Thigmotactic takes another path in Negativland’s many twists and turns throughout the musical wilderness, this time going deep into song making territory. Moving in a different direction than other Negativland releases, and with a decidedly surreal bent, 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.

While Thigmotactic continues in Negativland’s decades long collage and cut-up tradition, with the trademark “sound of found sound” appearing throughout, the cut ups and appropriation are also in lyrics that were created by combining dream journals, bits of advertisements, found poems, automatic writings, stream of consciousness, old National Geographic articles, and more.

The fifteen songs and two instrumentals were mostly written and composed by Negativland’s Mark Hosler, with contributions from the rest of the group, and well-known San Francisco noisemaker Thomas Dimuzio contributing lots of rather unexpectedly normal sounding instruments, arrangements and production.

The found ethic continues with 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."

“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

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.