September 2, 2021 | 0 Comments

NEGATIVLAND – NO BRAIN EP is at Top 200 and Electronic Radio Now!!!

If you’ve been around the scene for a long time, you know these guys are absolute freaking legends, titans of the sound-collage genre, coiners of the term “culture jamming”, once even sued by U2. But even if you’ve only been a part of college radio for a year or two hopefully you at least remember them from the last two campaigns I ran for their two most recent albums! Can’t believe how lucky I am to get to do a third. This one is not a full album, but rather a lil EP intended to complement those last two, a capper on this whole thing as a larger interconnected project. It fits in with True False and The World Will Decide quite nicely as a thematic and aesthetic set!

Also, tour!!! Negativland is finally hitting the road after a long pandemic wait, hitting the Northwest in September and the Southwest in November. Dates are below – if you’re in their path and would like to do something about it (come out to a show? Have them stop by the station or call in for an interview? Give away tix?) I would love to hook you up – just drop me a line!

I don’t have any CD copies of this EP unfortunately, they don’t exist – so if you’re a radio station rep, make sure you download it, and if you somehow got this far on my website but aren’t getting my emails (and you’re the music director or equivalent position at your college/non-comm radio station), please do hit me up!

NEGATIVLAND

NO BRAIN EP

Seeland Records

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. No Brain is a conceptual continuation of the interconnected Negativland albums True False and The World Will Decide.

Just as all those decades of Media Literacy courses finally seemed to be sinking in, along came Social Media to scramble our lines of sight on where all these voices are really coming from. Every tactic we 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 us in today’s all-way environment. The four songs on this record juxtapose the voices of media experts from the ancient 90’s with voices culled from the modern landscape of Social — from the users still operating under the old rules, to the rationalizations of tech CEOs making billions off 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 and including guest artist Prairie Prince (The Tubes, Byrne/Eno, XTC) on drums, could be coming soon to a nervous system that is You.

MORE ABOUT NEGATIVLAND…

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.

“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

RIYL: Girl Talk, People Like Us, Matmos, Yes Men, The Residents, Plunderphonics, Mouse On Mars, Faust, and culture jamming / sound collage

Start With: 3, 4

FCC: 4 (but clean edit included in radio download)