New Music /

Negativland

Formed in San Francisco in the late-1970s, Negativland have defied trends and a lack of radio love to release twelve albums of experimental, sound collage music. With the recent release of their compilation DVD, Our Favorite Things, we spoke with Negativland stalwart, Don Joyce: Listening to your music is never a dull experience. My ears are still ringing from listening to A Big 10-8 Place. When recording, is there any discernible structure to the songs or is it more about creating challenging sound collages that have a loose musical thread running through them? ‘It turns out to be an answer you’ve heard before. Sometimes it’s the music that comes first and dialog or lyrics are added to it, and sometimes the “lyrics” come first and we need to add music or sound to them. In both we usually take a collage approach to structuring it, as many of these aspects are actually found sound elements, though, with a few notable exceptions, most of our actual music is original and is composed and performed by the group. Also, starting with our third release — A Big 10-8 Place — in 1983, and continuing on with every single thing we have made since then, we always have had a very strong and very intentional conceptual thread running through each of our projects. It’s all highly structured. Nothing random about it at all, so with A Big 10-8 Place you may have to listen more than a few times before the picture becomes clear. But it’s there’. How different is the cultural scene in California now compared to when you got Negativland started back in the late 1970s? ‘I hardly know. I never leave my house. I think it is less radically inclined but still relatively innovative’. You’ve put out false press releases over the years, confused America with experimental recordings, and pissed off the biggest band in the world [U2]. Any cunning plans lined up that we should be warned about? ‘We wouldn’t tell you if we did’. Our Favorite Things is a remarkable collection of material. Thank god for parody! Do you feel like your contemporaries are taking their creative pursuits a little too seriously these days? ‘Hell, I thought we were the only ones taking things a little too seriously these days! It took many, many years to make that darn DVD, so you have to be pretty serious about being funny to keep at something like that for that long when no one is paying you to do it. And, no, we don’t think any of what we do is parody’.

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