Negativland’s Seeland label to release absurd album The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus by “destroyed” co-ed boy band, Poptastic.

Seeking fans of both Justin Timberlake and Merzbow, Poptastic is “just plain wrong.”

Seeland Records is pleased to present The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus, one of the most absurd albums of all-time by Poptastic. The music, like the band itself, was spawned from the warped minds of experimental producers Chris Fitzpatrick and Thomas Dimuzio. At the core of their debut release are twelve intricately mangled songs, but in the spaces between, there is much more.

Fitzpatrick assembled Poptastic as a coed “boy-band,” conjuring the spirit of Lou Perlman, who manned the helm of the millennial teen-pop wave. Accordingly, Fitzpatrick wrote and performed pop music and enlisted random friends to sing the sappy break-up-to-make-up lyrics he wrote in an imagined teenaged perspective. Once complete, the process had really only begun, and the production team of Dimuzio and Fitzpatrick set out to obsessively destroy the album masters with electronic effects until the music sounded as if a virus had infected the studio. Although the producers suggest the album still vaguely resembles the original, all of the original masters have been destroyed; only the remix remains.

Poptastic’s alien sound has found a welcome home at Seeland Records. Influenced by and aligned with the spirit of Negativland’s music and philosophy, Poptastic has applied similar methodologies to itself. Poptastic was created for the sole purpose of sampling itself into a collage-a version of a version of something unknown and inaccessible.

Poptastic’s basic concept is accessible and humorous, yet buried in the layers of sound is a complex web of mixing, remixing, editing, re-editing, arranging, and de-arranging that continues to reveal something new with each listen. It was also designed so that in CD shuffle play, only the “hits” play, yet when in continuous linear play, the entire album is a single interwoven work; the spaces in between songs are arenas in which fragmented elements of each song collide and blend discordantly. Fitzpatrick explains, “We are finding that people are not as confused by the music as by why they find themselves listening again and again.” With a smile, Dimuzio sums up the entire project, “Poptastic is just plain wrong.”

See below for more information about Poptastic’s creators Chris Fitzpatrick and Thomas Dimuzio.

Artist: Poptastic
Title: The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus
Label: Seeland Records

01. You Put A Spell On Me
02. Hold Me (MP3)
03. Are You Happy? (MP3)
04. I Think of You
05. The Details
06. Gossip
07. Someday Somehow
08. Torn Photo and a Broken Heart
09. I Want This Love To Last
10. Not Coming Back
11. Give You My Love
12. Can I Get Away?
13. Coda

Tools and Hi-Res Photos:
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On The Web:
www.poptasticnoise.com
www.myspace.com/poptasticnoise
www.seelandrecords.com
www.myspace.com/officialnegativland

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Chris Fitzpatrick Bio:

Born in 1978, Chris Fitzpatrick is a curator, writer, and musician. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Fitzpatrick was a member of Noisegate from 1997-2002. During this time, the sound art collective toured internationally and released music on several labels, including Tumult and Invisible Records. Poptastic, his latest musical project, was produced in collaboration with experimental musician Thomas Dimuzio, and the debut album, The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus, was released on Negativland’s Seeland Records in 2008.

Since 2001, Fitzpatrick has curated and juried exhibitions at galleries and museums in the United States. In 2004, he co-founded Onsix Gallery in San Francisco, which hosted art events and performances until 2006 when he entered the MA in Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts. He is currently adjunct curator at Photo Epicenter in San Francisco, where he produces cross-disciplinary exhibitions and events.

Fitzpatrick is also a published writer, and from 2002-2003, he was Features Editor at PopMatters Magazine, an online site for popular cultural criticism.

Thomas Dimuzio Bio:

Thomas Dimuzio is a composer, musician, sound designer, and mastering engineer based in San Francisco. Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and studio techniques, Dimuzio has earned a reputation worldwide as an avant-garde sound artist in touch with the aesthetic pulse of time and technology. Effortlessly moving from electro-acoustic and noise to glitch, dark ambient, improv and drone, Dimuzio’s eclecticism bespeaks a career equally informed by profound dedication to his craft and collaborations with friends, artists and technologists alike.

A true sonic alchemist who can seemingly create music events out of almost anything, Dimuzio’s listed sound sources on his various CDs include everything from “modified 10 speed bicycle” and “resonating water pipe” to short-wave radios, loops, samplers and even normal instruments such as clarinet and trumpet. And while his wide range of musical interests make it impossible to pin a label on him, Dimuzio clearly has an insider’s knowledge of older experimental musical forms such as musique concrete and electroacoustic, as well as more current ambient-industrial, noise, glitch and post-techno styles.

His solo CD studio releases include 2004’s Slew (RéR Megacorp), a compilation of compilation tracks, 1997’s double CD Sonicism (RRRecords), the remastered and reissued digital musique concrete classic HEADLOCK (originally released in 1989 on Generations Unlimited), and early cassette works compiled on Louden (Odd Size Records). As a collaborator, Dimuzio has contributed to numerous artists and ensembles, such as Chris Cutler, Tom Cora, Fred Frith, Dan Burke, David Lee Myers, Joseph Hammer, Due Process, 5uu’s, Nick Didkovsky, Matmos, Wobbly, and Paul Haslinger, and has toured North America and Europe. A veteran of hundreds of live concerts, Dimuzio’s releases Mono::Poly (Asphodel), Markoff Process (RRRecords), Quake (RéR Megacorp), Dust (RéR Megacorp), Preacher In Naked Chase Guilty (Ponk Records), and Hz (Sonoris), document a wide variety of his solo and collaborative performances.

Equally versed in sound design and production, Dimuzio has produced radically distinct sound libraries for Big Fish Audio and Rarefaction and heavily contributed to OSC’s classic Poke In The Ear With A Sharp Stick series, which featured the artist’s samples in the X-Files television series. At his own Gench Studios, Dimuzio has mastered more than a hundred CD’s for the likes of Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Negativland, GG Allin, Psychic TV, Matmos, and a veritable who’s who of artists and labels in the underground music world. Dimuzio’s soundtrack work was featured as part of the Whitney Museum’s Bitstreams exhibit in 2001, as he has worked on many remix projects, including the Art Bears tribute from RéR Megacorp. Dimuzio is currently preparing new solo works and has recently released collaborations with Mark Hosler of Negativland, Nick Didkovsky, Dan Burke, and Dimmer (with Joseph Hammer).