1983: Negativland - A Big 10-8 Place

In the 1980s, left-of-center musicians lacked the resources that are readily available to them today. Without the world wide web, out-musicians and their fans relied on zines, newsletters, and local record stores (which, of course, varied greatly in quality) to circulate and discover music. Moreover, the task of creating fringe music demanded money and time; few record labels would foot the bill for it, home recording equipment wasn't cheap, and everything was analog. If, for instance, you wanted to edit found sounds into a collage, you needed razor blades, recording tape, and adhesives.

Negativland, then, deserve commendation for crafting lengthy musique concrète pieces and using the DIY network to build a sizable cult following during the Reagan years. The group wasn't especially innovative -- they copped their technique from avant-garde composers, Nurse With Wound, and ’70s German bands like Faust. But their music was virtuosic, a cartoonish parade of split-second editing, psychedelic layering, and perverse noise-making that took hours to compose. Negativland were the Girl Talk of tape collage music, pushing their technique to the limits of ridiculousness.

Negativland's early albums, which the group's own Seeland label has been steadily reissuing over the last few years, sound as strange today as they did when they first dropped. But that's really all you can say about them. A Big 10-8 Place, the most recent reissue, is in no sense beautiful and in no meaningful way challenging. Its extended collages string together pure noise, snippets of old jazz albums, and all manner of human voices, among other things. No form emerges, no statement is made, no effect other than disorientation achieved. Most likely, these tapestries of cultural debris are intended to mimic the clamor and "unreality" of late capitalist American society, which Negativland has on many occasions criticized. If that's the case, though, this album neither critiques nor celebrates; it merely mimics. It tells us what we already know. So why listen?

DeLorean

There’s a lot of good music out there, and it’s not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that’s not being pushed by a PR firm.

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