NEGATIVLAND PRESENTS...THIGMOTACTIC
Not in stores until July 15th, but you can buy it from www.negativland.com right now.
Comes with deluxe 36-page full-color booklet.
"Thigmotactic" takes another path in Negativland's many twists and turns throughout the musical wilderness, by going deep into song making territory with a project created mostly by one member of the group.
The fifteen songs and two instrumentals were written, composed and performed by Negativland's Mark Hosler, with contributions from the rest of the group, and with well-known San Francisco noisemaker Thomas Dimuzio contributing lots of rather unexpectedly normal sounding instruments, arrangements and production.
Moving in a very different direction than other recent Negativland releases, and with a decidedly surreal bent, "Thigmotactic" is the first entirely song-based project to emerge from underneath the Negativland umbrella. These eccentric toe-tapping electronic folk-pop noise songs are strung together to form a continuous and cohesive listening experience, with themes emerging around meat, feet, pants, milk, cows, trucks, Herb Alpert, Richard Nixon, and even love.
"Thigmotactic" continues in Negativland's decades long collage and cut-up tradition, but while the trademark sound of found audio elements is heard through-out, the cutting up and collage is also in the lyrics, created by combining dream journals, bits of advertisements, found poems, automatic writings, stream of consciousness, old National Geographic articles, and more.
The found ethic continues with the artwork that accompanies each track, created from found materials to illustrate each song. Many of these have been shown as part of Negativland's traveling art show "Negativlandland", and, in a creative experiment in financing this release, each one-of-a-kind work is for sale via Negativland's website, www.negativland.com. Look under VISUAL ART to find them (art prices coming soon!).
Negativland has always existed as an umbrella under which the group releases collaborative work in many mediums - music, noise, collage, film, design, animation, fine art, books, lectures, essays, sculpture, performance, radio, web sites, etc. - with the term "Negativland Presents" sometimes being used as a way to release work that might be mostly the product of one member's brain, or uses members outside of the immediate collective. To learn more about Negativland's unusual history, read their bio.
“Norris bangs one yucca stump after another to rout out an elusive night lizard, and gives me a running resume of the genus: its smallness, its lack of eyelids, how it sheds its skin as a snake does, that it is so incredibly sedentary that one may stay under the same bush or Joshua tree for much of its entire life and, being strongly thigmotactic – needing to keep in contact with world around it – will always try to keep its back against a solid protective roof…”
- Ann Zwinger, The Mysterious Lands
THIGMOTACTIC TRACK TITLE AND TIMES -
1. RICHARD NIXON DIED TODAY 2:24
2. LYING ON THE GRASS 2:03
3. EXTRA SHARP PENCILS 2:31
4. IT’S NOT A CRITIQUE 1:02
5. BASKETBALL PLANT 2:46
6. TWO LIGHT BULBS FLICKERING 1:35
7. BY TRUCK 1:19
8. JACK PASTRAMI/FLOWER BUM 2:41
9. INFLUENTIAL YOU 2:22
10. VIRGINIA’S TRIP 2:26
11. STEAK ON A WHIM 3:13
12. PORK IN THE STORE 3:14
13. PERFECT LITTLE COOKIES 1:55
14. KIND OF GRUMPY 1:59
15. YOUR SKIN IS GELATIN 2:35
16. OMNIPOTENT STRUGGLE 2:46
17. RANCHO PANCHO 2:28
Total 39:29
NEGATIVLAND: OUR FAVORITE THINGS
Plus BONUS CD: 180-D'Gs TO THE FUTURE by the 180-Gs
OUR FAVORITE THINGS is a new DVD/CD project from reigning Kulture Kut-up Kings Negativland, co-released by Seeland MediaMedia and San Francisco's Other Cinema DVD. It is NTSC, region 0, and is playable worldwide.
Twenty-seven years of the group's "greatest hits" have become all-new moving pictures in this amazing, years-in-the-making package. Created with 18 other filmmakers from all over the USA (and one a capella group from Detroit), OUR FAVORITE THINGS is a collaborative project that takes Negativland's sound explorations into the world of film and video. What emerges is a darkly cracked look at 21st century America, juxtaposing paranoia, torture, control, power, guns, fear, suicide, cola wars, mental illness, and intellectual property issues with the lighter side of dopey advertising, cartoon characters, cleaning products and Jesus.
The OUR FAVORITE THINGS DVD includes over 60 minutes of never-before-seen bonus material, and, for those who would rather shut their eyes tight and just listen, it also comes with a full-length CD which isn't by Negativland at all: "180 D’Gs TO THE FUTURE!" by the Gospel R & B Doo-Wop group, The 180-Gs. You'll be all ears as this talented posse from inner Detroit sings out heavenly cover versions of Negativland's best (and least) known cut-up collage work from throughout their career, making for one of the strangest recordings you have ever heard.
OUR FAVORITE THINGS is an epic career-spanning project from Negativland, "sure to please their old fans," sez Dr. Wick Milton, D.D.S., of our Appropriation Assessment Department. And yet this DVD, released in cooperation with San Francisco’s Other Cinema DVD, also provides an expansively overdue introduction to Negativland's work for new audiences who have not yet discovered them.
Includes newly minted video versions of Time Zones • Christianity Is Stupid • No Business • Gimme The Mermaid • Greatest Taste Around • Over The Hiccups • U2 • Guns • Yellow, Black And Rectangular • Aluminum or Glass • Favorite Things • Taste In Mind • Truth In Advertising • Humanitarian Effort • Drink It Up • Freedom's Waiting • Why Is This Commercial? • No Business • and more
About Negativland
Since 1980, the 4 or 5 or 6 Floptops known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arranges these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.
Over the years Negativland's "illegal" collage and appropriation based audio and visual works have touched on many things - pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative anti-corporate activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture.
While it is true that, after being sued, Negativland became more publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation's copyright laws, Negativland are artists first and activists second. All of their art and media interventions have intended to pose both
serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda and perception. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about in over 30 books (including NO LOGO by Naomi Klein, MEDIA VIRUS by Douglas Rushkoff, and various biographies of the band U2), cited in legal journals, and they often lecture about their work here and in Europe.
Since 1981, Negativland and an evolving cast of characters have
operated “Over The Edge,” a weekly radio show on KPFA FM in
Berkeley,
California. “Over The Edge” continues to broadcast three hours of
live,
found sound mixing every Thursday at midnight, West Coast time, with online access. In 1995 they released a 270 page book with 72 minute CD entitled "FAIR USE: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2." This book documented their infamous four-year long legal battle over their 1991 release of an audio piece entitled "U2". They were the subjects of Craig Baldwin's 1995 feature documentary SONIC OUTLAWS and created the
soundtrack and sound design for Harold Boihem's 1997 documentary film THE AD AND THE EGO, an excellent in-depth look into the hidden agendas of the corporate ad world and the ways that we are affected by advertising. In 2004 Negativland worked with Creative Commons to write the Creative Commons Sampling License, an alternative to existing copyrights that is now in widespread use by many artists, writers, musicians, film makers, and websites. In 2005, they released the elaborately packaged NO BUSINESS (with CD, 15,000 word essay, and custom made whoopie cushion), and debuted "Negativlandland" - a large visual art show of over 80 piece's of their "fine art" works, video, and home-made electronic devices, at New York City's Gigantic Art
Space. That exhibit continues to travel and appear around the country. More recently Negativland have been touring a new performance piece called “Its’ All In Your Head FM”, a two-hour-long audio cut-up mix about monotheism, the supernatural God concept, and the all-important role played by the human brain in our beliefs. Christianity and Islam are the featured religions, as Negativland asks it’s audience to contemplate some complex, serious, ridiculous, and challenging ideas about human belief in a show best described as “documentary collage.”
Negativland is interested in unusual noises and images (especially ones that are found close at hand), unusual ways to restructure such things and combine them with their own music and art, and mass media transmissions which have become sources and subjects for much of their work. Negativland covets insightful humor and wackiness from anywhere, low-tech approaches whenever possible, and vital social targets of any kind. Foregoing ideological preaching, but interested in side effects, Negativland is like a subliminal cultural sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren't supposed to notice.
Let's change the American Flag to a tree or a fury wood land creature. 13 strips is bull shit. It was still legal to own slaves and take away American Indians land. Fuck the flag!
Survival Research Laboratories crew member Todd Blair suffered a severe brain injury while striking the set of an SRL show last September in Amsterdam. While liability insurance is being disputed we are doing all we can can to support Todd and his wife through his recovery.
The Wall: Unveiled will include art, performance, food, family crafts and fun. $5 to $500 minimum donation at the door. All donations are tax deductible. All ages welcome.
The Wall: Unveiled, Sunday, July 20, 2008, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda, CA 94501.
what I can not believe is that you actually have people who think they can dictate what you do and how you do it. shame on those assholes. and screw if you don't like the latest art rendered, all you did is sit around and bitch.
Stop making records. The new one is very weak. I dont hear any singles, no hooks, the lyrics are clunky and disjointed. The guitar solos are the only thing keeping my copy out of the trash... Don's got some killer licks.
FREE DOWNLOAD on Rack & Ruin Records new KIRAMEKI 6 track EP : “Exercises in Style”
"Kirameki’s [“exercises…”] is a twisted little set of tracks in an electro, break beat, ambient, noise, monster vain. A kind of trip-hop Aphex Twin style freakery is going on here. The songs stop and start and twist in all directions, sometimes in beautiful ways as in Bunny & The Electric Horsemen or spooky ways like on, well the end of that track... Exercises In Style is a joy to listen to and at only six tracks a quick breeze of inventive sound tomfoolery…"
