OVER THE EDGE : “WWW Radio” broadcasting on KPFA People Like Us & Negativland on KWCW (with a prelude in the radio show featuring special guest Blevin Blectum) 17 March 2022 | KPFA.ORG | MIDNIGHT-3AM (PT)
Show archived here
A week long residency at Whitman College’s Sheehan Gallery brought Vicki and Negativland & Sue-C to Walla Walla, Washington. It all ended with college radio: a two and half hour long chartsweeping riot broadcasted live from the studios of KWCW containing Vicki, Mark, Wobbly and eventually, one receptacle guest calling in to sing. 98% of that broadcast you’ll hear on Over The Edge tonight, largely as it happened.
Hour 1 Vicki and Jon in conversation (recorded May 2021) Hour 2 Live Session with PLU, Wobbly and Don Joyce on Over The Edge, KPFA (2002) Hour 3 Live Session with PLU, Wobbly, Irene Moon and The Evolution Control Committee on WFMU (2002)
29 November/30 November 2018 midnight on Thursday going into 3am Friday morning, California time. In the UK that is 8am-11am Friday KPFA 94.1FM, online at https://kpfa.org/player?audio=live
We returned to the radio to guest with Jon Leidecker (Wobbly) on Negativland’s “Over The Edge” on KPFA Radio for the first time in 16 years, and this represents the 20 year mark of first appearing on Over The Edge.
Since 1981, Negativland’s live mix, audio collage radio show, “Over The Edge,” has aired weekly for 3 hours at midnight, each Thursday on KPFA 94.1FM in Berkeley, California. Mixed for 35 uninterrupted years by founder Don Joyce until his passing in 2015, the show continues on, now helmed by Wobbly (2nd & 4th Thursdays) and KROB (3rd Thursdays, as a frequently-broken rule). OTE’s themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment. There is a plan and there is no plan. The mix consists of found sound of many kinds and from many sources put together on the run as the continuous audio collage progresses.
Over The Edge DO or DIY with People Like Us – Monday, 19 June 2017 – 6pm https://wfmu.org/playlists/pl
From 1981 to 2015, Negativland‘s Don Joyce hosted Over The Edge, the longest running block of freeform live mix collage radio in broadcast history — a program which continues today, having been inherited by long time show participant and collaborator Jon Leidecker. In this very Wobbly interview, Vicki and Jon discuss the history of collage radio, and the slow evolution of the Edge, as well as its many possible futures, both True and False. http://www.detritus.net/wobbly/ | https://archive.org/details/ote
Don Joyce (Negativland, Over The Edge) has merged with the radio waves. Don was a close friend and amazing artist. His influence on the work of People Like Us is beyond measure. Here is a wonderful piece accurately conveying many of my own experiences, written by Jon Leidecker, who I also first met through Don.
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.
Over The Edge – How Radio Isn’t Done Pt. 16
26 January 2006
Bits from the recent Congressional hearings on indecency continue with a vengeance as Howard Stern shows some of his own. The community speaks before an FCC hearing on media monopoly, the BBC as edited by People Like Us, the Firesign Theatre answers the phone, and live receptacle programming input just for spice. Run time2h:49m:28s
Over The Edge – How Radio Isn’t Done Pt. 4
29 September 2005
This five hour edition moves on and on with all our continuing radio characters like Negativland doing an interminably incompetent broadcast from WNUR, Evanston Ill. while on tour in 2000, the continuing free-dum saga of Howard Stern, an entry from “Another UFO” in which Art Bell is debunked and Jackie Gleeson interrogates the author of a 50s UFO book on the Long John Neble Show, Chris Morris with “On The Hour” from the early 90s BBC, People Like Us, and more.
Guests People Like Us and Wobbly drop in for an extended cancellation concert of unexpected music, mixed, in this case, with an extensified, supercharged completion of the Sturgeon story begun two weeks ago. This is a nice show for all-around modern interest. It’s truly a golden age of iritainment for all. We’d like to give you a free kitchen with this one, but you wont need it because this one cooks all the way through. Chew with your ears. Run time2h:56m:8s
We join together to mix 2000 announcements. These range from several announcements from General Injectables concerning all their current mergers, to fractured and re-edited public service announcements of all kinds. Dr. Harold Camping and Dave Emory take some calls, Michael Jackson protests his innocence, Bob and Ray awards to past programming, celebrity tooth decay for kids, know your W.W.II planes, Jack In The Box is now safe and wholesome, the need for pep pills, and about 1995 more announcements, along with ever constant cut-ups of the musical variety. Hot stuff. Run time2h:57m:44s
