[photos from the negativland archives.]

Mark Hosler: Readyyyy? Are you recording? Go! OK, well, this is an interesting year for Negativland. We’ve now been doing this for twenty-five years…

everyoneisdoomed: …so how does it feel to be all grown up then?

MH: Yes, I’m all grown up. I’m ready to finally stop doing this silly noise nonsense and do serious grown-up things.

eid: Does it feel different, twenty-five years later?

MH: Well, it feels like it’s just as hard of a struggle as it was when we started. I wouldn’t say it’s gotten any easier. It’s always a challenge and we’re always struggling. I wish it was easier, but I also think it helps keep our work honest, that we’re always having to thrash around pretty hard to keep our heads above water.

eid: Do you mean financially or creatively?

MH: I mean everything: Juggling all the balls in the air we have of running a record label, doing new work, a weekly radio show, trying to do live shows. I’ve been doing a lot of lectures in the last few years and I’ve actually had more of my income from lectures than from selling our stuff.

eid: A lot of the site’s readers will probably be familiar with your work, but could you give me a little insight as to how Negativland got started and what was the impetus behind getting together and starting this kind of project?

MH: Well, it wasn’t something that was very well thought out. I myself was only 16 years old. We weren’t thinking of ourselves as being any type of crusaders for copyright change or dealing with intellectual property issues, or being anti-corporate activists, pranksters, hoaxsters, you know? We were interested in making something with sound that didn’t sound like anything we had heard before – some hard-to-articulate combination of noises, sounds, tape loops, found sounds taken from TV and talk radio, recordings of our parents, playing our own instruments and making our own songs. Doing something that was somehow both cut-up collage and weird,but with an almost pop sensibility to it. It was before sampling existed. There were no computers. The word “sampling” did not even exist. We were literally cutting tapes up using razorblades.

eid: How did you first get involved in sound collage? Was that something you were doing before Negativland got started or was that a growth of this project?

MH: Well, we didn’t call it “Negativland” at first. We just traded tapes and got together in each other’s bedrooms and had some little synthesizers and mixers and tape decks… For me personally, I had been hearing a lot of music coming out of the explosion of independent music happening in the late seventies. In the wake of the Sex Pistols and punk rock there were a lot of people who were taking some very different and very underground approaches to how they made, manufactured and distributed music. It was very exciting. Incredible and amazing music was coming out back then but there was something missing, there was something that I wanted to hear. At some point I said “well, I guess we’re going to have to make it”.

eid: You mentioned that you didn’t have an idea that you might become a copyright crusader… Did you have any idea that it might possibly go this far?

MH: Oh, no. Not in the slightest. I thought we’d make one record and then we’d stop. Back then, there certainly weren’t any concerns about legal issues or being sued. Our work was a pretty intuitive and organic response to both what we were hearing out there and the world we lived in. We were surrounded by TV and movies and talk radio and advertisements. For us it seemed very normal to mix these things into the sounds we were making. We just liked the sound of it.

eid: You also mentioned causing controversy, and of course you’re widely known for being sued by U2 …

MH: Yeah, that’s our hit lawsuit…

eid: …and even the recordings I’ve heard so far from NO BUSINESS have a “confrontational” kind of quality…

MH: I don’t think so.

eid: …you don’t think so?

MH: Nope. But that’s fine if you think so.

eid: Well, I’m trying hard not to project my own emotion on your work…

MH: You are. But that’s o.k. Everyone does that with art.

eid: …but is it ever your intention to provoke negative publicity or negative attention? If some people perceive your work as confrontational, how would you perceive it?

MH: Well, did you laugh? Did you enjoy it?

eid: I didn’t say it wasn’t humourous , but it definitely has a sort of sharp edge.

MH: Well then what do you mean when you use the word “confrontational”?

eid: I mean that it has an element of challenge to it. For example, when I was listening to the track Downloading from NO BUSINESS… I thought it sounded somewhat aggressive in it’s message. Not necessarily in it’s presentation or in it’s format.

MH: Then what is its message? Hey, who’s doing the interview here? [laughs] But really, there’s no answer to that type of question, so it’s really up to your interpretation. So what do you think the message is?

eid: My interpretation is that there’s a fine line between what is considered to be free and what should be paid for. But again, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the track. It’s a piece that’s close to ten minutes long.

MH: Yes. Well, we work pretty hard to make our music be open to a multiplicity of interpretations. That’s an ideal that we strive for. We don’t want our work to be seen as having one simple message or to be what I would call didactic. We don’t want to seem to be offering simple answers to complex problems, because there aren’t. The world’s a very grey place, it’s not black and white. Part of what we’re dealing with when we’re dealing with copyright issues, is that copyright really needs to acknowledge modern creativity, and what people are going to do and make these days can be a very fuzzy legal grey area.

But unfortunately, copyright is written in a very black and white, simplistic, binary sort of way. You either totally own your work and control it, or it’s totally in the public domain. And there’s no in-between. We worked with Creative Commons and part of what they’re doing is creating licenses that do give creators an opportunity to articulate that they see copyright as more of a fuzzy grey area.

I can see what you’re saying about how there are aspects to our work that some people will hear and think “wow, that’s kind of extreme that you took that” or “aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?” or “wouldn’t this offend certain people?”… and it’s possible. But when we’re sitting down and making the music, it’s not what we’re thinking about. I’m not thinking about some guy at some big record label who’s gonna hear our work and decide to sue us.. We know there’s a public out there that we’re making stuff for, but we do assume that the public is intelligent and thoughtful and is paying careful attention to what we’re doing. Now, they may not be paying attention carefully at all, but we make the work assuming that people are going to dig in, and we make sure that there’s a lot to get out of our work.

At a more intuitive level, we’re just trying to make something that we think sounds cool. NO BUSINESS has a cut-up of the song My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. We rearranged the song so that Julie Andrews is saying absolutely ridiculous silly stuff, and it’s just really funny to us. To some degree, it’s sort of juvenile to have her saying things like “nose cream on kittens and nose cream on mittens”. There’s a shock of recognition where you know this work but you’re hearing it completely altered. There’s some cognitive dissonance that happens in your brain when you hear that, and it’s fun. It happens that we’re making this out of using intellectual property created and owned by someone else.

We’re very aware of the anti-corporate activist aspects to our work, but we think of ourselves as artists and musicians first, and activists second. I think if it were the other way around, we would make lousy records. In that case we would be making crappy, finger-pointing, didactic art and that’s something we must avoid at all costs. I think that the way we take things that don’t belong to us and reuse them, we actually make work that sounds pretty distinctively ours.

eid: Well, many people have said that downloading is analogous to tape trading from the 80s…

MH: No it’s not! It’s theft! Theft, I tell you! [laughs]

eid: …some people say that, too. [laughs] What I’m getting at is that it’s basically tape trading with new technology. I was wondering – how has the technology that Negativland uses to make music changed over the years, and how has Negativland changed with technology?

MH: This new record of ours is the first one we’ve ever made that was all done in the digital world. Believe it or not, that’s how far behind we are! We’ve never had the money to go out and buy the new G5 computer and the latest of everything to work with. Even Death Sentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak, which came out in 2002, was assembled on an eight-channel multi-track tape deck. Just about a month ago, the last remaining North American company that manufactures reel-to-reel recording tapes stopped making them. So those days are literally now over, whether we like it or not.

eid: Did that shut down have anything to do with going all digital for this album?

MH: No, it’s just that we’ve been very slow to learn new technology. I can’t stand learning new things on computers. It drives me crazy. Of course, once you do learn, there are amazing things you can do with it that you couldn’t do with the older technologies. But Negativland has always been interested in good ideas… We don’t really care how they’re executed. That’s really irrelevant. We don’t ever really talk about the hardware or software that we use. When we perform live we always cover up the names of all the gear. We’re just not interested in that. Other types of artists and musicians are way into the cutting edge gear and talking about it. To us, it doesn’t really matter. We just want a good idea, and that hasn’t changed in twenty-five years. It’s always been about “is this a good idea, or not?”, and when you’ve got five members of a band or six…

eid: …but there’s two core members?

MH: No, there’s not. There’s a core of four or five members, and there’s sort of satellite members of the group who work with us so often and are so important to the work that I consider them to be members… but they’re not as involved in day-to-day decision-making. We haven’t even said who’s in the group since ’87. We’re trying to do everything we can to avoid that “cult of personality” that seems to happen with bands and rock stars.

eid: Well, your promo photos do a good job of totally obscuring your faces.

MH: Yes. I wouldn’t say any of us are particularly vain! [laughs] I mean, we have big battles over what we’re doing creatively, but they’re never over money or ego or anybody being the star. We’re just struggling to make our ideas turn out the best they possibly can. A long time ago, we thought of this as a fun and different approach to the typical American thing of wanting your work to be all about you . We also thought it might create a more interesting sense of our work. Also, since we’re all human and we all do have egos, we thought it would be smart to kind of short circuit things that could happen years later on.

eid: O.K. Well, it’s clear that Negativland isn’t just about music. Last year you produced a heavily edited four minute piece of video called The Mashin’ of the Christ, which you either intentionally or unintentionally leaked onto the net. Something else I wanted to talk about was this new primary color you’ve either created or discovered called Squant…

MH: Oh yes. Squant is a dramatic discovery in the art world. There are big changes coming from Squant.

eid: …because for me personally, I’ve always known Negativland as an audio-based project. I’m just wondering how these other things – video editing and web trickery – fits in.

MH: It’s not trickery! Download the Squant plug-in. It works great! [laughs]

eid: I did download it, and funny enough, it didn’t work.

MH: Then try downloading it again, or write in to our technical support. They’ll help you!

eid: I don’t know. I was sober when I installed it.

MH: Well then, you should try it again after a few beers. It might start to look right to you. [laughs] So, I mean, we’ve always done different things. We’ve had a weekly radio show since ’81. When we play live, we’ve done shows with props, puppets, costumes, sets, and tons of visuals. We’ve been making short films for a very long time. We’re compiling all of them onto a DVD which will come out hopefully before the end of this year, called Our Favourite Things. Another thing we’re doing is that this year we’re gonna have an art show in New York City opening on September 9th that’s going to focus on a whole other side of our work which pretty much no one has ever seen, al this fine arts stuff. It will be called Negativlandland. So we don’t see ourselves as working in any particular medium at all. We just like to make stuff. In working on our projects, I get to be a noise-maker, a regular musician, a singer, a songwriter, a cut-up collage guy. I get to take photographs, make art, do design, work on sets and costumes, do painting and sculpture. For me personally, one reason it’s been so easy to keep working with Negativland for all these years is that I get to get all of my creative ya-ya’s out.

eid: You mentioned releasing a DVD of your short film work, including The Mashin’ of the Christ…

MH: If we can get it manufactured.

eid: Well, I wanted to ask if you find it hard to actually get projects like that released …

MH: Well, that is a problem for us. I mean, I don’t think our work is legally problematic at all. I think everything we do is perfectly fine, and I don’t see any reason why anyone should have a legal issue with it. We’re not pirating, we’re not bootlegging whole works. We’re chopping things up and transforming and reusing them and making new work out of it. The problem is at the manufacturing level, where you might encounter issues. The manufacturer may look at the master of our DVD before making it and say “hell, you’ve got stuff on here from The Passion of the Christ and Disney movies and a Clint Eastwood film. Did you get permission for that?”

eid: …and you’ll say “no”, and they’ll say “we’re not gonna print this”.

MH: Yeah. In which case we’re forced into behaving as if we are pirates. We have to go find some CD pressing plant in the Ukraine or Hong Kong or Taiwan or anywhere that will make it. If that happens, we’ll deal with it and I know we can get it made somehow.

eid: Have you had to resort to that type of behaviour before?

MH: Well, on our website there’s a section about Negativland and the RIAA. There were revised guidelines from the RIAA that went out to CD pressing plants, and in ’98 a plant that we’d been working with for years announced that they would no longer press any of our work because they were concerned about being sued. I tried to talk to them about the issues involved and how it’s basically a form of prior restraint: How can you have your day in court if you can’t actually publish the work? They said, “well, we’re very sorry, and we’re sympathetic, but we’re not interested in free speech issues. We’re a manufacturer. We can’t take the risk to help you print a few thousand copies of your CD. So, sorry”. Luckily we found a company to work with that doesn’t really pay much attention to what they press. [laughs] They probably should, but they don’t. Negativland gets e-mails periodically from other musicians who are having trouble with pressing plants, and I’ll turn them onto the one’s that I know of where they seem to be able to get away with it.

eid: Now, these are serious issues. But in terms of your work, there is this element of fun and an almost giddy kind of “pranksterism”, for lack of a better word.

MH: Yeah. I think some people might be shocked or surprised that we seem to engage with these systems of power and we don’t seem to be too afraid or take them too seriously. We toy with them, mock them, satirize them, play around with their million dollar cola commercials and rearrange them. Some people look at it and just think we’re making a fun record, and other people say “oh my god, that seems really risky. How can you do that?” But I don’t see our work as being outlaw at all.

eid: In terms of that element of fun, you’re going to be playing Toronto in about a week’s time. Of all the places you could have chosen to play, Toronto seems like kind of an odd choice…

MH: Oh, we didn’t choose Toronto. Toronto chose us!

eid: …is that right?

MH: Yes. We weren’t sitting around saying “gee, we really ought to create a brand new show and really work our asses off so we can go out and play for the fine people of Toronto. Those Canadians need to hear this”. [laughs] No, but seriously, two festivals came to us and made us a really good financial offer. We’re trying to survive off of this, and the money was good. We realized we could use this as an opportunity to create a new show and sometimes you just need a kick in the butt like that, an incentive to get things going. We were asked to perform our weekly live radio show live on stage in Toronto. We thought it was something challenging and something we’ve never done before.

Since it’s radio, it’s not filled with our usual costumes and props and visuals and eight 16mm film projectors, etc. There’s no puppet show, because it’s radio. We decided to pick a theme that’s, hopefully, very thought provoking… to give people something for their brains to chew on. There ain’t gonna be nothin’ for their eyes to chew on! Our weekly radio show always has a theme to it. It’s improvised but it has a weekly themetic link. For the show in Toronto, it’s going to be called It’s All In Your Head FM. It’s basically about why the belief in one single god is probably a bad idea, and about fundamentalism in all of it’s forms, and it all goes back to what I was saying before about black-and-white interpretations of the world. It’s very difficult for human beings to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the greyness of reality and the world. This is the type of thing our president, George W. Bush plays in to. He’s clearly insane, but he presents a very binary way of looking at things that is really reassuring and safe in a lot of ways. It’s not that the members of Negativland aren’t spiritual, but I think that the reality of what goes on in this universe at a spiritual level is far more complex. So, we want to do something that is thoughtful and isn’t sophomoric… It’s too easy to take potshots at religion…

eid: …for example, writing a song called Christianity is Stupid?

MH: …yeah. I don’t know who did that, but that was a dumb idea! [laughs]

eid: Well, I was going to mention, when we were talking about The Mashin’ of the Christ, that this isn’t your first headbutt with organized religion… You mentioned that you didn’t think you were confrontational, but are you in a certain sense trying to reach out to the unconverted, or the converted, or whatever the case may be?

MH: No, not at all. I mean, we don’t really know who our audience is. We just know that there’s one out there. I’d say we’re more contrarians that we are confrontational. We’re all really nice people. I’m not interested in freaking somebody out or totally offending them or pissing them off. It’s not that we aren’t unaware of these aspects of our work, but we aren’t sitting around thinking “gosh, we wanna change people’s minds”, or “gee, we’re trying to educate people, or upset people or confront them”. There’s just always been something that intrigued us about doing things that we weren’t supposed to do…

To totally contradict everything I’ve just said, our new release NO BUSINESS does come with a long thoughtful essay, which really is about trying to give people a different perspective on things. But the essay, to me, is an essay; it’s not art. It’s not music. It’s an actual “opinion piece”. With this release we are putting ourselves out on a limb a little bit more. We’re saying “here’s what we actually think about these issues to do with corporations and intellectual property and culture and art and downloading issues and the supposed collapse of the music industry”. We are offering our perspective based upon all the years we’ve been doing this stuff and thinking about it. I never could have imagined writing a piece like this and putting it out when I was 25. Back then, I didn’t know shit. Now that we’ve been doing this for so long, we thought “well, maybe we do have some interesting perspectives we could bring that could be of use to people in this ongoing public debate about these issues”. And for some reason, people seem to be interested in what we have to say about these issues.

eid: For this show in Toronto, you mentioned having a theme for it, and a lack of visuals…

MH: We’re actually gonna cover a chimp with shaving cream live on stage and shave it. We are actually, but you see, it’s all radio, so I don’t really know if you’re going to see it happening. [laughs] You will hear it happening, though. It’s a commentary on the theory of evolution. We thought a shaved chimp would be a good way to show how close we are to our simian brothers. [laughs]

eid: …but you also mentioned that the show was improvised. How do you prepare for something like that? Do you collect audio before hand?

MH: That’s a good question. It’s the same way we would do our radio show every week, but for this one we’re putting a lot more work into it. We’ve been collecting all of the material we have that relates to the subject matter. We’ve written some mic breaks, we’ve collected all kinds of music. We have enough material to do a six hour show, but we’re going to boil it down to about a two hour long show. We’ve worked in an improvisational sort of way for so long that it’s pretty much second nature to work like that. The challenge is that usually our live concerts are very structured with improvisation within that structure. This performance is going to be scary because it’s all improvisation, except for the mic breaks, which are scripted. If the shows in Canada come off well, we’ll reevaluate how they went and maybe work towards doing more performances of it. This is literally like the very beginning of a whole new Negativland show.

The other question this show is posing for us is “will an audience who wants to see Negativland enjoy the show when there is nothing to watch. This is a radio show on stage. With that in mind, we’re gonna pass out blindfolds to the audience. [laughs] But can we do something that’s sonically interesting enough and conceptually intriguing enough that people like it? Or will they say “geez, you were just pushing buttons for two hours”. I think times have changed a lot. Nowadays, there’s a lot of people doing DJing and laptop-type performances. People are used to the idea of going to see a performance where you really are just listening.

eid: So what do you hope that the audience takes away from it?

MH: Again, I suppose I’m contradicting things I’ve said earlier. On the one hand, we try to make all of our work thought provoking. On the other hand, we’re really leery about seeming like we’re trying to tell people what to think. It’s more like we’re just trying to get people to think. As to what they think, I’m not really worried about that. If we can do work that actually gets you thinking or debating… if people come out of our performance and have interesting conversations with each other, I think that would be the coolest thing.

I mean, when has Negativland ever done a show that was all about spirituality? For us, as individuals, it’s been a real challenge to create. As I’m sure you could imagine, the members of the band do not agree on these issues. We do not have one monolithic, hive mind point of view about god and spirituality and religion. For instance, I don’t want to come across like we’re atheists. There were some versions of the show where I thought “this is coming off like we’re a bunch of goddamned atheists”, but we’re not. So, how do we balance that, especially in a context where everything is improvised? It’s been a big challenge for us and maybe it’ll challenge the audience as well.

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