments of music and sound drawn from seemingly everywhere. His performances can be simultaneously hypnotic, playful and unpredictable — a kind of musical molecular gastronomy in which tiny sonic ingredients are chopped, stretched, layered and recombined into something entirely new.

First brought together for ‘Carl Stone at 70’ at London’s Café Oto in 2023, together the three form a particularly mischievous alliance. Mischievous Misappropriators is less a conventional collaboration than a meeting of ears, instincts and obsessions. Each artist arrives with their own history of bending, borrowing and transforming sound, but the real excitement lies in what happens when those approaches collide.

There is no hierarchy of source material here. A discarded recording, a musical cliché, an obscure electronic pulse or a few milliseconds of someone else’s carefully constructed masterpiece can all become potential ingredients. The familiar is lifted from its surroundings, nudged sideways and given a new life. Sampling becomes archaeology, collage becomes composition and misappropriation becomes a form of affection.

And, importantly, there is humour in the process. These are serious artists who take sound very seriously indeed — but they also understand that music can be mischievous, curious and delightfully unruly. Mischievous Misappropriators celebrates the joy of messing with things: taking them apart, turning them upside down, finding the accidental connections and seeing what happens when three highly experienced sonic troublemakers let their imaginations loose in the same room.

Nothing is sacred. Everything is potentially musical.