2 N E W L I V E S H O W S
A N N O U N C E D !
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New Year's Eve in San Francisco with The Butthole Surfers
- Early February at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN
Click here for more details.
Negativland Presents...
T H I G M O T A C T I C
"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 this website. 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, will always try to keep its back against a solid protective roof…”
-Ann Zwinger, The Mysterious Lands
New DVD:
O U R F A V O R I T E T H I N G S
With Bonus CD: "180 d'Gs to the Future!" by the 180-Gs
"Our Favorite Things" is a new feature length 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.
The 180 G's bonus CD contains acapella cover versions of Christianity is Stupid • I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For • Greatest Taste Around • Car Bomb • I Am God • Helter Stupid • A Nice Place to Live • The Playboy Channel • Oven Noises • Roy Storey Sports Line • Seat Bee Sate • Theme From A Big 10-8 Place • and more.
A B I G 1 0 - 8 PL A C E
CD back in print!
With bonus DVD: "No Other Possibility"
Here it is, the re-re-issue of Negativland's long out-of-print 1983 release, “A Big 10-8 Place,” now with less fancy packaging than ever before. But it does comes packaged with a 60-minute bonus DVD of Negativland's first foray into video, "No Other Possibility," featuring material shot before, during, and a few years after “A Big 10-8 Place" was released. This recording, Negativland's third-ever release, was their first-ever concept album, taking the listener on a surreal journey through the high and low points of their home turf in Northern California's Contra Costa County. Three years in the making, and with ten-thousand-million-billion analog tape splices, this uniquely insane tornado of fast-edits and painstakingly assembled sounds and ideas remains a hands down favorite amongst Negfans, despite our overflowing warehouses full of all the Negativland recordings released since then...
