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(Hi Mark!)
For your enjoyment (and mine), I've collected a bunch of material about my favorite recording group, Negativland. I tend to add bits and pieces sporadically, so check back every so often.
There is an official Negativland home page (Negativworldwidewebland), the only place on the Net where you can receive the full Negativexperience. My page is intended only as a supplement.
And remember, copyright infringement is your best entertainment value.
What is Negativland? As a group (Mark Hosler, Chris Grigg, Don Joyce, David Wills, and Richard Lyons), they do create music, but calling Negativland a mere "band" doesn't do them justice. On their recordings, they appropriate, dissect, juxtapose, scramble, reassemble, and regurgitate sonic material culled from a variety of sources--anything from network and shortwave broadcasts to private phone conversations and family recordings made in the kitchen. They mix this with an equally eclectic variety of instruments--keyboards, guitars, effects boxes, samplers, tape loops, squeeze toys, and so on. The end result is incredibly funny, often making a wry social comment; but it also has a strange coherence among its myriad layers, unparalleled by similar efforts of other groups.
And they don't just record. They perform on-stage. They write amazing essays. They even produce a weekly live radio show, Over The Edge, heard early Friday mornings on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.
Yes, Negativland is hard to pin down. That is what my page makes a pathetic attempt to do.
These are Negativland recordings digitized for your on-line listening pleasure. Negativland has granted permission for the recordings to be reproduced.
Their most [in]famous recording. So controversial they were sued twice over it (at last count!). [Note: The recording is actually no longer here.]
Radio essays by the Universal Media Netweb's own Director of Stylistic Premonitions, broadcast on Negativland's Over the Edge radio show. Unless noted otherwise, all tracks were lifted from Negativland's CD Over The Edge Vol. 5: Crosley Bendix Radio Reviews (SEELAND 010CD).
These are all RealAudio files that I made a long time ago long time ago (1997 at the latest). They should play in all current Real players, but they all use speech-quality encoding in one of the oldest RealAudio formats, so they sound just godawful. If you are interested in higher-quality reproductions, let me know. (I will probably use a non-proprietary audio format in the future.)
More nifty Negativland stuff from other sources:
Last update: 18 Dec 00