Tag: Negativland

Go ahead and call your band Great Grandpa. You better have something pretty weird up your sleeve.

It was a peaceful suburban street, and they had taken great care to select a vehicle that would not stand out when parked along its sidewalks, a gold Taurus wagon. The very familiar nature of the setting — the shading trees, the mottled but well-kept asphalt, the toys scattered on lawns — made it feel like one of the most exotic places they’d been to in a while. The cartographer checked the coordinates on the fancy device strapped to their wrist, but any web search could have found them Brewster, New York. The ethnomusicologist leaned against the mailbox, labeled “Marie”, and scanned the canopy of the tremendous spreading oak planted square in the middle of the lawn, eyes peeled for that squirrel.

Getting into Darra Adam Khel had not been easy. Getting into Pakistan was relatively straightforward, with the right-colored passports and decoy suitcases full of Western tourist necessities. The ride towards the Khyber Pass had been less so, and the necessary disguises and bribes to get past the checkpoints that turned away foreigners were more of an ordeal than ordinary. The dusty vehicle, neither truck nor passenger car nor jeep but somehow all three, had been recalcitrant for most of the trip, providing constant frequent minor breakdowns, keeping the mechanic perpetually busy. Now they were on a shooting range on the roof of a well-stocked arms shop, surrounded by dozens of identical shops and shooting ranges. As the linguist lifted the replica Berthier carbine to their shoulder, they darkly thought it would be just their luck, after all of this, to be caught in some rooftop crossfire from other purchasers testing their new toys.

Layers of samples, voices, music, found audio, sound effects, and other bizarre elements make up these haunting compositions from the masters of audio collage.

The vessel floated silently across the Mississippi, as silently as a hovercraft possibly could, which was not very silently at all. The two occupants of the walnut-paneled bridge listened intently to the sounds of the radio above the drone of the fans, one of them spinning the wheel with wild abandon, the other plotting an imaginary course over river and land using a nubby pencil and printed map. The sextant lay unused, for it was, after all, night.