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Negativland to release new song-based album — its first in its 28-year history — and remain subversive as ever.

Negativland to release new song-based album — its first in its 28-year history — and remain subversive as ever.

Anyone familiar with the long-running culture-jamming subversive audio collage outfit Negativland would not be surprised to hear that the band has gone and challenged itself and listeners for yet another album. However, what’s truly remarkable about its forthcoming new album Thigmotactic is that it’s the first song-based release of its 28-year history.

The band’s entertaining and challenging cut-up motif remains intact, but these are songs to which you can sing along, ponder existential notions and/or wonder just what makes these guys so prolific and dead-on clever. Thigmotactic takes another path in Negativland’s many twists and turns throughout the musical wilderness, by going deep into song making territory with a project created mostly by one member of the group.

Moving in a very different direction than other recent Negativland releases, and with a decidedly surreal bent, these eccentric toe-tapping electronic folk-pop noise songs are strung together to forma continuous and cohesive listening experience, with themes emerging around meat, pants, milk, cows, trucks, Herb Alpert, Richard Nixon (MP3), and even love.

Thigmotactic continues in Negativland’s decades long collage and cut-up tradition, but while the trademark sound of found audio elements is sparingly collaged through-out, the cutting up here is also in the lyrics, created by combining dream journals, bits of advertisements, found poems, automatic writings, stream of consciousness, old National Geographic articles, and more. The fifteen songs and two instrumentals were written, composed and performed by Negativland’s Mark Hosler, with contributions from the rest of the group, and with well-known San Francisco noisemaker Thomas Dimuzio contributing lots of rather unexpectedly normal sounding instruments, arrangements and production. The found ethic continues with the artwork that accompanies each track, created from found materials to illustrate each song. Many of these have been shown as part of Negativland’s traveling art show “Negativlandland,” and, in a creative experiment in financing this release, each one-of-a-kind work is for sale via Negativland’s web site, www.negativland.com. Negativland has always existed as an umbrella under which the group releases collaborative work in many mediums – music, noise, collage, film, design, animation, fine art, books, lectures, essays, sculpture, performance, radio, web sites, etc. – with the term “Negativland Presents” sometimes being used as a way to release work that might be mostly the product of one member’s brain, or uses members outside of the immediate collective. To learn more about Negativland’s unusual history, read their bio below.

“Norris bangs one yucca stump after another to rout out an elusive night lizard, and gives me a running resume of the genus: its smallness, its lack of eyelids, how it sheds its skin as a snake does, that it is so incredibly sedentary that one may stay under the same bush or Joshua tree for much of its entire life and, being strongly thigmotactic – needing to keep in contact with world around it – will always try to keep its back against a solid protective roof…” – Ann Zwinger, The Mysterious Lands

Thigmotactic Tracklisting:

Release Date: July 15th, 2008

01. Richard Nixon Died Today (MP3)
02. Lying On The Grass
03. Extra Sharp Pencils
04. It’s Not A Critique
05. Basketball Plant
06. Two Light Bulbs Flickering
07. By Truck
08. Jack Pastrami/Flower Bum
09. Influential You
10. Virginia’s Trip
11. Steam On A Whim
12. Pork In The Store
13. Perfect Little Cookies
14. Kind of Grumpy
15. Your Skin Is Gelatin
16. Omnipotent Struggle
17. Rancho Pancho