Negativland — Escape From Noise (SST, 1987)
Negativland
Escape From Noise (SST, 1987)
If you’ve heard of San Francisco audio-collagists Negativland, it’s probably because of their legal fight with Island Records after using uncleared U2 samples in the early Nineties. But Negativland had been raiding the radio archives and mashing up jingles, phone-ins, adverts, forgotten pop hits and smarmy announcers for more than 10 years by that point, and you can hear them at their best on their fourth album, released in 1987.
Negativland circa 1985
Escape From Noise was supposed to be Negativland’s breakthrough, an attempt to “try our avant garde techniques on something that’s more in 4/4 time”, as the band’s Mark Hosler recently said. After three self-released albums, they had signed to indie label SST, which was run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn and put out albums by Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr that same year. And it’s true that songs like ‘Quiet Please’ and the title track could have been hits for a band like Devo. But Escape From Noise is still recognisably Negativland, i.e. irreverent tape-splicers, not a pop group.
It’s not some po-faced postmodernist experiment either, though. It’s funny. Properly laugh-out-loud funny, especially when they steal a sermon from bonkers New Age religious types the Church Universal and Triumphant, the one that talks about condemning artists like “David Boo-ie” and “Cyndi Looper” to the fires of hell and was also used by Scottish DJ Mylo for his novelty hit ‘Destroy Rock’n’Roll’ 18 years after Negativland got there first.
Though it’s essentially a 42-minute tape collage, Escape From Noise never sounds chaotic. I think it takes discipline to sound this undisciplined. Negativland had learned their skills on a graveyard shift radio show called Over The Edge. The album took four years to record, during which the master tapes had to be rescued from a fire, and Hosler says even agreeing a track order took six months.
Escape From Noise, like most things Negativland did in the Eighties, sounds pretty far-sighted today. Its influence can be heard in Cassetteboy, Swede Mason and anyone else who’s cut up a political speech or an old sitcom and stuck it on YouTube. And a few years later, who was taking the whole sensory-overload culture-jamming thing to the stadiums of the world? U2.
Andrew Petrie
