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Negativland fans rejoyce! 700+ episodes of Don Joyce’s radio show ‘Over the Edge’ available online
09.24.2015
11:25 am
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If there were a Mount Rushmore for sound collagists, Don Joyce would be on it. Being one of the members of Negativland (and, incidentally, coining the term “culture jamming”) would likely merit such a distinction on its own, but Joyce’s decades-long commitment to his sound collage radio program “Over the Edge,” a staple of Berkeley’s KPFA since June 1981, would make it a cinch.

When Joyce passed away of heart failure this past July at the age of 71, the band’s official announcement noted that “in late 2015, all 34 years of Joyce’s ‘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.”
 

 
That day has finally arrived, and the riches contained at the Internet Archive threaten to overwhelm the capacities of even the most fervent sound collage fans. According to the Internet Archive, there are 941 episodes of “Over the Edge” available for download—Factmag.com uses the phrase “over 700 episodes”—in any case it’s a hell of a lot of programming for you to enjoy at your leisure. In fact, based on a random sampling of the collection, most of the shows have a duration of either 3 hours or 5 hours, so conservatively we’re talking about thousands of hours of mind-bending audio collage here.

“Over The Edge” aired every Thursday on KPFA 94.1 FM, featuring experimental sound collage, freeform performances, live listener contributions, and “untold unplanned weirdness” to a dedicated cult of Bay Area devotees. One of the regular features of “Over the Edge” was Joyce’s character Crosley Bendix, “director of stylistic premonitions” for the “Universal Media Netweb,” of which Negativland was, or is, putatively a part. “Over the Edge” was, as Allmusic.com’s Ned Raggett put it, “very often the testing ground for Negativland’s formal releases”—for instance, the show debuted “Nesbitt’s Lime Soda Song,” one of the more memorable tracks from Negativland’s 1987 masterpiece Escape From Noise.

By the way, for those who would like to sample some highlights without facing a bewildering choice of hundreds of potentially interchangeable episodes, over the years Negativland released several compilatons of Joyce’s KPFA material, many of which are available on Amazon.

Here’s an installment from January 1997, chosen simply because the episode’s name, “Dangerous Acts,” has a certain je ne sais quoi.
 

 
via Night Flight
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Just say BO-NO: Mark Hosler of Negativland on Apple’s ‘U2rusion’
‘Christianity is Stupid’: Negativland takes on religion in ‘It’s All In Your Head’

Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.24.2015
11:25 am
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