November 20, 2020 | 0 Comments

NEGATIVLAND – THE WORLD WILL DECIDE is at Top 200 and Electronic Radio Now!!!

I can’t tell you how psyched I am to get to bring Negativland’s second full-length album in as many years to college radio. This one is like a companion piece, a sequel, a continuation: title of this one is THE WORLD WILL DECIDE. It’s unheard of for Negativland to make two records in back-to-back years like this, but they made them all together, to be of a piece with each other. If you’ve been around for any length of time with an interest in experimental/outsider music, you definitely know these guys: the weirdos who pioneered the art of sound collage, specifically a version of mashups they call “culture jamming”; who got sued by U2; who get their work and ideas taught in college classes. Like last year’s, this album is this weird conglomeration of mashed up spoken word, chopped-and-screwed music, and some original instrumentation/vox, so as you can imagine it’s a bit of a genre bender. While also still being totally listenable simply as music (you don’t HAVE to approach this as an art project, if you don’t want to!) It is shooting for your Top 30s (the general charts that get compiled into the Top 200), and it is also shooting for your Electronic charts, where it hopes to find a home among some of your more experimental/open-minded but still dance-oriented DJs. It’s political, philosophical, timely, playful, dark, weird. Alongside this album there is also a skill set for Alexa and a Chrome extension (plus some very detailed visual art) – Negativland are multidisciplinary weirdos!

NEGATIVLAND

THE WORLD WILL DECIDE

Seeland Records

Since 1980, the 4 or 5 or 6 (or more) Floptops known as Negativland, a multimedia collective originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland surreally re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and “culture jamming” (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.

Over the years Negativland’s “illegal” collage and appropriation-based audio and visual works have touched on many things – pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, religion, death, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative activism in our media-saturated and multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture.

The mirror image sequel to last year’s True False, The World Will Decide turns the focus away from our 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 we had to keep track of was our own minds, life alongside the machines built to connect us only seems to multiply the uncertainties. On this album those uncertainties are made almost deliriously danceable: a netweb of densely sampled voices melting speech back down into music and back again, into what we can all 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 will assure you: we can really feel like we’re here.

And, finally, just who’s even in Negativland these days? Didn’t half of them die a few years ago? For The World Will Decide, Negativland consists of Mark Hosler, vocals by David “The Weatherman” Wills, Peter Conheim, and Jon Leidecker (the Thurston Moore Group), as well as the dearly departed Don Joyce, Richard Lyons and Ian Allen. The album also contains tapes from the earliest years of the band (including dozens of samples that will be very familiar to regular listeners of their KPFA radio program Over The Edge), as well as guest artists including Prairie Prince (The Tubes), Matmos, Ava Mendoza, Jem Doulton (Thurston Moore Group), Tom Dimuzio, Kyle Bruckmann, Nava Dunkelman, Erich Hubner (Man or Astroman?), and Kevin Blechdom (plus Marc Maron’s voice in samples).

“Declared heroic by their peers for refashioning culture into what the group considers to be more honest statements, Negativland suggests that refusing to be original, in the traditional sense, is the only way to make art that has any depth within commodity capitalism”- NEW YORK TIMES

“Collage pioneers…..genre-defying, densely layered, strangely accessible” – WASHINGTON POST

“Negativland were definitely not what the EDM kids at Bumbershoot were expecting. The experimental San Francisco sound collagists don’t make music as much as sonic mayhem: audio think pieces that are subversive and enlightening, vexing and revelatory. Negativland are political to the core.” – SEATTLE WEEKLY