Negativland Releases New Album The Chopping Channel with Deceased Former Member’s Ashes

Negativland has recently began the process of releasing their new album, The Chopping Channel, with their release date being October 21, 2016.

This album will be a series of recordings that were collected and edited from the band’s radio show called Over The Edge. The artwork and the tracklist are listed below.

The band has placed small amounts of Don Joyce’s, a former band member who passed away last year due to a heart failure, ashes in mail order copies of their new album. According to NPR, the band had released the following statement:

“Thank you for reading about all of our deaths over the past year and a half! This is not a hoax. We’ve decided to take The Chopping Channel concept to its logical conclusion by ‘productizing’ an actual band member. It is also a celebration of the degree to which no idea in art was ever off-limits to Don, and offers a literal piece of him, and of his audio art, for the listener to repurpose and reuse. We are pretty sure he would have wanted it this way.”

With some confusion this statement has brought, the band clarified that the former band member’s ashes were not for sell, but rather they are doing this to serve as a gift and to enhance the theme of the album. They say in their statement “They actually fit the concept perfectly. Once you hear it, you’ll understand.” Along with this, they are adding one of Joyce’s “handmade audio tape loop ‘carts’ used in the creation of [the band’s livemix radio show] Over The Edge and Negativland live performances between 1981 and 2015.”

A year before Joyce’s death, the band had performed at the Bumbershoot Festival, which took place in Seattle during Labor Day weekend.

The Chopping Channel:
01. Bud Choke’s Smiling Voice
02. This Is Raymond Bien
03. The Man from The World
04. Trash Drum Biscuit Cred
05. The Stain of Music
06. Two Beautiful Car Horn
07. Homes and Bombs
08. Spiritual Transformation
09. Ethnic Prosthetics
10. Family Friends Laundry
11. Stop
12. Become What You Hear
13. Candle and Cradle
14. They Know How Busy You Are
15. The Violet Flame
16. Everything’s Fine
17. Food and Water
18. Almost Every Time