Thursday, October 8, 2015

Negativland’s latest release celebrates legacy of Don Joyce with 34 years of group’s “Over The Edge” radio program for download.

Called a “Mount Rushmore for sound collagists,” by Dangerous Minds, over 3200 hours of Joyce-helmed episodes are available now.

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Members of Negativland perform “Over The Edge” live on stage at the Highline Ballroom, NYC.

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Dangerous Minds calls the “Over The Edge” Radio Archive the “Mount Rushmore for sound collagists” here.

Negativland’s newest release is 34 years in the making, over 3200 hours long, and no human may ever be able to listen to it all! It is of course the audio archive of the legendary culture jamming group’s weekly radio showOver The Edge” (Seeland 031).

Negativland’s live mix radio show “Over The Edge” is the longest-running block of free-form audio collage in radio history. With Negativland’s Don Joyce at the helm, the weekly show was broadcast from KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California from 1981 to 2015. The news of Joyce’s passing on July 22, 2015 received nearly 130,000 views on Negativland’s Facebook page, and with his death being memorialized by mainstream publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard, the band members felt it was only fitting for this important and substantial portion of the group’s work to be made available immediately.


“Over The Edge”’s weekly themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment used to do live sound cut-ups and collage while mixing, including the frequent use of the now long-dead analog technology of radio broadcast cart machines. On each themed episode there is a plan and there is no plan. The mix consists of found sounds of many kinds, from many sources, put together as a continuous audio collage, along with live electronics, live sound processing, and recurring themes and characters. “Over The Edge” also often employs “Receptacle Programming,” where phone callers are punched into the mix with no warning.

The archive currently has 941 three-to-five-hour-long episodes of “Over The Edge,” over 3200 hours of the show, with some gaps in the archive to be filled over time (especially the early years).  If you are that person who listens to every single show in the archive, no matter how many years it takes you, Negativland wants to know about it!

Though “Over The Edge” continues to exist and evolve, and is still broadcast each week on KPFA-FM, the “Over The Edge” Radio Archive consists of the episodes helmed by Don Joyce. It ends on the episode broadcast immediately after his passing, “There Is No Don.”

A more extensive background on Negativland, “Over The Edge,” and Don Joyce’s legacy, written at the time of his passing, can be found courtesy of SF Gate here. Joyce’s detailed 1995 essay about “Over The Edge” can be seen here and an informative bio on Negativland’s past, present, and future, is at this link. Besides Negativland’s many studio recordings, a selection of “Over The Edge” shows have been edited into CD releases over the years, and can be found here.

Members of Negativland are available for interviews.  Contact Josh Bloom at Fanatic for more information.

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Negativland Links


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Contact Josh Bloom at Fanatic Promotion



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