Sonic Reducer

Neg heads

'I'D NEVER JOIN a club that would allow a person like me to become a member": It's an old Woody Allen (or Groucho Marx) saw, but it still holds when it come to the merry culture-jammers of Negativland, cofounder Mark Hosler says (more on Hosler and co. in "Negativ Advertising," page 46). "Each of us has to make our own club of one and hope that there will be intersections with others," he told me earlier this year on his way to Canada for the first in series of monotheism-tweaking performances.

Now into their 25th year, Negativland teeter between the extroversion of theater and the safety of anonymity, which Hosler relishes as he strolls among his audiences, unrecognized.

"We thought, if we manage to stick around and we get to be more well-known, we'd really like people who like our work to devote their attention to the work, not us, and if you put our picture out there on the record cover – I have an ego; I think I can be seduced, as Don Joyce calls it, by 'ego bloating blasts of inconsequential fame and attention until the sharp jaws of fame and compromise come crashing close on our unsuspecting necks,' " he drawls on his cell while waiting at the airport. "A long time ago, we thought, 'We don't want to be rock stars,' and if Negativland's work is good, it's because we're a collective."

When they started out, in 1980, DJ culture was barely a skip on a disc, and laptop rockers were mere cursor blips on clunky Word Perfect screens – so Negativland, by necessity, relied on performance, reaching their apex in 2000, when they toured with a huge stage set, puppets, eight film projectors, and multiple movie screens. "When we started out, we didn't want to seem like a bunch of button pushers, so now we're getting back to our tape-loop roots," Hosler explains.

All from the mouths and minds of onetime babes: When the first Negativland record came out, Hosler was living in the outlying suburb of Concord and going to high school. "I was hearing a lot of great punk rock in San Francisco in the late '70s, but there was something missing. For me, Negativland was our attempt at hearing the record we wanted to hear but never could find. Some combination of noise, sound, pop music sensibility, taking familiar things out of context and recontextualizing them," he recounts, at the same time praising music by Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, and Cabaret Voltaire. "It wasn't very intellectual, either. There was just something I loved about taking a recording off the TV set in the middle of a processed guitar and a dog barking outside, which I recorded by sticking a mic out of window."

Here's the rub: The band that shook the timbers of such disparate characters as U2, Casey Kasem, and Island Records ended up being consummate outsiders – geeky teens far outside a city of refuseniks. "We were suburban kids. None of us have ever lived in San Francisco or wanted to," Hosler explains. "I found it to be a bit of an elitist scene, and when I dealt with people in the scene, like RE/Search magazine, they weren't very nice. We were just nerdy, normal-looking kids from the suburbs, not wearing black or leather, but we were making some of the weirdest music in the Bay Area. We weren't trying to pick up girls or score drugs – we just wanted to make a cool record."

Willowz bop Kids running scared from a certain rock 'n' roll fate – that also sounds like the childhood of the Willowz's Richie James Follin. His moms' longtime partner, Paul Kostabi, cofounded White Zombie; toured with Iggy Pop in Psychotica, playing the main stage of Lollapalooza; collaborated with Dee Dee Ramone on visual art; and played in the Bomp band Youth Gone Mad – and all that filtered into Follin's makeup. "We're highly involved in the Southern California punk scene," said the 22-year-old, who said that Agent Orange used to practice in his unofficial stepdad's garage. Follin's own adolescence included time spent cringing backstage in the land of Metallica. "I thought it was scary at first, then slowly I started to understand," he declared, taking a break from shooting a video in downtown LA, one of the slew the Willowz are making for every song on their new LP, Talk in Circles (Sympathy for the Record Industry).

Follin still leads a relatively glam life: Jack Black was rumored to have dropped by the shoot that day, and Willowz themselves got their first big break when one of their songs provided the backdrop for a tweaked Kirsten Dunst boogying in her thunderwear in Michel Gondry's film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Gondry loved their music so much that he offered to shoot a video for free (it's on the director's recent music-video-comp DVD). "He had our CD and had a dream about it," Follin said. "But I wouldn't exactly say we have charmed lives. We just got lucky with that, but even before that we were touring for a year and half in our teens in shitty-ass bars. Not that much has changed. We walked into the premiere of Eternal Sunshine, and they were playing our CD with all these movie stars around – that's crazy. But as far as normal band stuff, like touring and making flyers, we still do that." Still, theirs will be the first song featured in Gondry's upcoming feature, The Science of Sleep.

Luck of the draw NYC singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell is way steeped in the city's country history – so it seemed like an insane coincidink when she discovered she was related to Ethel Park Richardson, a Chattanooga, Tenn., songcatcher, historian, and radio drama producer. The Nashville-raised Cantrell had read Richardson's 1927 tome, American Mountain Songs, but didn't realize the author was her great-great-aunt. "To find out I was related to her was really kind of a trip, a funny confirmation that what I had been doing all along was an avocation and interest and meant to be," she says now, calling from Raleigh, NC, on a tour that will find her playing in SF for the first time.

The musical history jones seems to go deep down in Cantrell's DNA because she's shown herself to be quite the ethnomusicologist on her 12-year-old Saturday program on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop. "It was a way to encapsulate that I was playing a lot of older music, a lot of older records I found at thrift shops, but also music that was discarded or no longer thought cool by other folks," she says. "It's old-time country and pop when there were fewer genre stratifications." She's been playing vocal groups like Cats and the Fiddle and Golden Gate Quartet lately, and material from old radio shows is also a must. Now Cantrell will have to get used to being on the other side of the console (she'd been to the city many times in the past as part of her job in equity research for Montgomery Securities in NYC), doing radio appearances across the country. Radio also seems to be in her genes – as it is in those of Jeremy Tepper, her husband, who programs Outlaw Country for Sirius Radio. So would she call her music country? "Maybe because I grew up Nashville, I feel like it's my right to claim the title. If someone's expecting country music to sound like Faith Hill, they might be disappointed," she says. "But I'd rather risk a little confusion on the margin." Willowz play Sun/10, 9 p.m., 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $6. (415) 970-9777. Laura Cantrell plays Wed/6, 9:30 p.m., Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $10-$12. (415) 861-5016.

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