Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/17/negativlands-next-album-come.html
Good Hello, Consumers of Media About Media:
Courtesy of our friends at Boing Boing, this is Negativland speaking to you. Thank you for reading about all of our deaths over the past year and a half!
God I love Negativland.
Negativland was always too negative for me.
This will make it hard to sell on ebay, what with their âno human body partsâ ban.
Hey does anybody have a little scale model of Princeâs house?
Take my money!
C. Elliot Forever!
This will be the second time Iâve read about the ashes of someone named Joyce.
http://mila18.tripod.com/life-like/joyce.html
As much as I love Negativland, can I get this without the human remains?
ETA: Ah, what the heck! Ordered as-is.
ETA: Arrived today.
Yeah. Super creepy, but it IS October. Ordered.
Negativland has a long and distinguished history of packaging weird shit with their releases. Their first album had a box with a unique patch of wallpaper on the back and picture on the front. Each was handmade and no two were alike. Each box contained a pin and gardening miscellania.
My copy has a picture of a boy playing with a toy boat in a puddle on the front, and striped wallpaper on the back. It contains a baggie of bark. Iâll take pictures some time.
Itâs only fitting that they would pull something like this on their newest album.
In other news, holy shit itâs been like decades since the last OTE album so Iâm excited. I was never able to stay up late enough to listen to their KPFA broadcasts when I lived in the Bay Area. 
Remember A Big 10-8 Place ?
Where they were included burnt parts of wood, or splinters of wood, ostensibly remnants from their house fire?
I am sensing a theme here.
Still got that bumpersticker âNo Other Possiblity.â Heh. Maybe itâs time I stuck it on a bumperâŚ
I bought that one as a teenager. Regrettably I didnât keep it in tip top shape. The bumper sticker has long since been stuck to something and I have no idea where the map went.
Oh, NOW I get this.
I have the map, the bag with the price sticker, the wood splinter bits, the bumpersticker etc. Am a bit unclear what happened to the actual CD. Either one of my many prior roommates nicked it, or put it âawayâ somewhere to prevent me from playing it in the house/apartment/warehouse/squat (I had a lot of roommates and some had very sticky fingers).*
Not even sure what to do with it all. Anyone interested in these artifacts, PM me and for the price of postage Iâll send you the pile. Maybe youâll be able to divine what these things are supposed to do next.
*ETA: as I recall, the audio pieces on that CD were fairly uh challenging listening and sometimes I didnât listen to it with headphones but through some huge Klipsch speakers that weighed a ton apiece. I canât say I really blame any of my roommates for wanting to eh ah escape from noise for a while.
Agreed. A Big 10-8 Place is definitely a challenging listen but Iâd argue at least half of their catalog would fit in this category. For every Escape From Noise or Sex Dirt, you have a Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak or Willsaphone Stupid Show.
Not to say these less-than-musical albums canât be interesting or even entertaining. I can listen to the Richard Lyons-centric OTE albums over and over again. He portrayed his various personalities with such earnestness and skill that if I wasnât In on the Joke, I would totally believe that Pastor Dick was a real person that struggled over the ethics of accepting a donation of a Dodge Demon since it was promoting Satanism as an example.
As huge of a fan as I am of Negativland, most of their albums sit squarely in the âuncheckedâ realm in iTunes and donât get played regularly since I need to be in a specific mood to listen to a specific album.
One final thought. I absolutely adore the irony here of how they are transforming the remains of one of their members into a collectible item especially given their staunch anti-consumerism. I actually laughed at the video with the, âOoh! A big bone fragment! I wonder what that was!â This is definitely consistent with their long tradition of dark humor and irony. I can imagine Joyce having a good laugh at this.
It only makes me sad that I canât hear Crosley Bendixâs take on this.
Mine didnât have any lawn detritus. I havenât had the bumper sticker since 1993 when I got rid of that particular car*, but I kept the backing paper so it would still make an âN.â
*Much in the same way I havenât had the âCar Bombâ sticker since I got rid of that car.
Itâs been the same ever since Beatlemania. You think youâre getting a band memberâs ashes, but really itâll be the ashes of some kid in the marketing department.
Oooooh yeah you got that one right. I kinda overlistened to âthe letter U and the numeral 2â and now the slightest convergence with reality will set off that earworm something fierce. ("⌠a little dog⌠named⌠âSnugglesââŚ)
Do you have your own radio show, or something public-ish audio show I can listen to from afar? Your depth of knowledge about noise-music (thatâs my term, I dunno what the real phrase is) strikes me as unusual and varied.
I remember reading an interview with Laurie Anderson in the 1990s, and she was asked to categorize her own music. She called it âdifficult listeningâ as opposed to Muzak, I guess. But lady, you have no ideaâŚ
