Carl Stone - So we’re here with several of the members of the current configuration of Negativland, Mark Hosler and Jon Leidecker. And, of course… rabid devotees of the band know its current configuration, but it’s been through a lot of changes. A number of your members have sadly passed away, so could you fill us in on the current full lineup of the group?

Mark Hosler - We’ve always been kind of vague about that, but yes, we’ve lost some key members, founding members like Richard Lyons and Ian Allen, and near-founding members and people who were huge parts of the brain trust like Don Joyce. There are those of us who are more involved in driving the whole thing forward, but there’s a larger group of people who are involved in creating the videos and the websites and the graphics, and in our mind they’re all part of the family who are making this thing be the thing that it is.

CS - Yeah. In fact, including those who aren’t full-fledged members, but auxillary people who assisted in putting together the most recent project, The World Will Decide, which includes people like Tom Dimuzio, Kyle Bruckmann, Kevin Blechdom, Prairie Prince…

MH - Nava Dunkelman, Ava Mendoza, the two fine fellows from Matmos… all kind of harkening back to our album Escape From Noise, where we had all kinds of interesting guest stars.

CS - What’s the process with putting together a project with so many participants? Are you just kind of passing the master files around, where people add stuff, and send it back? Or does it go in a round robin, or if there’s a singular way… which there may not be…

Jon Leidecker - For Prairie, I went to his studio and played him several tracks that were just rhythm loops, and he gave us six or seven first takes. Like being the room with John Bonham or something. Ava Mendoza, Nava Dunkleman, Kyle, venerable Blechdom, also recorded in person. Many of the other people, it’s internet contributions, definitely.

MH - With Prairie’s contribution, the groove was there, and then he improvised in an ornamental way that brought the tracks to life in a way that was extraordinary. None of us have that level of skill. The thing was fun about it for me personally, there’s a track on the last album, True False — The World Will Decide is our sequel to that record — on that track, ‘Discernment’, Prairie’s drumming was so inspirational that Jon decided to completely erase all the music we’d made, and we went in and wrote new parts, and I got to play along with Prairie, in a digitally delayed fashion. We composed new music to his drumming for tracks you no longer hear. I don’t think we could have come up with that result if we’d written it in a more traditional way.

CS - It’s true that that’s one of the most driving, danceable tracks on True False, and in the Negativland canon overall — but my question, is that I sort of assume that everything if not everything, in this age of COVID, was done through internet exchange… were you the hub, with people passing things to you, or were people passing things around in a circle? This process is interesting to me.

JL - This new record was finished December 2019. ‘True False’ was finished well before that, but this was all in the can before the world we know now… decided. There wasn’t that much back and forth, people made contributions, and then we edited mercilessly to our whim.

CS - There is a tremendous amount of editing which is apparent… this is true in a lot of cases with your work, a kind of torrent, a barrage of elements hitting you from all sides… it’s sort of like watching an early episode of Arrested Development or something, where if you close your ears or eyes for a second, you miss an eternity, and if you give your attention to any one element, you might miss the things that come in the seconds to follow… so it’s definitely as much as any of your works it almost requires repeatedly listening…

MH - We hope it works if people give it a cursory listen, but there’s enough sonic and conceptual layers and easter eggs… there’s a dialogue across both albums that’s intricately thought out, but you’d have to spend time with them and really want to dig. If you do, it’s there.

JL - I really like that moment at which language melts back into music, the level at which your rational brain almost gives up. I thought a lot about the operas of Robert Ashley on this record, and the way he enunciates each word antithetically to how that word is normally pronounced to convey meaning, in such a way that you almost give up on what he’s trying to say, and what the libretto actually is. You can also do that with density. If you arrange the language on the rhythmic grid precisely enough, bringing out the built-in melodies in the language… language coming at you so quickly, you give up on trying to understand the sounds, and instead you just feel them. At the same time — you’re still hearing the words… it’s an ideal state to be in. It’s not just information overload, it’s trying to overcome the normal filters we have when listening to language. The pleasure of listening to music in a foreign language, in that at first you’re freed from the responsibility of figuring out the meaning… but inevitably, any music you love, you figure out what your favorite songs were trying to say.

CS - Or, you develop your own alternative narrative to what they’re saying, which can be the case also. Either way. And you know, this gets us to the whole issue of what is meaning? The meaning of meaning, which I think is a question you’re asking in your work.

MH - I think we’re always trying for this very complex, delicate dance between… obviously the albums are very conceptual, the tracks are about specific things, and yet. There’s all these voices that never knew they were going to be in proximity to each other. And we’ve made them have a conversation. And the ultimate meaning is being put together by your brain as you hear it, and there’s something about that which has remained, after all these years of doing this, really interesting — there’s a depth to that that you can keep playing with. In particular on these two records, Jon’s work with digital editing came to bear in a way where we could take phrases, and we could insert a tenth of a second, a quarter of a second, between words, to alter cadences, to nudge things right onto the beat, or where the music transitions… there’s a finessing that most listeners won’t know we did, but when I hear it, having done it for forty years, I can hear there’s a greater degree of musicality to how the language is being placed in the mix that anything we’ve done…

CS - And more remarkable in having doing that, you never have the sense that things are overly quantized, or you’re not forcing it to the beat… it’s so natural, and still speech-like, it’s a wonderful illusion that you’ve created…

JL - There are times where we pushed it too far onto the grid that we realized we had to back off. Too locked in, wasn’t language anymore. So much of meaning is contained in prosody — our rational conscious brains want to think it’s all language, and yet so much of the actual meaning we extract isn’t the words, it’s the sounds. These records really play on the line between words and music. Even if a lot of the editing is invisible, at all times you’re supposed to be questioning whether or not any of the voices in the mix actually said the things you’re hearing. Some of those things are so unlikely, so evil or preposterous or corporate… some of the business models of Facebook or Google, when people like Eric Schmidt discuss these things, we want you wonder whether or not those sentences were edited. Even if we seldom had to edit the Google people.

MH - Negativland, historically, we have edited people to say things they didn’t say. But we don’t actually do it that much! What draws us to these found elements is what they actually did say. And obviously we’re always drawn to these voices that we appropriate for the language, the words they’re using, but it’s also always about the cadence, the tambre, the quality of the voice. So there’s the purely sonic element in our selecting things, as well as the meaning. I was going to say earlier… there’s also our own inner compass on our sense of humor and silliness is that we always put in little funny time bombs, dropped into the track that don’t quite make any sense, they’re there only because… they made us laugh.

CS - You mentioned that the new album is a companion piece, a sequel to the prior release True False, but I think both of these releases deal with the whole issue of truth, and what is truth in a world of alternative facts. Both of them deal also with media, and the role that media plays in promulgating alternative truths. It’s very much consistent with how your work has always dealt with media, to one extent or another, wouldn’t you agree?

JL - The records are definitely on brand!

CS - There’s something else this new release deals with, rearing its head as we get towards the end, and it comes from a band that’s had three of its members pass away… on some level, it seems to be dealing with the issue of… death.

MH - I’m glad you picked that up! It’s woven through both albums more than I think we even realized while we were making it.

JL - Oh by the second record we’d picked up on it. It’s more than a sub-theme.

MH - Definitely leaked in there. And I certainly remember being aware of things changing, especially when we hit our current COVID moment, and with what was happening in our country politically, I’ve been curious and eager to see how what we made would play out and be perceived once it was finally released. Something can only come out when it does, and one wonders how is that going to impact how people see it? And I think there’s things on the record that sound as if we did make them just this summer. And that’s just… luck? Our antenna were out, who knows?

JL - Don wanted us to keep going. He wanted the radio show to keep going, he wanted his work to outlive him. And that’s just one of the things that always comes up with composition, the western canon of written notation… Bach may have considered himself just a craftsman, but by the time we get to Beethoven… we get people who realize that the media upon which they work is going to allow them to outlive their own mortal existence. So Don had twenty-five years worth of stuff he was making for this weekly radio show, constantly grinding out stuff…

MH - Thirty-four years!

JL - The last twenty-five years, some his favorite subjects were artificial intelligence, neuroscience, the increasing confusion of technology with our selves…

CS - Were these notes on a notepad? Mark told me you had a big box of cassette tapes he’d willed you… and you used some of these as material for this album?

MH - Whenever we were doing our weekly radio show Over The Edge, which started in 1981, we’d have a theme that week, and we’d all bring in material that related to that theme. Don would have things edited up and ready go, ready to be used improvisationally, but… prepared. When the shows were over, he’d store them in our archive, and they’re all labelled… after Don died, we realized we had this enormous amount of material that had never made its way onto any studio recording. Beautiful gems that needed to find a home, and also were very much the voice in which he spoke, the things he would choose to appropriate, not the things I would, or Jon, or anyone else in the group. That’s what we were drawing upon, all that material. And in addition to that, there were a ton of cassettes that Jon ended up with.

JL - The ingredients he’d use to improvise the weekly radio show, coming up with three hours of content a week — we had both the shows, and the source materials. And the subject, frequently, was… artificial intelligence. So we had a direction.

CS - There you go. Was it fun going through all those materials, Jon, or was it an arduous task? How did you feel, because it seems like a massive undertaking, the way you described it.

JL - There was so much… but in some ways, you edit like you improvise, right? As you know yourself, Carl, the current electronic music tools allow you edit in real time in front of an audience. What used to be only composition is now performance. And that’s what the radio show was, it was real time editing — stopping and starting tapes, recombining them, it was a live mix collage. So when you have that much material, and it’s all pre-screened, all good — you can flip into a state of mind where you are editing in an improvisatory way, it was literally just, pick out a cassette if you need a voice for this next part, go to Don’s magic box of tapes, put it into the cassette machine, and more often that not…

CS - And I’m sure a lot of people know, because it’s sort of an infamous aspect… not only did you sprinkle Don’s materials throughout these albums, but you actually distributed his ashes to people who bought your album.

MH - Yes, we sprinkled Don over the world.

CS - And… was that his idea?

JL - As our press release put it: ‘We’re pretty sure he would have wanted it this way.’

CS - …yeah.

MH - The project we had completed just before he died was an edit of an Over The Edge show called the Chopping Channel, and this particular episode we’d edited down to put out as a CD… literally, among other things, dealt with the commodification of the human body down to its fluids. Conceptually, we wouldn’t have put Don’s ashes into just any project we’d made, it was this particular one, the one we were about to put out, finished before he died… it was literally the perfect place to put Don’s body into the work. We felt, I think, very sure, that he would have said yes guys, that’s a great idea, please do that.

CS - Did you have to check to see if there were any legal constraints about mailing human remains?

MH - Because of things we’ve gone through over the years, with various legal adventures, we do have a couple of friends in the world of law who will give us free advice. We investigated that to make sure. The thing is, when we actually mailed out all the CDs with the ashes, we sent them normal media mail rate. That was very not legal to do. But nothing happened. We got away with it.

JL - It was a contract with the fans. People who we knew loved him.

CS - This new album also is remarkable because of the number of tracks that seem to adhere to, even though they have all these elements, they adhere to song form, they are kind of songs.

MH - We call them songs! And the samples, we call them lyrics.

CS - Would ‘More Data’ be one of those?

JL - The hit! You’ve done this before, Carl.

JL - That song’s so on the nose. It’s from the second record but we put it out six months before the release of the first one… we felt the situation with public awareness of data privacy was moving so quickly that we needed to get that track out before much more happened.

MH - We also really liked the idea that we were promoting a new album by releasing a single from the album that was going to come out after the new album.

JL - It was a way of linking the two albums together in the public mind, for those thirty people paying attention.

MH - And then to help promote the album ‘The World Will Decide’, we released a video and Chrome Extension to promote the track ‘Discernment’ from the previous record.

CS - Is that something that could be downloaded from the Negativland website?

MH - You actually download it from the Chrome website itself. Programmer and visual artist Dina Kelberman, she did astonishing work on that — you point your browser towards any news website, and the headlines morph in time to our song. And then…

JL - Kristin Erickson aka Kevin Blechdom!

MH - She created an Alexa Skill Set for the track ‘Before I Ask’, in which our member David Wills, the Weatherman, has a confused interaction with the digital assistants in his home.

CS - I don’t even know what a Skill Set is.

JL - You install it within Alexa to customize their conversational and responsive capacity.

CS - So if I had a Google Dot, or an Alexa… how would I install that? Or does it come pre-packaged, or you just call it up?

JL - You download it from the Amazon website, and it synchronizes with your Alexa.

MH - And you tell Alexa to ‘Play Negativland’, and then Alexa does a bunch of confusing things.

JL - Alexa begins saying some of the terrifying things we made her say on our album. Basically, Google Chrome and Amazon Alexa are home consumer products that mainly exist to spy on you, and that you should not under any circumstances be using or allowing in your homes. And to promote our new album, we’re offering extensions that you can download that will entertainingly reveal the purposes in difficult ways.

CS - Naive adapters.

JL - That’s the joke!

MH - There was also something weirdly entertainingly grotesque to do a project where we’re pointing people to the Chrome and Amazon sites.

JL - We’re all complicit. No easy way out of being online. So many of the media literacy self-defense techniques we grew up with as means of resistance, against Big Media… the term Culture Jamming, which this band is associated with, these were ways to resist the machines of one-way media dissemination. Take their output, take the one way stream, remix it, make a critique of media so irresistible that media itself will be helpless to do anything but suck it back up and recirculate it. All these methods of self-defense, or resistance that people our age grew up with thinking as countercultural… have all been assimilated by social media and self-publishing. Facebook loves it when you use Facebook to criticize Facebook.

MH - It makes me wonder if in some sort of strange, upside-down backwards way, there’s things Negativland were evoking or getting at in our early work… we’re now in that world. We’re now just as in it. And yet we’re still making work… what does this work we’re making now mean now?

JL - Still a form of self-defense.

MH - That’s what Don would say.

JL - But you have take the antibiotic to its completion. Or you’re just going to be more sick afterwards.

CS - You were thinking about antibiotics, I was thinking it’s more like… a vaccine!

JL - How about that?

CS - So far, these two most recent albums can be thought as a kind of diptych, but do you have plans for a third, to make it a trilogy, or have you said your piece?

MH - There’s more to what we’re doing with these things, yes. I’m not sure how much we’re ready to reveal right now.

JL - These two records were originally one record, and then there was so much material, it naturally split. But when we played live last year in 2019, the fun bit was taking all the samples that had settled within certain tracks, and spread them back out across the entire concert. Live, I think there’s still a lot of potential to turn these two records back into one coherent, flowing, single piece. Like the radio show, float the elements into different places every night.

MH - We don’t treat our recorded works with any respect, it’s all raw material to continue to rework and rethink… we could make it converse with itself in whole new ways, changing it up every night. We got a glimpse of that on tour last year. Hopefully we will eventually return to this and be able to resume that conversation with our own material. Also we’ve been working with this incredible and inspiring live visual artist Sue-C, who we hope we can continue working with when we resume…

CS - Tell us more about Sue-C.

JL - She was one of the first people to use Max/MSP’s visual program, Jitter. Essentially the first in-house beta tester back when it was being co-written by Joshua Clayton and Luke DuBois. She’s worked with Luc Ferrari, Morton Subtonick, AGF, Laetitia Sonami. Then, she and her husband raised two kids, and last year Laetitia casually mentioned that Sue was looking for new projects, and… we lucked out. We’re trying to figure out how to do multi-location live streaming in a way that isn’t inherently a lie, where all the latencies involved can all be turned to advantage, and say something about the world we’ve all been forced into, and hopefully… hopefully that can be productive instead of poisonous.

MH - Also what was great about working with Sue and her wonderful husband Kevin was it was the first time I’d been on a Negativland tour where we never argued, not once! Not once!

CS - Must have felt like something was wrong.

MH - Yeah, wrong! I’m prone to terrible, terrible crushing anxiety when it comes to performing and touring and stuff, but I had a really nice time and I’m looking forward to continuing to doing this.

CS - Someday, we’ll all be back out on the road. But in the meantime… keep those studio lights, or turn them off and keep working in the dark.

MH - By candlelight!

CS - Very good. Fun talking to you guys!

JL - Yeah and congratulations on your new album, Carl! If we had another fifteen minutes… it’s so weird how you made a pop album almost simply by virtue of having the tracks… shorter!

CS - Uh… that’s all you have to do, just make ‘em shorter! And then get them on AM radio. These are all my radio mixes, you should hear the album mixes.

JL - Sure. It’s always edits.