TechStuff Listens to Negativland

time zones there are in the Soviet Union? Power? And all that that's power. We've got so much power. That's ridiculous. We have power, power and power power. What you're hearing is the work of a performance group called Negative Land.

The band creates interesting sounds from accommodation of electronics, musical instruments, and an enormous library of prerecorded audio from sources as diversus political speeches to music numbers to old television commercial Guess what I spoke with Mark Hustler, one of the founding members of Negative Land. Our conversation lasted for more than two hours, and we talked about topics like art, music, intellectual property, and more. Well, this episode has highlights from

that conversation. I really learned a lot, and the first thing I wanted to know was how Mark got interested in this type of art in the first place. I was really into all kinds of music as a teenager, and there was just some kind of record that I wanted to hear that didn't seem to exist. And so at some point, when I was sixteen or seventeen, you know, I said, well, I want to let's make We're gonna make that record, and that's who we did, and it

came out when I was still in high school. The we in this case was Mark Hustler and Richard Lyons. Others would join Negative Land over the years, including Don Joyce, who hosts the band's weekly radio show, and Ian Allen, who passed away in early The group's membership changed many times throughout its existence, and each member contributed a unique perspective. The band has always been about experimentation. You've got a good beginning, God meers and trial and era. It's just

the pens again. I'm breaking the records over radio. We've been around an extremely long time. I've actually known the guys in the group for thirty six years. Our first record came out of night and for some reason which I don't really quite understand, we all just love strange, weird, funny noises and found things and reusing stuff in ways

they weren't intended to be used. And so our very first recordings were making tape loops, so you could cut real to real recording tape and stick one end to the other and they repeat over and over again, you know, an echo. And you could stick pieces of metal into a guitar and make the guitar string sound all strange.

And we were recording things off the TV and radio and our parents, you know, making in the kitchen and the sound of the our dog barking outside, and all this stuff made its way into our into our recorded work, and it was kind of surreal data, coufy collage. We also put in beats and sometimes sang little songs, and it had a somewhat pop kind of sensibility to it in a way, in a screwy sort of way, one

too stupid, great or dumb five six idiotics. The experiments would evolve into projects, and while the tools of the band used to create their sounds would change, the medium in which they worked would remain sound collage. Collage is a medium that I think is one of the easiest art forms in the world, whether it was sound or film or visual art, to do something really crappy. It's really easy to do collage and just have it be

really mediocre. And I but to to to really get it to where it's it's it's at a level that we think it's, you know, our our standard. You know. It requires a lot of work and thinking about it. And we've had lots of pieces that get to a point, but they're just not there yet, you know, and we sit on them for six months or even a year later we'll go back. In fact, the band might sit on a piece for decades. One piece Negative Land recently revisited is a work called Like Cattle Act the Gun

by the late Vian Well. I was thinking of a Cadillac Cadillac got Wreck, Cadillac Catillac, Cadillac Cadillac, Cadillac, La Cadillac, Lack Cadillac Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac Cadillac Cadillac, La Cadillac, Lack, Cadillac Catillac. Alan first worked on the piece back in the nineteen eighties. Before his death, Alan gave his blessing to Negative Land to revisit and finish the recording. Alan was also instrumental in shaping the band's cultural and social perspectives.

Before long, the band was using its quirky techniques not just to make interesting sounds, but to provide commentary on various issues. It just kept being really interesting that you could use collage, you know, to talk about stuff in this way that invited the listener to work on figuring out what you were getting at into some degree. You know, we don't spell everything out, but we try to do something where it's both about stuff, but there's some thing

about it. It's open enough that you're engaged and you're drawn in and you're trying to work with it, and hopefully that's the place where you know, you get something out of it that's interesting and it's and different for every person who hears it. And because so many of the sounds Negative Land uses in its collage work are taken from other sources, you can't just assume that what you're hearing and what the band itself thinks are necessarily

the same thing. While we do sometimes actually write song lyrics and do songs, most of the spoken word you hear in our work is appropriated in collage. So it's not us saying it. We're not. It is not the author's voice you're hearing it. It's what we chose to use. Well did we choose to use it? Because we agree with it? We disagree with it. We like it and

we hate it. We think it's funny, stupid, smart, sad, creepy, annoying, you know, surreal, and usually for negative Land, will the things we pick to you is will usually be something that will be of many of those things all at the same time. Listen, this is all that shouting, all that noise. Ian Allen's involvement would lead to another pivotal

moment in negative lands development, meeting Don Joyce. Joyce is a radio DJ who not only joined Negative Land, but also helped create a venue for the group to express themselves to a larger audience. It's called Over the Edge for Negative Land. One of the kind of laboratories for us to work on new ideas and try out new stuff is our weekly radio show. It's called Over the Edge.

It's been on, it's still on to this day, and it's three hours of audio collage that's always about a theme of some sort or another, and Negative Land member Don Joyce is the one who has been kind of the steward of keeping that flame alive all these years. He uses old radio station cart machines. If any of you out there are radio makers or listeners are old enough to know, he uses old school dead analog technology

to play dude live cut ups stuff on the air. Yeah, we get to try out stuff and occasionally ideas of emerge from that that we think are good enough to take out and turn into studio recordings or maybe a live show. And for those Negative Land fans who want to explore that material, band member Tom Maloney has been hard at work transferring files to archive dot org so that the thousands of hours of programming will become available

to anyone with an Internet connection. It's a mind blowingly huge amount of work that will be available for free. As any artist will tell you, art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Art doesn't just reflect the world around us. It comments on that world. We see elements of the artists thoughts and feelings within his or her art. And while you might think that creating a collage out of appropriate material limits and artists ability to comment upon the world,

you'd be wrong. As Mark explained to me, collage is just another artistic medium, not significantly different from any other means of artistic expression. Basically, to me, our work is no different than somebody lives in a cave ten thousand years ago who takes a stick out of the fire and uses the burnt end to draw on the cave wall what's outside of his cave, which could be buffalo

or a mammoth, you know. So that's no different than me taking a computer, a tape deck, a cassette deck, a real tool, chape recorder, a digital capturing device, and I'm capturing the world around me that I live in the world. It's in my home, the world it's outside my door. And that world is not just walls and furniture and trees and blue sky and buildings. It's advertisements, it's logos, it's pop songs, it's media absolutely everywhere you go.

And it's great, that's com and so negative lands are often comments on these facets of life, the way messages are communicated to us and how we are expected to react to them. Asciated, and there's another conversation happening as well, one about ideas ownership and the peculiar institution has changed the way we treat concepts. Corporations who are immortal, who now have these ideas of intellectual property. They own this stuff, so they want to profit from it. They've privatized it.

They've all said, you can consume it, will sell it to you, but don't ever think of messing with it. Don't think about doing anything with it, because we own it our property. And I'm kind of saying, well, no, it's not just your property, because it's inside my head. You know, it's in my brain, So I'm gonna I think I'm allowed to do things that have been inserted

into my brain. You know, I don't want to see your giant pepsi billboard every time I drive into town, but I do, so you know, yes, I'm going to take some of your pepsi ad and I'm going to cut it up and I'm gonna use it in something that maybe makes fun of you. And in this case, it was a project negative landid called Dyspepsi. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, what you're compiling is going to be a positive reflection of for what PEPSI is all about. And the makers

of their advertising. So I think it's fair to say that if that's all the case. Uh yeah, this is part of the marketing spin of Pepsi calif. One of my favorite pieces by the band involves a surreal, absurd radio call in show. This is Pennywise, Joan, You're next, nice Sue, How can I help Jem? I really have a problem impulse buying. I never have money left for anything.

That's a piece of truth and advertising, and that was where we were able to take it so that every time the talk show host hung up on the caller to go to the next caller, it was the same caller over again and over again because of how we were able to edit it together and that was all done. We've always used to call those edits razor takes, because those were done with analog, real to real recordiers, and we would cut them with a razor blake, you know,

to rearrange those things. Okay, let's go to line four. This is Pennywise. I'm Jim Phillips and your name is Bob. Hi, Bob, what can I do for you? I get confused by all the claims main commercials. This is Pennywise. Line stakes you're on and your name is. I think it definitely kind of grabs your attention. There's a real rhythm, there's a real musicality to the way the voice has been is the repeats itself and folds back in on itself.

But but also it gets that something that actually is a real thing, which is about how advertising impacts us and how advertisers maybe aren't telling you the truth, you know. And I don't think it's didactic. I don't think it's having handed I don't think it's like a we are we're wagging wagging our finger at you about the subject. But it does kind of get get it out there. It really hit me that what Mark and Negative Land

are doing is incredibly challenging. Anyone can grab a dozen or so clips of sound and edit them together to make something new, but to create something that has a sense of musical rhythm that can be entertaining and that can also be a comment on our culture is extraordinary. It explains how the group can work on a project for years before it's ready to be released. Once it is released, that work can get a lot of attention. Negative Land is no stranger to criticism, controversy, or even

legal action. In fact, one of their most famous works landed the group in legal trouble for several years. But it all started out innocently enough. A fan at a show of ours handed as a cassette and uh at a show that we were partying in Portland, Oregon, and it had outtakes of top for D d J. Casey Cason having a really bad day in the studio. Casey Cayson, as you know, just passed away this summer, and I think the engineer's revenge was to get these tapes out

to some people in the public via cassette. Now, back then, the Internet didn't exist, and so this stuff had a very very limited audience of just people sharing this stuff. And I think if it had come out now, we wouldn't have been inspired to make that record that we made, because everyone would have had it. But we had something that was kind of seemed very precious, you know, and and like, you know, and and rare. And it was also you know, Peter pants funny and just so inspiring.

And he was trying to do a dedication with family's dead dog, and he was trying to introduce a new song by a band. He got the name of their country origin incorrect, but a band who's been around as long as Negative Land has a group, You Too. That's the letter you and the New World Too. The fore Man band features Adams Clayton on bab Larry Moren on drums, Dave Evan and nickname the Edge. This is nobody cares. These guys are in England and we give it. There's

a lot of waste. The name that don't mean Italy. We ended up using doing a kind of a weird mutated cover version of a YouTube song. We had Negative Land member David Wills the Weatherman, do his own dramatic reinterpretation of Bono's lyrics. We used the casey caseum stuff.

The song was I still found what I'm looking for and kind of at the end when we were deciding how to present it, we ended up deciding to call the whole thing you Too by Negative Land, And originally it was actually gonna be you with the dash between the U and the two, because that's actually how the you. That's as slight variation on You two's name, which has no dash, and the YouTube is the airplane, the spy plane that was shot down and it's where you two

stole their name from. In the course of designing the whole thing, our graphic designer we were working with a guy named Randall Hunting. Uh. He suggested that we could make the Uh he says, well, what am I making the airplane of the YouTube airplane itself, which we were using as part of the cover design. What about making that the dash? And how about we could make the

you two really huge and negative Land really small. I think he was just kind of joking, you know, like because of course you wouldn't really do that, because that would be insane, right. But of course when we saw it, we said, that's great genius, you know, yes, that's what we're gonna do. This is even better. We're gonna make it look like something it isn't. As it turns out, this particularly mischievous release would have a long lasting effect

on the group. It didn't take long for you Two's management to respond, and it came out in two weeks after it came out, or I think maybe it was less maybe ten days after it came out. YouTube's record label and their publisher, uh, at the instigation of You Two's manager. We've only found that out about fifteen years later. But yeah, they suit us for copyright infringement, trademark infringement. Uh, it has lots of swearing on it, courtesy of Casey Cason.

So they suits for defamation of character for associating this foul language with the clean cut image of the band you two. They sued us for failure to get a license to do a cover version of a song because we change the lyrics. You can do a cover version and just pay a licensing fee, but if you change

the lyrics, you have to get permission. And they also suit us for fraud, saying it was a get rich quick scheme intended to du millions of innocent YouTube fans into you know, buying this record so we could make you know, lots of money, so pay through everything we could think of at us, we had to really look at what we were doing, even more deeply than we ever had, you know, and really examine if it was worth the fight. You know, do we really want to destroy our lives and lose at the tiny bit of

money we might be making. And we you know, we were gonna lose a lot by choosing to fight it, but we we really felt like it was you know, it was it was a fight that needed to happen because at the time, there was nobody making any smart, thoughtful cultural arguments about this from a progressive point of view. It was just lawyers, and it was just so it was just all very conservative, you know, thinking around money, profit in ownership in ways that just were culturally very

very smart. And we've been headed this amazing opportunity because we've been has sued on behalf of the largest rock band on the planet Earth. So we thought, well, maybe we could use as a platform to talk about this stuff. And that turned into an odyssey that took up the next four or five years of all of our lives. I could say literally every day of my life for the next four or five years, literally, I was dealing with some aspect of it. The FBI got involved, there

were threats made against Casey. We tricked you Tube's guitarist, The Edge, into an interview he didn't know we were anyway, all kinds of stuff. It's all documented in a book we put out called Fair Use The Story of the Letter You in the numeral two, which actually shows you the behind the scenes facts. Is lawsuits, press releases, phone calls, transcriptions, everything you're never supposed to see when these cases settled out of court. Is all there in the book in

short chapters, so it makes good bathroom reading. Ultimately, the band settled out of court and their album was withdrawn, but that was only the beginning of the battle. Negative Land only settled because there was literally no way for the group to afford to fight the charges in court. They wished to argue that their appropriation fell under fair use, that they were creating art from appropriation the same way that other artists had for years. Andy Warhol's famous works

were commentaries on consumerism and pop culture. How could that instance be okay? But Negative lands work be considered illegal? The experience with you two ended up having the opposite effect on the band then what was intended. It's been endlessly fascinating and then we got, you know, actually sumed for doing it. It politicizes more. It actually made us kind of bear down on wanting being more committed to doing this work than ever before. And uh, it's certainly

kept it really really interesting. While Negative Land has always been interested in culture and consumerism, the legal proceedings brought to light the complicated matter of copyright and fair use, which became a new focus for mark Copy Right is meant to protect the owner of an original work of authorship. In the United States, it's defined as such a work quote fixed in a tangible medium of expression end quote. It covers all works, whether published or unpublished. Now, it

doesn't protect facts ideas methods of operation. Some of those can be protected under other means, like trademarks or patents. As soon as you have your original work in a fixed tangible form, it's protected by copyright. That tangible form doesn't have to be a piece of paper, it can be code. The law provides for protection of works that require a machine or device in order for someone to see or experience it. Registering a copyright is a way

of ensuring protection of your work. Technically, your work is protected even without registration, but registering creates an official legal document that establishes your authorship in case you should ever have to pursue a claim of infringement against someone else. If you were to create an original work but not register the copyright, it's possible someone else could steal your work and register it under his or her own name,

making a claim of ownership more complicated. The concept of copyright dates all the way back to seventeen ten and it's changed significantly over the years. Yeah, it was like twelve thirteen, fourteen years the Statute of Queen Anne. And whenever I do lectures about this, which I've done quite a few, it's very rare that people actually know this, because it sounds shocking to hear it now, because copyright nowadays last for the life of the creator. Plus it's

seventy years seventy two, seventy three. The Statute of Anne establishes copyright lasting fourteen years for new unpublished works, works that had already been published, and we're under ownership of some party or another, we're granted twenty one years of protection. Ever since copyright was established in British law, people and

entities have attempted to expand its protection. According to Mark, this trend has become truly destructive, largely due to the rise of a particular type of institution, this very strange creature called the corporation. And we've decided to give corporation these rights as if they're human. We give them free speech rights. What I would argue has led to the total destruction of democracy in this country. But we we give them all these the perks and privileges of being

a human being, none of the responsibilities. And you know, when a corporation does things that lead to the deaths of thousands of people, we we don't we don't seem to give the corporation the death penalty unfortunately. But because corporations are immortal, in fact, they're not like anything human at all. They from their perspective, understandably they want to

profit from their property forever. And since we've decided that ideas are property, intellectual property, you know, it all sort of it also, you can see how this all starts to play out in this very bizarre way, um that eventually goes kind of off the rails, you know, at this point. And that's kind of what what Negative Land

got drawn into was. Because our work does appropriate things and makes this collage and to to talk about the culture and the country in the world we live in, we found that our work was kind of colliding, you know, head first into these these these ideas about copyright, which had just become completely crazy, you know, just ridiculous. I agree with a lot of what Mark saying. He and

I both acknowledge that copyright has an important role. People who create original works should have some measure of protection so that they can receive compensation for their work. A world without copyright could be chaotic and unfair, but so can a world with copyright that extends well beyond what

its creators intended. Remember when I said that copyright protection originally only lasted fourteen years for new works, the story has changed significantly today in the United States, a new original work last the life of the author, plus an additional seventy years. This has had enormous implications and the publishing, music,

and artistic spheres. It's a balancing act. And that's what kind of has been lost in a lot of the conversation about all this is that it's it's kind of treated like it's an omnipotent property right of some sort. And that's why I was saying that when copyright first began, it was an incredibly short period of time. But but the this was not some radical idea that would be

that short. In fact, it was that that was a conservative idea, you know, that was that seemed long enough, you know, to give you a chance to profit from your your creativity. And I should also add that just the very idea of taking the word intellectual and property and jamming them into each other to make one expression is very strange when you think about it, that we've

decided that ideas are things. You know. It's it's an incredibly abstract idea and it and it only is true because we've all just sort of agreed that it's true. Though in the case of negative Land, we decided that we didn't really like that particular hallucination and we wanted to a nord A lot. This shift toward extending protection beyond the life of the creator has had other consequences as well. Corporations that own intellectual property go to great

links to protect that property. If there's a prospect of generating revenue off of an original work, it's worth investigating how to protect it. This leads to ideas like digital rights management, which is intended to provide protection to corporations, but often has the unintended consequence of negatively impacting the honest consumer more than any pirate. As Mark explains, this is a problem that the industry itself is painfully aware

of and yet isn't sure how to change. I was actually at a conference on copyright law in Washington, d C. And I remember speaking to somebody who was from the r I double a. I said, this is what do you guys talk about behind closed doors? You know, isn't it kind of bizarre that you're basically taking legal action

again at your customers? I mean, you don't you you realize that every fourteen year old kid growing up basically hates you, you know, just knows the cat is out of the bag about how absolutely ugly your business is and how you take advantage of artists, etcetera, etcetera. He kind of sheepishly kind of said, well, yeah, we kind of look at it like chemotherapy, and I just hope that that the patient doesn't completely die, you know, during

given the treatment that we're giving it. You know. But yes, we're perfectly aware that this just comes off really horribly, you know, but we don't know what else to do. As Mark points out, the concepts of ownership are deeply ingrained in culture and economic models. That's not to say ownership is bad, but it does complicate matters, particularly when we extend the concept of ownership to institutions that could potentially live forever. But there are limits to copyright, and

not just in how long protection lasts. You don't have to wait until the work goes into public domain before you can talk about it in some other format. For example, This brings up the concept of fair use. Hey, well, here's an example. Anyone listening, I'm sure you've read a review of a book or seen a review of a movie on your television or digital device. And that's where

fair use comes into play. When you review that, you don't have to get permission to use a clip of the film, You don't have to get permission to excerpt from the book. That's considered fair use. You were using someone else's intellectual property within your intellectual property to talk about that other intellectual property now, and so fair use was trying to acknowledge that, and fairies had four factors

to it. But the first one, I think was you know, are you are you using any bit of someone else's intellctual property? The next one was you know how much of it are you using? And in what way are you are? Are you not transforming it in some way or changing it? And what is the context in which it is reappearing? Is it in a different medium, is it in a different market? Could there be some confusion between what you've done in the original in some way?

So there's these different factors that are supposed to be weighed when the courts are looking at these things, And for many, many years, the courts didn't look at all four factors. They just looked at the first one. Did you use some of it? Well, if you did, then you're a thief and you lose, you know, and you're

you know, you're you're you're the bad guy here. And for many, many years, that's kind of how the courts look at things, and that's why there's a lot of really bad legal decisions that have been made over the years. Um So the laws haven't changed, you know. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any any smart, progressive legal changes to intellectual property law. There haven't been any cases that have gone through the court systems to really do that in a

long long time. And this is a big problem. Very use is something that ends up being decided in a court on a case by case basis. Very use is a defense. There's no codified set of rules that lets you create a checklist to make sure you won't be food. You could create a work that sites of pre existing piece owned by someone else and follow all the rules and still get sued. You might eventually win that court case, but it's going to cost you just to be involved.

Some entities like YouTube respond to copyright infringement notices by immediately taking down the infringing material. Sometimes this happens automatically, and the content owner has to flip a virtual switch to allow the other video to go back up online. So if you create a video series in which you critique films or television or some other form of media, you could run into the issue of having your work

taken down. Even if you're following the rules. You could get that video restored if it meets fair use criteria, but it takes a lot of effort. If all original works were truly original, perhaps I would see this entire system as being tough but fair. But the truth is no work is truly original. Creators have influences. Art doesn't bloom spontaneously in a vacuum. The real question is to what extent does a work stand up on its own versus relying upon the pre existing work that influenced it.

That's not an easy or an expensive question to answer. It is deprogram from the universal media netted well as for Negative Land, they released a new album late in two thousand fourteen called It's All in your Head. It's a college piece that examines religious beliefs, not necessarily specific beliefs, but why we believe things in the first place. You're listening to It's All in your Head FM monotheism but in stereo. The project was born out of discussions within

Negative Land itself. None of us had ever talked to each other about our religious beliefs. I mean, I've known these guys, some of them since i was a teenager. And we had to work all that out because in fact, we don't all agree. You know, there's atheists, there's a NaSTA, you know, there's there's different perspectives on this, and we had to be sure that was all reflection in the work as well. Um, So that that was another really interesting kind of behind the scenes part of creating the

whole thing. So we would have huge debates over single words that we're being used in it. You know, one sentence that what is it going to be there, We're gonna cut it out, you know, typical just super o c D negative lanned, you know, obsesso, you know, microscopic thinking that we do the poetry. We reached to arts to try to begin to articulate what those things are.

And I think that we have to acknowledge that we're in this realm when we begin to talk about this, and if we take the symbols and don't acknowledge that they're symbols, then we get into this trouble. The album is organized on a pair of c ds referred to as acts. If you buy the physical album, your packaging is a King James version of the Bible. There was a limited edition version packaged in copies of the Kuran,

but it has since sold out. While the album takes a critical look at belief systems, it also avoids passing judgment. Sections of the album explore ideas such as how the brain processes information to how cultures define and interpret beliefs.

Mark explains why the group chose to package the album inside a Bible, but having it inside of a Bible framed it in this way that I personally just love, you know, and I think all of us just love the idea that you're using the Bible as a repurposed found object, and also anyway that the Bible is the liner notes you know to the record. I've listened to

the album in full and found it provocative. There were times that it made me think, in times when I had a very strong emotional reaction to what was going on in the album. It's the sort of reaction I imagine many artists hope for when they create their works. And it marked a very different experience to listening to audio entertainment than what I'd become used to. It's rare these days that sit down to listen to an album

in full. I'm more likely to listen to my entire music collection on shuffle or even a larger collection streaming online following some cryptic algorithm that supposedly anticipates what I'll want to hear next. But that's not how negative Land

intends you to listen to their work. I actually when I give people copies of our of our music, and I say, you know, I know it's a lot to ask in this day and age, but wait until I don't care if it's a year from now, wait until you have an actual hour of your time to do nothing else except just listen to this thing from beginning to end. And um and I think you might enjoy it, I said, if you just have it on in the

background or just listen to separate tracks. I said, it won't even make sense, it will probably even just be annoying. And so It's All in Your Head is like that. It's too complete. It's one complete work, it's got two acts to it, but it's very much designed to be listened to in its entirety. We have a huge debate about whether or not to put track points in it for for downloading and for CDs, because it kind of suggests or encourages people to put it into random shuffle play.

But we also don't like the idea of trying to control someone's experience that much and just have to be one long track. Plus I know people will just break it up into tracks anyway. Negative Lands It's All on Your Head is available for purchase from their website negative land dot com. That's n E g A T I V l A n d dot com. You can also find their other work exploring all sorts of issues as

well as learn more about concepts like culture jamming. I really appreciate Mark taking the time to talk with me about his career, the world of art and collage, and and how copyright law has made it difficult to provide artistic commentary on the world around us. I've also got to thank my producer Noel for putting in a ridiculous amount of work to bring all this together and for

his expertise in general. As for the future, I imagine that as younger generations who have grown up with tools to create mashups and remixes grow into leadership positions, will see a shift in copyright law. Will artists went out over corporations? What do you think? Let me know by sending your thoughts to text stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember that you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr at the handle text stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on

this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com