 NEGATIVLAND - Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak 2002 Seeland 023 Book/CD TAPE OP Negativland present us with
one of the best CD packaging jobs ever, a work of art (I won't even
try to explain, just buy this) and one of their most "difficult"
listening events yet. It reminds me of the scary "Go to sleep,
Tommy" tape collage stuff from their third album. Gone are the
humorous songs or easy-to-digest collages. This is powerful, evocative
stuff and all the more amazing that no digital editing was employed
in its construction. NEWSWEEK Sept 23, 2002 Other People's Property: Trash found in scrapped cars becomes an art project - It's an often-ignored request, but you may pay more attention to the phrase "Please remember to take all your personal belongings" after seeing Negativland's eerily mesmerizing new project, "Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak." The artist's collective spent the past few years scavenging in junked cars to rescue letters, shopping lists, party invites, sheet music, certificates of completion and sonograms. The result: a photo book of their findings and the cars they came from (an accompanying CD sounds like a car crash). The belongings show a direct relationship between people whose cars get scrapped and poor spelling; kudos, however, to Nicole on that math assignment. In truth, the papers are fascinating because of what you don't know about them: where they're from, whom they were intended for, the fate of the passengers delivering them. People are already being inspired. Says founding member Richard Lyons, "Friends are going to wrecking yards" -many charge only $1 - saying, 'We're going scrapping!' "-Bret Begun LOS ANGELES TIMES, September 26, 2002 Negativland Finds Its Muse at the Auto Wrecking Yard - For more than 20 years, Negativland has earned renown for manipulation of both tape and media. A 1989 news release by the audio-visual art collective falsely claimed that a Minnesota teen who had killed his family had cited Negativland's provocative track "Christianity Is Stupid" as inspiration. The "news" was reported as fact by several print and electronic outlets, providing the groups underlying point about media unreliability. Two years later, the Bay Area-originated group released a single featuring chopped-up and rearranged bits of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" mixed with purloined outtakes of an expletive-laced rant by radio and TV personality Casey Kasem. That spurred legal action by both U2's label, Island Records, and Kasem, while also putting the group front and center in the debate over copyright and fair use issues. All of it's albums, it's weekly radio show on Berkeley's KPFA-FM and the various publications and projects carried out on the web site www.negativland.com are rife with tape=splicing, topical high jinks and surreal satire that incisively stand pop and corporate cultures on their heads with equal parts Stockhausen, Chomsky and Firesign Theatre. So, when Negativland started
showing friends and fans its latest project, a book and CD revolving
around letters, notes and other written material found in vehicles at
a wrecking yard, the group got some puzzled reactions. Nor is their any hoax involved.
"Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak," which
was released earlier this week on the group's Seeland label, is uncharacteristically
straightforward, and quite moving. "Dear Daddy, I Love You. Michelle" is scrawled in crayon on a magazine insert card, a rainbow and three red hearts added. On the right-hand page is a red mini-van, its front end smashed and twisted. A young woman's letter to a friend chronicles her tortured life, with the facing page a photo of a car that appears to have been in a brutal head-on collision. Another is a certificate of completion of a drug-and-alcohol rehab program, with the accompanying photo showing the trunk of the car littered with beer cans and bottles. There's nothing to indicate the fate of the people in the autos, or whether they were the writers or the recipients of the missives, although the states of the cars imply tragedy. The eerie, heartbreaking aura is enhanced by the audio CD, an ambient soundscape that invokes metal impacting metal in slow motion. Hosler says it was that emotional aspect that drew Negativland to the material, which originated with group member Richard Lyons' trip to a wrecking yard to scavenge car parts. Lyons made 10 or 15 copies of a small book of retained materials and gave them to friends. Two years ago, Ira Glass, host of the pu8blic-radio show "This American Life," heard about it through a mutual friend and asked Lyons to do a spoken essay about his finds. "The reaction to that was so strong, and from people clearly not our normal audience," says Hosler, who now lives in Olympia, Washington. "And that made us think, 'Wow, this is good. It's evoking a wide range of reactions, seems to be really compelling. Maybe we should expand it into a real project." Initially the group approached it much as it had in such works as the 12997 album "Dispepsi," which tacked the topic of advertising with both audio and cover graphics taken from or parodying PepsiCo campaigns. But the usual approach proved inappropriate for "Deathsentences." "We kept doing the things we do in other Negativland projects - add funny stuff and layers and layers of explanations," says Hosler. "And everything we tried didn't work. And the more we worked on it, the answer became, "Get Negativland out of the way and let it speak for itself.'" The change in tactics tined out to be particularly satisfying, given that the groups' collage style has lost some of its novel edge over the years, becoming commonplace both in professional media and among the public with cut-and-paste techniques accessible to anyone with a computer. Increasingly, what the members of Negativland find themselves speaking for are the copyright issues implicitly challenged by their work. They've become the center of a community of artists working with sound collage for similar aims, including Canadian "Plunderphonics" artist John Oswald, the group The Tape Beatles and English DJ Vicki Bennett (a.k.a. People Like Us). They are also in demand in academic and legal circles as experts on intellectual property matters. Hosler says he actually makes most of his income now as an invited speaker at symposiums and seminars. "Issues of fair use, what is property, what is culture and who owns it have become a lively debate since the arrival of Napster," likening Negativland's activities in the field to the tactics of the environmental militants in Earth First! "Negativland is more
interested in staying on the outside and lobbing our little mind bombs
over the fence. Even though we are clearly associated with the issues,
I don't want to turn into a lobbyist. We don't want to go to that world
and stay there - partly because it's more fun out here." BLENDER, November 2002 Sound collagists who enraged U2 find metal machine music in car graveyards - Best known for their inflammatory
1991 cover of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,"
which earned them a copyright-infringement lawsuit from U2's label,
Negativland have been pranking the entertainment industry for two decades.
But "Deathsentences," cleverly packaged to resemble a car
manual, is less tunefully clever than deadly serious. A book of photographs
portrays wrecked cars beside the various love letters, hate letters,
shopping lists and other documents Negativland's Richard Lyons found
in them. The accompanying CD is itself a kind of a car crash. Filtered,
processed, shredded and pasted, the album's dozen instrumental tracks,
including "Born to Loose" and "Hot & Ready,"
are titled after tunes on a mix tape found in one of the wrecked cars.
Negativland's chugging cacophony seems a fitting and grisly tribute
to human road kill. STOP SMILING, Issue 13 2003 Negativland's affinity for automobiles stretches back all the way to all of "A Big 10-8 Place" (1983), to tracks like "Car Bomb" ("Escape From Noise," 1987) and Cityman" ("Free," 1993) to later reaffirm it. 1985/1995's "The Starting Line," culled from broadcasts of the group's weekly radio show Over The Edge, focused almost exclusively on our (fucked up?/insane?) relationship to our autos. "Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak" is an extension along this conceptual vector, albeit offering a more delayed impact (with more room for your own construct of what it all means) than usual for a Negativland creation. One of the reasons Negativland rules is their admirable ability to appropriate and subvert various distinct styles and media to their own message. The idea that these guys would put out a thought-provoking, multi-tiered conceptual art piece is not exactly a shocker. That being said, "Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak" is clearly a veer toward revealing a more contemplative side to a group better known for its blazing (and mostly hilarious) anti-corporate/copyright expressions like "Dispepsi" and the notorious single "U2." Essentially "Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak" can be broken down into the visual vs. the aural. A full color 64-page book presents grim junkyard photos of wrecked cars juxtaposed with the notes, lists, letters, and other random bits of paper and text found inside them (a process known as "scrapping"). These are as surreally apt and bizarre as you'd expect from old pros like Negativland to discover, and the attention to detail in the transcriptions is cool. The book's CD companion is 45 minutes of Negativland's patented "non-music" - a specifically created "ever shifting electro-acoustic soundscape" component of the "Deathsentences" multi-level experience. "Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak" is solid and nifty in a manner we've come to expect from Negativland. The design is dead-on - especially the large die-cut silver automotive courtesy envelope (complete with blank intersection map, accident report, and space for noting the badge number of "Law Officer Present") that holds the book and CD. It's the kind of thing you remember seeing in the glove compartment of your mom and dads' car, and vaguely connected it with insurance or the DMV or something. Negativland is incapable
of staying to far from it's own classic collage style, and that's a
relief. "Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak"
is a breakout think-a-long. The format may seem a little unfamiliar,
the goods might look a wee bit slicker, but the end result is purely
Negativ. CMJ NEW MUSIC MONTHLY, September 2002 Weird Record of the Week - Appetite for Destruction To put Negativland in the
Weird Record section is almost redundant: constantly sued, always infringing
and never normal, every one of their records belongs under that heading.
They've upped the ante with Splendid e-zine, September
19, 2002 Back to PRESS US Back to NMOL 
|