Negativland

Negativland

Speech Free: Recorded Music For Film, Radio, Internet And Television

Seeland

What does a Negativland album sound like when it’s missing all of those voice samples? It sounds like Speech Free. A triple vinyl / double CD release of library music for advertising, this new album by Negativland has had every last trace of language carefully removed from the mix. But what does that really mean? Having become a rock music adjective for their work in mass media collage, where voices are seized from the airwaves and woven into musical conversations more true than anything that normally makes it on the air, Speech Free is a complete re-imagining of the music that was hiding in plain sight beneath the branded “cultural jamming” on their last two record albums. Entirely composed and performed by the band with an all-star group of guest musicians (including Prairie Prince, Ava Mendoza, Matmos and others), these productions explode out of even the tiniest speakers as some of Negativland’s most listenable barrages of pure ear candy yet—all they had to do was remove all of that speech! As marketing research suggests, these catchy tunes will work well as new jingles and musical beds, perfectly suited for voiceovers discussing anything from commercial products to political campaigns. Everyone knows that most target audiences regularly indicate a preference for moderately subversive content—and this release provides that audience with precisely the right amount, now that all of this “usable music” has been personally guaranteed by Negativland as Speech Free.

Negativland

No Brain

Seeland

Four songs in just under nine minutes: what do they have in common? They’ve got No Brain, and they’re the new vinyl EP from your grandparents in Negativland. Just as all those decades of Media Literacy courses finally seemed to be sinking in, along came Social Media to scramble one’s lines of sight on where all these voices are really coming from. Every tactic modern citizens used to resist the one-way feeds of Broadcast Media—from skepticism, to research, to signal jamming—is just as easily used against them in today’s all-way environment. The four songs on this record juxtapose the voices of media experts from the ancient ’90s with voices culled from the modern landscape of Social Media—from the users still operating under the old rules, to the rationalizations of tech CEOs who invented the software that’s eaten them. How does one follow the money on a free platform? Who’s got the megaphone? Can non-sequiturs exist? What takes less time to update: a website’s auction to determine which ads are being loaded onto your page, or your own perceptual mechanism making a call on everything you don’t need to know?  All of this and more, made hypnotically catchy through Negativland’s time-honored use of funny noises and weird beats, could be coming soon to a nervous system that is You.

Negativland

The World Will Decide

Seeland

Negativland’s mirror image sequel to last year’s True False, The World Will Decide turns the focus away from the very human inability to accurately define reality, and towards the technologies being built to do a better job at it. But if sorting true from false seemed like a full time job back when all one had to keep track of was one’s own mind, life alongside the machines built to connect everyone only seems to multiply the uncertainties. On The World Will Decide, those uncertainties are made almost deliriously danceable: a netweb of densely sampled voices melting speech back down into music and back again, into what everyone can agree are the real questions—did that firefly really land on your finger? Would you like to be arrested? Does this app connect you to people, or replace them? Is this post an example of inauthentic behavior? Do people have to die? Or, as one of the many sampled voices on this work assures the listener: we can really feel like we’re here.

Negativland

True False

Seeland

What is True False? True False is Negativland’s full length return to all original music that could be mistaken for actual songs, albeit ones sung by dozens of sampled vocalists who have never met. The first of two interconnected double albums, 2019’s True False tackles concerns that will be familiar to any surviving fans of the band: our nervous systems, our realities, and the evolving forms of media that inevitably insert themselves between us. Shootings, bees, the right’s rules for radicals, dogs pretending to be children, climate control, the oil we eat, and the right of every American to believe whatever they want to believe are all explored—it’s never the content, always the edit. This album is one’s own inescapable subjectivity made catchy as witness to the entrenched political beliefs of the left and right cleanly switching sides in under one generation, and it’s the first Negativland album to come with a lyric sheet. Juxtaposing Occupy mic-checks with US militia rallies, FOX news hosts and ecoterrorists, and the listener’s sanity with the home-viewing habits of Negativland’s lead vocalist, the Weatherman, when the word “true” is put next to the word “false,” a broader reality come into focus. Who’s even in Negativland these days? Didn’t half of them die a few years ago? For this album, the band consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills, Peter Conheim, Jon Leidecker, as well as our dearly departed Don Joyce, Richard Lyons and Ian Allen. Containing tapes from the earliest years of the band (including...

Negativland

Over The Edge, Vol. 9: The Chopping Channel

Seeland

Negativland’s newest album is the summation of years of on-air research and development of the Chopping Channel: A place on the dial where music—and lots more!—was swallowed, digested, exhumed, consumed, and presented for sale at prices that didn’t last long. Broadcasting live from Negativland’s legendary Over The Edge radio program, this album brings you cultural appropriation at its most typical, with jokes that aren’t that funny because they aren’t really jokes. Atop a relentlessly atomized mix of thousands of fragmentary samples of indeterminate origin, re-mulched into one continuous and time-saving stream of music, the salesmen (and woman!) of the Chopping Channel dare to sell you the music you’re already listening to, as well as the culture you’ll need to survive in the years to come. A cavalcade of special guest hosts, including Mark Gergis (Porest, Mono Pause / Neung Phak), alongside regulars Bud Choke and Help Suit, breathlessly parade the goods you need and instant-compose new modern music classics. The Over the Edge program is history’s longest-running freeform radio show, as heard on Thursdays at midnight on KPFA FM in Berkeley, California. Originally helmed by the late Don Joyce, and now by Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker, it’s the latest release in a series of Negativland albums carefully crafted from on-air recordings, and represents the last released work completed with Don Joyce before his death in 2015.

Negativland

It’s All In Your Head

Seeland

Negativland’s new album finds the group tackling their biggest subject ever: why humans believe in God. Millennia-in-development, this ambitious and densely-crafted double-CD is packaged inside an actual Holy Bible which has been appropriately repurposed into a “found” art object. It’s All In Your Head intends to entertain, inform and provoke, mixing found music, found sound, found dialogue, guest personalities and original electronic noises in a compelling and thoughtful musical essay that looks at monotheism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, neuroscience, suicide bombers, 9/11, colas, war, shaved chimps and the all-important role played by the human brain in our beliefs. Reading the attached Bible is optional. The audio is presented as a live radio broadcast (modeled after Negativland’s weekly Over the Edge radio program on KPFA FM in Berkeley, CA) that, in an effort to gain listeners, proposes that there is no God. This theater-of-the-mind project has been carefully crafted from basic tracks recorded live in front of blindfolded studio audiences, and documents the unique style of live collage performances that Negativland has been presenting on stages, and on radio, since the formation of the group in 1980. Following its last major release, the Our Favorite Things compilation DVD in 2008, Negativland has kept busy with its weekly radio program, lectures, art gallery shows and live performances in the US and Europe. Currently in the works are several different studio albums, including Negativland’s all-electronic Booper Symphonies, two brand new Over the Edge album releases, and a new touring live show with upcoming performances...

Negativland

Big 10-8 Place

Seeland

***Three years in the making, and with ten-thousand-million-billion analog tape splices, Negativland's third studio album is an aural odyssey to Contra Costa County. The favorite of many Neg-fans, it's an insanely complex sound collage classic. Reissue includes "No Other Possibility" BONUS DVD, featuring material from the album's time period and much more.

Negativland

Death Sentences Of The Polished And Structurally Weak

Seeland

***Actual wrecking yard detritus - found notes, cassettes, laundry lists, etc - forms the basis of this poignant 64-page full-color book with read-along CD soundscape. The album is a return to pure noise collage, closest in spirit to "A Big 10-8 Place" but utterly unique in the Negativland canon... no words, just sounds.

Negativland

Dispepsi

Seeland

***Two-and-a-half years in the making, this collection of original music, songs, and collaged advertising brings the Negativland brand of thirsty cultural critique to the parched and dehydrated psyches of the neXt generation of young consumers everywhere. "Dispepsi" applies Negativland's found sound style of modern noise to one of this planet's best known saturation advertisers of liquid trivia.

Negativland

Fair Use - The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral 2

Seeland

***In 1991, Negativland's infamous U2 single was sued out of existence for trademark infringement, fraud, and copyright infringement. In 1992, Negativland's magazine-plus-CD "The Letter U and the Numeral 2" was sued out of existence for trying to tell the story of the first lawsuit.  This crazy, convoluted history is told in a 270-page book, complete with a studio album created uniquely for this release.

Negativland

Free

Seeland

***Found sounds, stories, and songs about a well-known convenience store, torture, the quality of urban life, Cadillacs, firearms, the bible, interstate trucking, geriatric discomfort, big dogs, bicycle safety, alcohol consumption, driving in circles, death, organ buttons and what it means to be free.

Negativland

Helter Stupid

Seeland

***This is Seeland's re-issue of Negativland's 1989 notorious ax-murder hoax project. In part one, Negativland exposes their own manipulation of the media when a startling prank of theirs swells to monstrous proportions, while part two has everything you once needed to know about radio's selling of the past in a future which hadn't happened yet, but is now old news.

Negativland

No Business

Seeland

***Negativland clipped, transformed, and re-imagineered all the found sound they could get into their computer, and out came "No Business." A lovely die-cut sleeve houses a CD tribute to stealing on the internet, file-sharing, jamming popular culture, nose cream and one very insistent piece of pie. It also comes with a 56-page essay about the cultural public domain which isn't one bit funny... and a rubber novelty device! 

Negativland

Our Favorite Things

Seeland

***Created with 18 other filmmakers from all over the USA (and one a capella group from Detroit), "Our Favorite Things" is a collaborative project that takes Negativland's sound explorations into the world of film and video. 27 years of Negativland juxtaposing paranoia, torture, control, power, guns, fear, suicide, cola wars, mental illness, and intellectual property issues with the lighter side of dopey advertising, cartoon characters, cleaning products and Jesus. Includes bonus a-capella CD!

Negativland

Over The Edge 1 1/2 - The Starting Line

Seeland

***Used car salesman Dick Goodbody hosts a very unusual automotive quiz show with the help of The Weatherman and the rest of Negativland. This single CD comes in a double CD box with a giant fact filled poster and a fluorescent vinyl key chain from Dick's Auto Hive. SEELAND 016 CD 53762-0016-2 In-house proselytizer Pastor Dick Pastor Dick tries to recoup some stolen money with a promise to get drunk on the air...and he really does! New additions in this reissue of a 1990 cassette include: Pastor Dick's Fellowship Dinner stand-up routine, the problems of driving a Dodge Demon, an expanded Bible Quiz, Pastor Dick's expose on the cult of Mormonism... and it comes with an honest-to-God 16 page religious pamphlet!

Negativland

Over The Edge 1: Jamcon '84

Seeland

***First in a series of albums edited entirely from "Over the Edge", Negativland's long-running FM radio program (29 years and counting!!) Here, illegal radio antics abound as Crosley Bendix hosts a tumultuous convention for jammers and coins the now-popular term, "Culture Jamming".  Much bonus material, including a live remix of a speech by then-President Reagan.

Negativland

Over The Edge 2 - Pastor Dick: Muriel’s Purse Fund

Seeland

Negativland

Over The Edge 3 - The Weatherman’s Dumb Stupid Come-out Line

Seeland

***Come out of your closet with The Weatherman and The Clorox Cowboy as Negativland tackles the subject of gay repression in a very unusual way. Includes a new special folded insert and a brand new and very detailed 24-page Weatherman Dictionary!

Negativland

Over The Edge 6 - Willsaphone Stupid Show

Seeland

David "The Weatherman" Wills is a founding Negativland member, and rabid documentarian of his own family.  This charming and peculiar double disc set is the definitive overview of the Weatherman's amazing collection of recordings of all kinds.

Negativland

Over The Edge 7 - Time Zones Exchange Project

Seeland

***Negativland tackles international affairs and helps Radio Moscow spread free-market thinking to the (at the time) brand new former Soviet Union. An enigma wrapped up within a fantastic "plot" (constructed out of scripts, appropriated media, and anonymous radio call-in participation) which actually came true!

Negativland

Points

Seeland

***This is Negativland's second album, originally released in 1981. These are more early suburban noise/music/text/loop pieces from the formative years of the 4 (or 5) Floptops.

Negativland

These Guys Are From England And Who Gives A Shit

Seeland

***Unauthorized reissue of the notorious "U2" single which got Negativland in so much hot water, expanded to full LP length with relevant material which both pre-dated and followed the banned release. All otherwise unavailable material from live and studio vaults!

Negativland

Thigmotactic

Seeland

***Negativland's Mark Hosler, with assistance from bandmates and friends, crafts a pop record with a decidedly surreal bent: eccentric, toe-tapping, electronic, folk-pop, noise songs strung together to form a cohesive listen, with themes emerging around meat, feet, pants, milk, cows, trucks, Herb Alpert, Richard Nixon, and even love.

Negativland

Escape From Noise

Seeland

***The tape splicing skills honed on "A Big 10-8 Place" go into ever more musical directions in Negativland's fourth studio record, with some of the group's most beloved tape collages (such as "Time Zones") butting heads with tunes such as "Christianity Is Stupid".  A big college radio hit when first released in 1987.

Negativland

Over The Edge 4 - Dick Vaughn's Moribund Music Of The '70s

Seeland

***Radio nostalgia DJ Dick Vaughn's hostile takeovers of KPFA FM's airwaves in the early 1980s, edited into an epic double-CD set. Listen as KPFA becomes "The California Superstation", much to the chagrin of paid subscribers! This expanded reissue of a long-deleted cassette features over an hour of unreleased material.

Negativland

Happy Heroes

Seeland

Negativland

Over The Edge 8 - Sex Dirt

Seeland

Negativland

Over The Edge 5 - Crosley Bendix Radio Reviews

Seeland