Marking
it’s 35th anniversary today is the fourth studio album from Bay area
sonic collage masters, Negativland, with Escape From Noise being issued
on November 4th, 1987. For this album, the group took their penchant
for cutups and assemblage and applied it to slightly more conventional
song structures, utilizing shorter song lengths and occasionally
recognizable musical arrangements. The results were still wildly
surreal and bizarre, but also engaging in a way which hadn’t been
achieved on earlier works. It was the first album I ever heard by the
group and it left an immediate impact. It was certainly the funniest
album I’d heard since I had encountered Nurse With Wound’s Sylvie and
Babs a couple of years prior.
The album very nearly ended up in
ashes as the band’s studio was destroyed by fire when the dry cleaning
business below it on street level erupted into flames accelerated by
toxic cleaning chemicals. Luckily, Don Joyce happened to notice flames
licking up the bottom of the studio window and, after calling 911,
grabbed all the masters to the album before evacuating. That didn’t
save the band’s gear or masters from previous projects, but it did mean
they were able to release Escape From Noise, which came out on SST, the
most prominent label to feature the group’s work to date.
The
album gained notoriety shortly after its release when the song,
Christianity Is Stupid, became associated with a famous murder case
where David Brom had killed his family, supposedly after listening to
the song. This wasn’t actually true, but the group weren't averse to
leveraging the misinformation as it did ignite a firestorm of media
interest which became fodder for their next project, Helter Stupid.
Since its release, the album has become perhaps the most notorious and
recognized release in the group’s long history.
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