The story is about
Negativland, a collective of three or more friends
who sometimes get together to make music. Well, maybe it's music:
recorded audio material - television jingles, radio talk-show clips,
conversations culled from radio waves, anything that features the sound
of a human voice - is fodder for the collage that comprises a
Negativland recording. Mediaddicts who see society suffering under a
constant barrage of TV, canned imagery, advertising, and corporate
culture, Negativland's members are, by self-definition, artists of
appropriation. They create with mirrors.
Gathering the most memorable, most evocative, or most provocative
chunks from the spew, they reassemble them into something new -
occasionally political, frequently critical - and spin them back into
the barrage. Combining, say, car-manufacturers' slogans, sound effects,
and a PSA warning against drinking and driving in "We Are Driven" (from
their 1993 release, Free), they create a danceable phantasmagoria that
disses our culture's obsession with the automobile: simple enough,
thought-provoking, and pretty funny. At their worst, the members of
Negativland are repetitive and smarmy; at their best, they are
razor-sharp, microscopically focused, and deadly accurate.
At a tiny North Oakland, California, studio, where he collaborates
with Mark Hosler and Don Joyce (Negativland's brain trust), Chris Grigg
explains the band's techniques. "By working with several levels at the
same time, we encourage people to observe multiple meanings - even if
they aren't intended - in everything around them," he says. Negativland
invites us to inspect more closely the surrounding world and its media, a
practice Grigg calls "instructive, terribly fun, and a bit psychotic."
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which
originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They "lifted
their name" from a Neu! song. Long-standing band member Don Joyce produces a weekly interactive radio
programme, Over The Edge, on listener-supported KPFA in Berkeley,
California. A significant number of Negativland's recent releases have
been formed from material which was developed by the band live on the
show. The core of the band is Mark Hosler, Richard Lyons, Don Joyce and David
Wills (aka "The Weatherman"). Chris Grigg is a former member. Peter
Conheim joined the band in 1997. Negativland has released a number of albums ranging from pure collage to
more musical affairs. These have mostly been released on their own
label, Seeland Records. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they produced
several recordings for SST Records, most notably Escape From Noise,
Helter Stupid, and U2. Negativland is well-known for the U2 lawsuit, which nearly destroyed them as a band.
Negativland started in Concord, California in 1979 around the core
founding members of Lyons and Hosler (who were in high school at the
time) and released an eponymous debut in 1980. A number of releases followed in the early 1980s, but it wasn't until
after the release of their breakthrough sample and cut-up sonic barrage
Escape From Noise in 1987 that Negativland gained wider attention. Following the somewhat unexpected success of this album, Negativland
faced the prospect of going on a money-losing tour. To prevent this,
they put together a phony press release claiming that their song
Christianity is Stupid (featuring the sampled and edited voice of an
actor portraying a commissar repeating "Christianity is stupid!
Communism is good!", taken from the propaganda movie If Footmen Tire
You, What Will Horses Do?) was an inspiration for a real mass-murder
committed by David Brom in Rochester, Minnesota. The resulting fallout and media frenzy, based on the humorously
fabricated claims by Negativland, had the effect of pointing out the
venality of the mass media. Though the story was completely
unsubstantiated by any facts, the lurid combination of murder, religion,
and "rock" music proved too tempting for the media to ignore. The story
ran on TV news shows, newspapers, and magazines, with little to no
fact-checking. Soon the world was informed of the "Killer Song" that
supposedly led some kid to murder his parents with an ax. The scandal became the foundation for their next release Helter Stupid,
featuring a cover photo of a TV news "journalist" intoning the fake ax
murder story, with the news station's caption "Killer Song" above his
head, and a photo of the ax-murderer
Negativland's next project was the infamous U2 record with samples from
"America's Top 40" host Casey Kasem. In 1991, Negativland released a
single with the title U2 displayed in very large type on the front of
the packaging, and "Negativland" in a smaller typeface. An image of the
Lockheed U-2 spy plane was also on the single cover. The songs within were parodies of the well-known song, "I Still Haven't
Found What I'm Looking For", including kazoos and extensive sampling of
the original song. The song I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
features a musical backing to an extended profane rant from well-known
disc jockey Casey Kasem, lapsing out of his more polished and
professional tone during a frustrating rehearsal, commenting, for
instance: "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?" (U2's
members are in fact from Ireland.) U2's label Island Records sued Negativland claiming that the "U2"
violated trademark law, and the song itself violated copyright law.
Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to
deliberately confuse U2 fans, then awaiting Achtung Baby. Funds exhausted, Negativland settled out of court. Most copies of the
single were recalled and destroyed. By the mid-1990s, rap had made
authorized sampling more common in mainstream music, but the single
"U2", for which Negativland did not obtain clearance to use U2 samples,
is still illegal to sell in the United States, but is available for free
download from Negativland's official web site. In June, 1992, R.U. Sirius, publisher of the magazine Mondo 2000 came up
with an interesting idea. Publicists from U2 had contacted him
regarding the possibility of interviewing Dave Evans (aka "The Edge")
hoping to promote U2's impending multi-million dollar Zoo TV Tour, which
featured found sounds and live sampling from mass media outlets (things
for which Negativland had been known for some time). Sirius,
unbeknownst to the Edge, decided to have his friends Joyce and Hosler of
Negativland conduct the interview. Joyce and Hosler, fresh from
Island's lawsuit, peppered the Edge with questions regarding his ideas
about the use of sampling in their new tour, and the legality of using
copyrighted material without permission. Midway through the interview,
Joyce and Hosler revealed their identities as members of Negativland. An
embarrassed the Edge reported that U2 were bothered by the sledgehammer
legal approach Island Records took in their lawsuit, and furthermore
that much of the legal wrangling took place without U2's knowledge: "by
the time we (U2) realized what was going on it was kinda too late, and
we actually did approach the record company on your (Negativland's)
behalf and said, 'Look, c'mon, this is just, this is very heavy...'"
Island Records reported to Negativland that U2 never authorised samples
of their material; Evans response was, "that's complete bollocks,
there's like, there's at least six records out there that are direct
samples from our stuff." The "U2" single (along with other related material) was re-released in
2001 on a "bootleg" album entitled These Guys Are From England And Who
Gives A Shit, released on "Seelard Records" (a parody of Negativland's
record label "Seeland Records"). It is thought likely that Negativland
themselves were responsible for the re-release, and that U2 gave their
blessing; although the Negativland website refers to this release as a
bootleg, it is available from major retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and
Tower Records, as well as Negativland's own mail-order business. Negativland are interested in intellectual property rights, and argue
that their use of U2's and others' material falls under fair use. In
1995, they released a book with accompanying CD called Fair Use about
copyright law in general, and the U2 incident in particular, and were
the main subjects of Craig Baldwin's documentary "Sonic Outlaws",
detailing the use of culture jamming to subvert the messages of more
traditional media outlets. There are many other artists who push the
boundaries of copyright law in a similar way to Negativland, including
John Oswald, the Evolution Control Committee, The Bran Flakes, Sir
Mildred Pierce, and People Like Us. Negativland's Mark Hosler pointed at the irony of U2 infringing
copyrights on a massive scale during their Zoo TV tour by broadcasting
live satellite images on stage, and getting away with it, while almost
simultaneously suing Negativland, who had been doing it for a long time
before it ever dawned on U2.
In 1999 Negativland collaborated with UK anarchist band Chumbawamba to
produce the album the ABCs of Anarchism, which is largely based around
the writings of Alexander Berkman and cut-up versions of the hit song
Tubthumping, the theme tune to the children's program Teletubbies and
Anarchy in the UK.
In 2003, members of Negativland contributed their efforts to Creative
Commons, an organization devoted to providing artists with a broader
range of copyright options. In September 2005, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the band,
Negativland curated an art exhibit in Manhattan's Gigantic Artspace
gallery. The exhibit, Negativlandland, included a number of pieces of
artwork from and inspired by Negativland recordings, video projection of
music videos created by the band and others, and some artwork created
specifically for the show, such as an animatronic Abraham Lincoln figure
(inspired by the band's Lincoln cut-up piece God Bull) and a hands-on
exhibit featuring the Booper, the audio-processing unit that band member
David Wills (a.k.a. The Weatherman) assembled out of old radio parts.
The show will appear in Minneapolis on May 12, 2006, at Creative
Electric Studios. The band is hoping to continue to bring
Negativlandland to other cities.
Ask for download links in comments.
In The KLF’s 1990 Chill Out, the car radio was a means for a psycho-geographic dérive in America’s Deep South through TV-evangelists’ rants, traffic-accident reports, Tuvan throat singing and sheep herds. In The Faust Cycle, completed January 2010, English sampler virtuoso Ergo Phizmiz (born 1980) embarks in a similar dérive,
though he eventually gets rid of any excuse or plausible scenario to
let his mind become a permanent radio dial switching between 78 rpm
shellac records, music automata, string quartets and cuckoo clocks. In
this surrealist aural freak show, Phizmiz attempts to capture the last
signals from 20th century’s murmuring agony, from Morse code to music
boxes, from 78s to ukulele, from silent movies to bird recordings. This
mammoth mix collects sonic memes and blends them with Phizmiz’s
own obsessions: music machines, bird songs, Gramophones, scatology,
artists as divine figures. Exploring the dark recesses of the Doctor’s
House, he encounters the many faces of Faustus: the Artists, the
Creators, the Originals, the Freaks, the Musicians, etc, and eventually
finds a family among them. But Phizmiz is not alone in this adventure
and Faust includes a host of collaborators, sponsors and music
workshop participants. The former contribute a series of fantastic pop
songs and incidental music, while the latter add awkwardness and
freshness to the music – all enhance The Faust Cycle‘s
collective experience. For Phizmiz has the ability to let other people’s
creativity blossom, embedded inside his own work, and most composers
will look narrow-minded, even unidimensional, compared to Phizmiz.
For instance, Chunk #3 incorporates rehearsals and final interpretation by amateur young people from the Isle of Wight (around 1h44). In the course of their workshop with Ergo Phizmiz, they created an alternative soundtrack to Murnau’s 1926 Faustus film, based on ukulele, melodica, piano, xylophones, marimbas, assorted percussion and. . . Drinking Lucky Bird [+]. The ensemble reminds some of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra experimentations. This episode #3 is typical of all the Cycle. It has collage and electroacoustic music by Angela Valid, on top of which Phizmiz has plenty of time to retell an episode from Homer’s Illiad.
A ventriloquist duo eventually disrupts any common sense left. In an
hilarious scatological passage around 2h10mn, the mix transforms into a
radio drama where the narrator gets way of his soul in the toilet bowl,
or porcelain. The passage eventually leads to Doctor Faustus’ sewer system. Episode ends with a desolate violin solo by Amie Willingale, followed by a no less sad, Liszt-ian piano solo, presumably an interpretation of Erik Satie’s Le Tango Perpétuel by James Nye.
Subtitled ‘An adventure for radio’, The Faust Cycle is after
all a regular radio play, where Phizmiz narrates his own adventures,
leading us from place to place, from implausible stairs to the next
imaginary room. Episodes of the Cycle have been aired on various radios
between 2008 and 2010, including WFMU. The Faust Cycle would not have
been possible without mp3 technology and the ability to store thousands
of sound files on a hard drive and the whole project is quite
vertiginous when you think about it: it contains samples of music (78rpm
and other records), but also samples from sample-based music (guest
contributors). In any case, The Faust Cycle is the most ambitious music
project conceived in the 21st century and certainly the only one able to
challenge your listening habits. That it is available for free and
doesn’t fit on a regular disc speaks volumes as to the state of music
today.
