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The National Cynical Network (or ’NCN’ for short) is a long-running ’alternate programming’ project assembled (originally) by a trio of San Francisco Bay-Area based sound-collage absurdists: Phineas Narco, Ronald Redball and Alexander T. Newport.

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NCN seeks to create and practice ’mediage’, which we define as creating art out of the media environment which we inhabit.

Mediage is the expressionistic re-casting of the media environment upon itself, filtered through the lens of the artist’s own subjective experience of it.

The group first formed in the spring of 1998 at the Los Altos, CA college radio station KFJC. It dis-banded sometime in 2003.

Phineas still creates work, largely solo, under the ’NCN’ moniker.

ROOTS and INFLUENCES

(1987-1998) The OTE Years

Phinny (Phineas Narco) was heavily influenced in 1982 by the manically improvised late-night radio psychedelia of KPFA’s "The Subgenius Show" (now known as ’The Puzzling Evidence Show’).

Inspiration was also found in listening to the sonic wizardry of Negativland’s late-night sound-collage show "Over the Edge" also on KPFA.

In the mid-eighties, Phinny began calling up the live shows to speak and also insert pre-mixed material by phone, and then later guested on shows in the studio. Various themes were explored including the early work of Frank Zappa,food, death, parents, and media coverage of such topics as crime and terrorism.

As well as the KPFA radio shows, other main influences for Phinny include the solo work of Roger Waters, the music of Trent Reznor, and the work of the late Frank Zappa.

Redball’s influences aren’t specifically known, but he is a great admirer of radio personality Phil Hendrie. Redball built and ran the infamous ’Shoebox Tapes’ site which featured much long-lost early Phil Hendrie material given to him by Alexander T. Newport. Many of the Shoebox Tapes are now (probably) available on Hendrie’s site.

Redball also seems to be influenced by the humorous stylings of the Firesign Theater and The Simpsons, and is a long-time enthusiast of the works of musician Philip Glass.

Redball completely wrote and produced, the popular ’Chap in the Hood’ segments, from the Midnight Voicejail series, and helped to co-create the song ’Free Will’ which was featured on the infamous Droplift Album in 2000. He also penned and provided the voices for the poplar ’PepRidge Farm Commercial’ parody which was featured in the later "Needle in the Red" audio series. .

Redball has done at least 40 "Over the Edge" shows with Don Joyce, of Negativland, (with Newport guesting on many of those shows and Phinny on some of them).

Redball effectively dropped out of ’NCN’ in 2003. He currently lives in Cupertino and is looking for work as a comedy writer.

Alexander T. Newport contributed writing and much voice talent to the early days of NCN, and has authored three books of “philo-babble": The Vomit Factory (Life is Fake: Death is Good), Ice Cream & Poop (Making the Best of a Stupid Existence), and The Steering Wheel Ain’t Connected to the Wheels (It’s Just for Show). These books are currently unavailable as Newport is looking for a publisher for them.

Originally born & raised in the USA midwest, Newport currently lives in England with his wife and pets.

In 1988, the 3 members of NCN were doing shows intermittently on various episodes of "Over the Edge" and met through their association with that show. They also knew of each other through a pre-web voicemail community scene which was going on in the Bay Area at the time and described below.



(1986-1995)

’The Box Scene’ Years:

’Midnight Voicejail’ was an artistic audio documentary, done originally as a school project, it focused on a voicemail ’Box Scene’ that started in 1986 in Silicon Valley.

The box scene was sparked by a personal ad in the San Jose Metro, put there by a character named Ed Note. The ad invited Silicon Valley ’freaks’ to call a voicemailbox sardonically titled ’The World Suicide Club’. The recordings of incoming calls to Note’s advertised voicemail box were then cut up and used in collage form as his outgoing message material.

This small-scale ’mediage’ experiment (which created it’s own electronic media environment from which it largely drew) created a kind of feedback clarion call attracting all manner of artistic and disaffected outcasts, freaks and weirdos, who had been largely alienated from the 1980’s Silicon Valley yuppie social scene which predominated at that time.

"Mr. 1:15" (Newport) soon after set up his box (called "Club Manic-Depression"), followed by Ronald Redball’s box (titled "The Global Maverick Society"). Many more box-owners followed, and the scene grew and migrated to other more robust voicemail systems (which could better handle the load it put on their resources).

The scene continued for 10 years. At its peak, there were no less than 50 different mailboxes, all of them interacting with each other, trading and re-broadcasting messages, and presenting creative outgoings for the world to hear.

The scene broke up around the mid-nineties, presumably when everyone discovered the worldwide web.

What were the boxes??

Interestingly, in retrospect, ’the boxes’ turned out to be a type of ’pre-web’ internet, utilizing the DIY social-networking, news reporting and entertainment capabilities of voicemail. These capabilities were not intended in their design, but was rather imposed creatively in DIY fashion by the users. Many systems were usually not set up for that sort of traffic, having been originally designed as only virtual answering machines for individuals and small companies.

Having a ’box’, back then, (meaning a voicemail box) is sort of like having a box now, (meaning a computer). That is, owning an entry point into virtual public space.

They were used as public journals, creative outlets, political soap-boxes, self-expression, for social networking, flame-wars called ’bombing’, and sheer entertainment for the underground twenty-something crowd of the day. All of these utilizations have their parallels as the web is used today.

Many of those who, at the time, looked down on ’the boxes’ as ’lame’ have computers, and blogs, today.

Just about everyone in ’the box scene’ had their own collection of tapes of the scene and the messages both incoming and outgoing. It was widely known that such taped material was being widely collected, freely circulated, and would someday be used for... ’something’ in the same creative spirit.

That something turned out to be the radio show ’Midnight Voicejail’ which was created in 1999 and ran until 2002 on KFJC’s radio show "Club Manic-Consciousness" run by Angel D. Monique.

(1998-2003)

The Needle in the Red years

.. The phrase ’Needle in the Red’ came out of a studio session ’play tape’ made at KFJC on evening in 2001. In that session, Newport kept pointing out how the needle of the VU meter kept going into the red and in jovial frustration, the trio suddenly burst into singing ’Needle in the Red’ sung to the tune of "Farmer in the Dell".

In 2002, in the wake of the dot-com bust and 9/11, and with the world wide web in full swing, Phinny was weary of working on voicemail material. Disillusioned by incomprehensible KFJC station politics, devastated by an aborted friendship with comedian George Carlin, tired of dealing with Redball, and spooked by very odd and apparently prescient synchroncities in his own sonic creations, Phinny wanted to spend more time abstractly exploring and expressing personal inner landscapes, and demons, through collage. He began spending more and more time at home, working obsessively on intricate collages and weaving programs together under the name ’Needle in the Red’.

During this time, Phinny became more and more reclusive to the point of agoraphobia. He kept working on the strange audio documentaries, with the voicemail art now taking a backseat to collage and music, producing over 30 episodes as of the summer of 2006.

STYLE, THEMES and TECHNIQUES

Many people ask what the ’style’ of NCN is.

While it identifies itself with no particular genre it shares some identification with the following terms: ’experimental variety’, ’stream-of-consciousness’, ’mediage’, ’found sound’, ’medcore’, ’the new blues’, ’dark psy’, ’neuro-novelty’, ’retro-reality radio’, culture-jamming.

There are elements of comedy, psychedelia, trance, techno, industrial, dark psyc, house, dub and satire in the NCN experience, although it holds no allegiance to the trappings of these particular genres.

Like many Generation X-er’s themselves, the project rejects idealogy and therefore ’suffers’ from an inherent and indecisive lack of identity. However it has come to embrace this identity crisis and use it, instead of trying to oppose or ’solve’ it. The project bears a host of ’logos’ instead of one identifiable one.

O-kay... But... really... what is NCN?

Uhhh... in effect, NCN is a project which seeks to frighten and amuse by painting sonic paintings, self-portraits, that use the media environment as it’s palette and canvas. Yeah... that’s it.

Common themes include: cynicism, psychedelic intensity, experimental music, political and pop culture, political caricature, drugs, an obsession with the shows ’Star Trek-The Next Generation’ and the short-lived comedy series ’Sledgehammer’, an identification with ’nerd culture’, the necessary ’illusion’ of being in an inescapably subjective reality, sophisticatedly vulgar humor, "Newportian dreamgame theory", buddhism and new age ’self-help’ spirituality, extreme states of mood and consciousness, work, liberalism vs. conservatism, the phrase ’how dare you,’ the word ’types’ and the number 59.

All of the above, at any given time, can be lampooned or taken very seriously but.... but....

"SO, WHAT??"

We do not seek to change minds as much as to describe the times as seen through our own minds, our own subjective lens. These shows are presented as surreal sonic snapshots of the vast media environment we live in right now. Whenever historians look back to see what a civilization was like, they first look at the art. As artists, we appropriate the right to appropriate. "Officer, here’s my artistic license". To deny media appropriation, certainly nowadays, is to deny art itself! Artists have always copied from their their environment and made rearranged duplicates of how things seem to them. As Children of the Media, raised on television and muzak, we reclaim our birthright to play with that media. We claim the right to be artists!

Types (heh... ’types’) of material runs the gamut from improvised mixes, produced comedy skits, straight up found sound-collages, political parody, abstract sonic expressionism, dada, surrealism, social commentary, voicemail messages, field recordings, naive melodies, ’psycho-philobabble’ (the expression of an amalgam of various philosophical standpoints) and novelty songs.

NCN is a long and passionate dance between all the above elements.

Listening to an NCN show is rather like going on all the rides of an amusement park all at once. Chemical enhancement is... redundant. The mood of a show can be, at any given time, scary, funny, disturbing, absurd, ambient, psychedelic or spacey.

Wear headphones while listening for the best effect....

That is all.