My music hero!---- Don Joyce(Negativland) RIP

Don Joyce (2/9/44 - 7/22/15)

Words cannot do justice to the loss of Donald S. Joyce, Crosley Bendix, C. Eliot Friday, Omer Edge, Izzy Isn’t, Bud Choke, Leland Googleburger, Wang Tool and Dr. Oslo Norway, who all died yesterday in Oakland, CA of heart failure at age 71. Perhaps a loud, mournful squawk from Don's “Booper” feedback oscillator would better sum up the feelings of Negativland, his comrades and partners in art for 34 years, who are devastated. It was Don who coined the term “culture jamming”, and who devoted his life to the art of sound collage and his weekly live radio program, "Over the Edge", on KPFA FM in Berkeley, where it has continuously lived on the dial on Thursday nights at midnight since 1981, without interruption.

Don was a DJ at the station when a mutual friend, Ian Allen (who died this past January) introduced him to a group of Contra Costa County noise/music artists called Negativland, who entered the station one night, armed with stacks of recordings and electronic gear, and immediately transformed Don’s “normal music show” into a free-form collage sound odyssey, totally blowing open Don’s idea of what a radio program could be and what a DJ could “do”. And in Don Joyce (whose initials were conveniently also “DJ”), Negativland had found its “lead vocalist” without even realizing they were looking for one. It was Don who took the idea of reshaping previously recorded words – in a pre-sampling age – and ran with it to an extent and depth never before heard, and never equalled. “Recontextualization” became his weapon, with the 1/4” tape machine and razor blade his ammunition, and the radio “cart player" – an entirely forgotten piece of broadcast history using endless-loop tape cartridges, which he used until he death – his delivery system.

When he and Negativland discovered their mutual love for “found” sounds, an intensely collaborative creative partnership was cemented. It continued non-stop for the ensuing decades, with Don endlessly scanning the airwaves of radio and television, along with his massive LP collection, for new material, day by day, week by week. There was often a TV and a radio on in his room simultaneously, cassette recorders always at the ready. And as an extremely shy and often quite reclusive person, radio was a perfect medium for Don. He could reach thousands of people each week without having to deal with very many actual humans, just as he preferred it. Creating art was not only Don’s full-time pursuit, it was literally his life’s work. He had made it clear to the group as recently as a few weeks ago that he was happy and satisfied with what he had been able to achieve in his life, and were he not able to continue to work, his life would feel as good as over.

Don Joyce’s singular editing style was laced with profundity and silliness in equal measure. His work was that of a dada humanist, able to wring unforgettable sentiments and statements out of material which originally spoke something entirely different. Hugely inspired by both the droll radio of Bob and Ray and the reckless free-form of the Firesign Theatre, he created a wicked language of repurposed purple prose which has inspired legions of other collage artists over the past three decades. He was the father of the form. One need only to listen to his work on “Time Zones” (on the Escape from Noise album) or “Piece of Pie” (in the No Business CD/book) to immediately tune into his unique wavelength.

He was also an animal lover, a Bob Dylan fanatic, a staunch atheist, a convicted (but never jailed) draft dodger, and slept with the radio on. Cranky, curmudgeonly, loyal and fair, brilliant, hilarious and uncompromising, he was steadfastly devoted to the creation of his art, full-time, for more than three decades. He leaves behind not only his massive recorded legacy via "Over the Edge", but his work on nearly 30 Negativland albums, two books, three DVDs, and his giant, meticulous paper collages.

There was Negativland before Don Joyce (though not by much), and there will be Negativland after (indeed, Don stopped touring with the group in 2010), and he made it clear that he wished for the group to continue on in some fashion if he was the next member to go. At the very least, there are two nearly-completed albums in the works and possible live shows, and, in late 2015, all 34 years of “Over the Edge” (5000-plus hours' worth) will be available until the end of time on the Internet Archive, the result of a multi-year archiving project. But there will never be another Don Joyce.

Don Joyce was born in Keene, New Hampshire, where he spent his childhood obsessed with drawing, leading to him getting a masters degree in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. By the late 1960s, he had relocated to Northern California (with a brief stint living in Toronto during Vietnam) where he lived, in Oakland, until his death. He is survived by his sister, his brother, a spider plant which thrived on a window sill through decades of choking cigarette smoke, and his Negativland family.

 

I LOVED this guys work.
He was "Revolution #9", with a 'point'!

 

Sorry to read this. Negativland went off my radar after the U2 incident but this may be a good time to check into their work again. Good to read that their radio shows may go on the Internet archive.

 

Why???

 

It was the 90's. The Internet wasn't as powerful then.

 

There have been some 'misses' in their post-"U2" history, BUT, there's a big bunch of greatness, too!
- "Dead Dog Records"- the album that came in the "Fair Use" book.
- "Dispepsi"
- "It's All In Your Head FM"
- and, Don's 'solo' album, "We'll Be Right Back"

 

RIP Crosley Bendix!

 

this seems legitimate and not like David Wills messing around again.

damn.

 

A big loss, for sure. And a crucial member of the REAL counterculture, gone. A sad day, indeed.

And I'm sending my full support to that poor spider plant! What a blow!

 

Negativland was huge fave of mine in HS. Really sad. RIP.

 

Negativland Appreciation Thread
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/negativland-appreciation-thread.83117/

 

Keep on BOOPIN'!!!!
The surviving members have performed a 'tribute' show on KPFA!
Over the Edge Radio

 

I'm so sorry to hear this. When I was DJ-ing early morning 'World Music' programming at KPFA in the 1990's, Don Joyce would be the DJ on the air just before me about half of the time, the 'Puzzling Evidence' folk the other half. I remember Don as surprisingly quiet and restrained. Of course, he was focusing on any number of sonic collisions he was overseeing/hearing. RIP to a radical musical voice.

 

This was a great obituary, in the service of very sad news. I think it's difficult for some people who found their way to Negativland's work via the "musical" and record industry routes to avoid pigeonholing them into "novelty" status and to take in just how conceptually innovative and seriously subversive these guys have been. Joyce's radio shows (the ones I've heard) are a pinnacle of the form. A truly great artist has left us.

 

I would also recommend Death Sentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak, perhaps the most un-Negativland sounding Negaitvland album and No Business, which includes Don's razor tape classic, 'Piece of Pie'.

 

It's hard to tell how 'collaborative' THEIR work is! The track "Downloading" from "No Business" is one of my faves! The juxtaposition of the 'anit-downloading' speech with the barrage of sounds 'attacking' it makes me smile!

 

For those of you who want to hear the 3 HOUR tribute show on KPFA, with Mark & Peter at the helm,
you can now hear it for free! Right here:
There is No Don :Over the Edge Radio

I recommend it.

 

It was very entertaining (the snippet of Richard and Don doing the Harold Camping Bowling thing was hilarious. I've never heard Don lose it before!) but they need to do another one. They mentioned that David & Richard and Vicky Bennett were all going to call in but none of them did. They did say that OTE would go on in some form but I just don't really see it. Producing 3-5 hours of radio every week that is that densely packed cannot be an easy feat, not to mention with Don's singular vision.

 

Here's hoping, perhaps, David, Vicki, and (hopefully) Wobbly show up for (I think) next week's show..... possibly, a 5 HOUR show!?!?!?

 

I have not been the same person since finding Don on 'Over the Edge'. RIP.

 

Listening to Another UFO on my iPod. RIP, DJ.

 

Funnily enough it was Wobbly who first came to mind as someone who could take over OTE and do it justice... Vicky too but she is more of an East Coast gal these days, isn't she?

 

If by 'east', you mean England!

 

Wobbly's thoughts:

This lovely reminiscence is from Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker, also of Negativland:

Don Joyce lived in a second story flat off Telegraph Avenue in what is now the thoroughly gentrified Temescal district in Oakland, but when I visited the Negativland home studio for the first time in July of 1987, after nightfall you had to watch yourself on the way from your car to the front door. I was there to drop off source materials and discuss the theme for the coming week's episode of Over The Edge, which, after two years of avid fandom, I had finally been invited to play. Don still had his programming day job at that point, and I discovered him in his room tinkering with the GUI for a primitive typing tutor program on his Mac SE with his left hand, while his right hand hovered near the pause button on a cassette deck recording KGO talk radio. Occasionally, while talking to me and coding with one hand, he'd unpause or repause the recording with the other, seemingly randomly. But I soon realized he was precisely waiting for silences between the host and his callers, and making sure host and callers still alternated in sequence. The resulting tape would still sound as if it were a conversation; it just wouldn't be even remotely close to the one that had actually happened.

This approach to multi-tasking wouldn't have been a surprise to anyone who's heard Over The Edge, which I'd randomly channel surfed into at 12:30 in the morning two years before; at first I'd assumed I'd hit one of those magic nodes on the analog dial where two stations were coming in clearly at the same time, and paused to enjoy the accident. The slow rush of recognition came on over the next twenty seconds as I realized it was actually five to ten things at once: talk radio recordings and advertisements cut in with each other and twisted into dialogues, all while loosely played guitars and keyboards mingled with fragments of pop and soundtrack albums. And only when the sound of a disconnecting line terminated the guitar riff did I make that final connection: a number of the lower fidelity instruments and tapes were being contributed by live phone callers. I stayed up until the show ended at three, that night and many nights to come.

My nascent record collection had already skewed electronic by that point in my young life -- the most interesting music, by definition, seemed to be something that could only be composed within in the confines of a studio. Live music seemed a pale shadow, far removed from where the action really was — what was live music even supposed to sound like at this point in history? A museum, or a card trick depended on canned backing tracks? The answer was suddenly obvious -- you make music, live, out of pre-recordings, treating no one source as final, hearing any single moment of sound not as a fixed object but rather as the potential for another moment of live music. Every playback is already an act of live music, but the show made this obvious through the example of getting involved. This show was the moment when I stopped relating to music as the sum total of my record collection and I began relating to it as something that could be made in real time by people: Don, every week, sometimes joined by Negativland, Fake Stone Age, King's House, Ronald Redball, Babs Bendix, People Like Us, and an endless cast of receptacle callers: Sasquatch, Mr. Oogie, Rocky, Phineas Narco, Metallurgy, Suicide Man.

I never got around to formally studying music; there was only playing on the show. All the instruction you need is right there in your studio headphones. The radio audience remains hypothetical, but you knew by definition the right people were listening; anyone else had the option of tuning out. Going back to the tapes, I know how exactly annoying I was as a teenager, but Don never assumed the role of a mentor, he just chimed in with what he knew. There’d usually be a smoke break around 1:45am with the occasional golden aside: "The trick is to keep coming up with new ways to make mistakes! It gets harder and harder to keep yourself confused enough to make anything worth listening to the next day." Or: “Never confuse satisfaction with success! That first hour was way too much fun to be listenable.” Sure enough.

His life was pretty much his work. By the early 90s, the day job had been jettisoned, and the show became a full time job that nothing else could compete with. There was the occasional relationship with an amazing woman, but that was not going to be the path. Even food; I think he timed his grocery shopping to happen on the drive back from KPFA to minimize the number of hours away from his equipment. I'd play the show a certain number of times a year, and shared some wonderful concerts with him over the years; always surreal to spend time with the guy in a public setting. But most of my most personal memories of him are also strangely public; I've got them on cassette. And this is not the time to sum them up. The size of the archive is overwhelming, but any given 60 seconds shows you the practice, makes available an inspiration to anyone who needs one. It's harder to describe the show now in the age of the internet; we can open twelve browsers at a time but we seldom use them to live our lives as a work of art in the way that he proved any one of us can.

I drove him to the emergency room when his breathing became a problem and we spent about three hours talking about future concerts and radio shows while they found him a room. So much left to do! He didn't feel up to traveling with Negativland for tours, but he definitely wanted to play local shows, and he had ideas. And when I reminded him that he had collapsed, backstage, moments after we'd finished a concert we’d played together in 2012, overwhelmed… He admitted that if he was about to go, it'd been an amazing life that had gone much further than he'd ever imagined. He started out a painter, and then out of nowhere, this whole music thing — it'd really turned out! He also wanted me to know: he wouldn't take back a single cigarette. Every one delicious. So much pleasure.

In other words, no regrets. Such a relief for anyone who sometimes feels at odds with the idea of getting subsumed by the art, or missing the traditional signposts of a normal life. Take it to any degree you feel comfortable with, as you visit to the archives, or make your own weird new combines, or encounter any of the other odd people who might have been listening in isolation, but whom this show strangely brought together in real life. The recordings are one thing, and it's good that they're there, but what are you going to do with them on any given week? Might as well be something; it'll be the right move.

The work you started is not ending anytime soon, Mr. Edge. Thank you for the inspiration.