Negativland: Escape From Noise

IF I RAN THE marketing department at SST Records, I’d do burritos with someone over at the University of Minnesota Press and make sure Negativland’s fourth LP, Escape From Noise, was included with each copy of Minnesota’s translation of Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali. First published in 1977, the French intellectual’s (you know the type) free-form analysis of the subversive impact of noise (as protomusic, interference, and harbinger of social change) strikes a dissonant chord you can’t avoid hearing amid Negativland’s cluttered noisescapes.