Negativland
A chaotic, brilliant collage of found sound and media subversion. It is the sound of the 20th century being shredded and taped back together to tell the truth.
A chaotic, brilliant collage of found sound and media subversion. It is the sound of the 20th century being shredded and taped back together to tell the truth.
Negativland sounds like a radio dial being spun rapidly across a landscape of forgotten commercials, panicked news reports, and instructional tapes. It is a dense, rhythmic thicket of 'plunderphonics' where the music is built entirely from the debris of consumer culture. You will hear familiar voices twisted into new, often hilarious or disturbing meanings, backed by mechanical beats and analog hiss.
What makes them distinctive is their commitment to 'culture jamming.' They don't just use samples; they use them to wage war on the organizations that produced them. Their work feels like a transmission from a pirate radio station operating out of a suburban garage, exposing the absurdity of advertising, religion, and copyright law through meticulous tape-editing and sonic pranks.
Start with 'Escape From Noise' or 'Dispepsi.' The former is the quintessential introduction to their cut-up style, while the latter is a focused, surprisingly catchy assault on soft drink marketing. Both albums demonstrate how they can turn a legal threat or a corporate jingle into a compelling piece of avant-garde pop art.
Negativland is an American experimental music band that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. The core of the band consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills (aka "The Weatherman"), Peter Conheim and Jon Leidecker (aka "Wobbly"). Negativland has released a number of albums ranging from pure sound collage to more musical expositions. 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 were sued by the band U2's record label, Island Records, and by SST Records, which brought them widespread publicity and notoriety. The band, along with the Church of the SubGenius parody religion and other "creative" types, were among those given a free website by the University of North Carolina back in 1994 just to see what these creative types would do with a website. Negativland coined the term culture jamming in 1984. Don Joyce added it to the album JamCon '84 in the form of "culture jammer". The band took their name from a Neu! track, with their record label Seeland Records also being named after another Neu! track.
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