Puncture: a Magazine of Punk Culture NEGATIVLAND On Broadway April 22, 1983 Performers: Mark Hosler, lan Allen, David Wills. With Don Joyce. Considering that the plug would be pulled on the after only 20 minutes performing, Negativland took a long time setting up. It became an interesting question how they would capture our attention when they were ready, after being onstage playing tapes, quite loudly, for so long before starting. When it was time, they stopped messing about and became still, though not with any exaggerated or theatrical stillness. They simply took their places and looked at us. Really looked at us: they turned a photo flood in our faces. That's when the audience feedback began: "Hey wouldja turn that light off?" and so on. In this way, all the sounds and sequences in Negativland's performance reached out to us as watchers and listeners, rather than occurring in some self-involved trance that we happened to be witnessing. The first piece lasted for as long as it takes two slices of toast to burn irretrievably. No one was compelled to react to this event as it slowly transpired. Yet people did. "Hey, your toast is burning!" sounded through the theater not once or twice but many tiaes. It rang out in almost every silence between the reiterated taped phrases, "hello!" and "can you hear me?" So we were involved. It turns out to be hard to let toast burn-—even though it's only toast and not other things that may burn, such as books or houses or bodies....We learned, I suppose, just how much we feel we must intervene in a given process of dissolution. The second piece continued—-vis sapplly hortatory taped voices-—to draw us in. "Make a fist. Clench it tight" said a voice, and "Open your mouth wide and say. Wow!" There was music, there was a sense of eventfulness. Not everyone went for it. "Play the good part," someone called out acidly. And one local musician simply walked out of the building, not returning until Minimal Man was safely set up half an hour later. And yet the occurrences on stage were well shaped and well organized to a degree that made objections or walkouts, if not part of the show, at least not counter to it. And it's surprising how many people sat vocalizing In their seats with big round "Wow"s: people who probably hadn't anticipated anything of the kind when they set out for the OB. The last piece involved a live narration shaped by Booper-—David Wllls's home- built electronic device which processes sounds simultaneously with their live production. The piece celebrated sewerage water, aka Sue Ridgewater. Neither would seen riveting as a subject. But members of the audience got in on it all the same, lining up to Boop their voices. Music was used sparingly throughout the set—-as if too much might prove distracting. The synth background was the most primal sound going: deeply submerged chords, chaotic churchbells, tribal drumming. When live music was allowed to layer in for a few minutes, it seemed astonishingly fresh, particularly lan Allen's keyboards. When the set was, too quickly, over, there was bafflement, mixed with delight. A member of the audience made what was perhaps a symbolic encore request by climbing onstage and pushing down the bar of the old-fashioned toaster-—as if to re-start the cycle. The air was thick with the aroma of browned bread. People sat cross-legged on the stage munching pieces of unburnt toast. Where had it come from? Where had we been? Negativland have done only eleven live shows in the last two years. Each show, being completely new, represents a sacrifice of recording time (their second LP sold 2,600 copies before lapsing; their third, still in the making after two and a half years, may be issued by UK's Recommended Records). Yet this is a group whose projections are well suited to stage shows. They can call you out and take you somewhere. Their agreeable stage presence-—intense but casual, serious but unpretentious-—is perhaps a front. They are really wizards. Wizards of lo-tech. —Kit Druam BAM Magazine November 5, 1982 Issue No. 142 Negativeland Ollie's Back Room, Oakland August 30 The evening is sponsored by CAVAN (Committee Against Visual and Aural Numbness), and the predominant mood is one of serious art. But whether or not one has the taste for performance pieces, innovative feedback demonstrations, or photographed poetry, the headlining act is certainly worth the wait. Mark Hosler begins the Negativeland set alone onstage, playing a pensive and pastoral piano over the electronic hum of waiting amps. Next to appear are guitarists Peter Dayton and Chns Grigg, beginning a slow tide of whining, blatting, flanged, effects-box sounds that seem in no way related to the piano. Hosler raps on wood by the microphone as if to summon out synthesists David Wills and lan Allen, the latter of whom proceeds to operate the tapes that are this band's trademark. The studied irrelevance is in full swing —- welcome to Negativeland. Suddenly. Hosler is banging out brief cannonades on a set of floor toms, and over the deep grumbling of synthesizers, David Wills is out on the floor, babbling into a mike as he interacts with the audience. There is no poetry to this monologue, no grace, no profundity of any kind — Wills is being stupidly absurd, and would be the first to admit it. Compulsive cleaning of a stage monitor with Formula 409 somehow segues into his setting up a kind of miniature electric chair. As Hosler paces the band's tonal drift on rhythmic bass guitar, Wills zaps several luckless macadamia nuts with bright, syncopated sparks, crackles, and exclamations, looking for all the world like a demented engineer doing graduate work. The next section has no "vocals." The base keeps a slow backbone to the low-end rumble of slow tapes, synthesizer hugeness, and subtle, muted guitars that create the soundtrack to a Super-8 movie about a Pocono winter in the '40s. Middle-aged ladies wrestling in the snow are underscored with hugenes, whining, pulsing; randomness and dissonance are somehow synched to the film, innocent fun is turned sinister. Homemade sound generators provide wind, and the bass is water dripping. The music comes in waves, Chris Grigg massaging a slide guitar and then going to the drums to punctuate the crescendo beneath windswept trees. The audience, though calm, is insistent for more. And if you've ever felt that Negativeland and Points are impenetrable as albums, or that their monthly radio spot on KPFA's Over the Edge is inaccessible, by all means catch a live show to complete the picture. No visual and aural numbness here. ~ Alan K Lipton