Don Joyce documentary

After I watched the Negativland documentary trailer, Ryan Worsley’s previous documentary in 2020 about Don Joyce (RIP) came on…I remember hearing about this but hadn’t watched it yet.

It’s really good and a must watch for lovers of mashup history and plunderphonics, or indeed radio, and indeed goes a little bit into the history of Negativland – I guess that’s where the idea for a bigger documentary started?

I was very inspired by Over The Edge – Don Joyce’s radio show on KPFA I heard via tapes and Robin Rimbaud/Scanner in the late 90’s to do something similar – you can hear edits of those on my Bandcamp page, where I would do live improv performances with vinyl, VHS, synth, scanner, cassette tape for hours. Mostly they do go on, but a few bits I liked hence the ‘Reality Engine’ edits..

Also some of that is my degree show stuff about surveillance – ironic since I was monitoring a lot of mobile calls, baby monitors like Weatherman does in the trailer, etc. It was amazing and also creepy – and also depressingly inane. People’s conversations were not as interesting as you’d think!

Interestingly amongst the clips on the Don Joyce documentary is what seems to be an early version of Our National Anthem which is on Free, the album I mentioned in my last post…

The director’s name sounded familiar – I checked, he has created music videos for Negativland before.