Last night my friend David and I went to a talk/video show by Mark Hosler, a member of the group, Negativland. It was great! If you don’t know about Negativland, here’s a quote from The Unofficial, Unnecessary Negativland Page.
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.
Years ago (late 80s) I was a fan and collected a few of their tapes. I had forgotten about them until I saw that they were coming to the Coolidge Corner Theatre. They have been sued for copyright infringement (and lost), since they “appropriate” music and sounds from other sources. What they are doing seems more and more relevant given the changing political evironment, with media consolidation and crackdowns on “piracy” of music and copyrighted materials.
This week at work (MIT) I also sat in on a class where a video of a Larry Lessig talk was shown. (totally relevant to this same issue) You can watch the movie online here. Here’s a site where you can find links to several of Lessig’s talks
