Presented by Anti-Social Music, PEOPSSONGS is an a capella, choral song cycle with texts drawn from a series of portraits by the artist Fly, one of the most prominent graphic artists to come out of the Lower East Side squatter scene, documenting LES characters, musicians and artists, and the drifters, visionaries, and charlatans passing through that world. Her longest-running project is a series called “PEOPS": single-page, head-and-shoulders portraits of the characters and scenesters she's met, surrounded by transcriptions of her conversations with them during the sitting. A few are well known – John Perry Barlow, Richard Hell, John Zorn (who says "Her visions should be read every morning instead of your daily newspaper") – but most are simply members of the transient underground. Composer Franz Nicolay went through Fly's PEOPS archive, selected fifteen of the portraits, and edited their words down to provide the texts he has set. This work was made possible by a residency at the Rensing Arts Center.

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