![]()
OTE Vol. 5: CROSLEY BENDIX: THE RADIO REVIEWS
1993
(Seeland 010) CD
Approximately 3000 copies sold.
Boston Rock
#14In general, Negativland attacks the boundary between sound art and real life. This recording comes from OVER THE EDGE, a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM that Negativland has produced since 1981. Volume 5 (four previous collections were released before this) features Director of Stylistic Premonitions CROSLEY BENDIX, who may or may not be a real person, but appears regularly on the show in well-produced clips. Bendix exists to deflate artistic pretensions, sometimes by parodying existing criticism ("Domestic Art" vests preposterous home decorator hints with avant-garde justifications; "Squant" discourses on issues raised by the discovery of a fourth primary color), by larding on the rhetoric (puns and malapropisms abound throughout, especially "Progress") or sound effects (his Pollyanna-ish lecture on technology is scuppered when the studio goes haywire around him) - and even occasionally straight talk: in "Movies", he derides the notion that artworks can be rank ordered. Great stuff!
The Valley Advocate
January 6, 1994CROSLEY BENDIX, commentator for the Berkeley radio station KPFA, sounds like he hasn't left his local Media Center since 1975 - excepting an occasional trip to the local convenience store for hot nachos. As director of stylistic premonitions for the Universal Media Netweb, he spins his media culturocritical tales and essays on a recently released compact disc compilation on multimedia band NEGATIVLAND'S label SEELAND (Bendix is probably an alter-ego of one of Negativland's ,members, but since these guys are always pulling pranks and counter pranks, it's tough to know for sure).
As he reads the output from his state-of-the-art Cubulax Mainframe Culture Crunchier(TM) in the Universal Media Netweb's Situation Pit, Bendix presents 97 percent accurate cultural forecasts for decades to come. The recent discovery of a new primary color ("squant") and its associated secondary tones ("squed, sque and squellow") inspires a hilarious nine minute diversion into abstruse theories of vision, and his attempts to transform modern dance into a medium for radio are, well, unprecedented. NEGATIVLAND PRESENTS OVER THE EDGE VOL. 5: CROSLEY BENDIX-THE RADIO REVIEWS may be a mouthful but it's worth a try.
Back to PRESS US
Back to NMOL
![]()