NEGATIVLAND and LYDIA LUNCH at the Extreme Futurist Festival, Los Angeles, Friday 12/21/12.

After finding parking right outside the Los Angeles Center Studios complex, we were put through a metal detector security check and then found ourselves inside the Extreme Futurist Festival, a three-day showcase of weird and unusual behavior appropriate to the Mayan apocalypse schedule. Survival Research Labs would perform the day after the apocalypse, but Negativland was right on time, although their performance was moved up from 11:30pm to 8pm and they actually went on around 9. Time is shifty in Extreme Apocalypse Land. This gave us time to hear about 20 minutes of Lydia Lunch's set, so we entered the temporary dome building outside and there was Lydia, accompanied by a lone electric guitarist (Weasel Walter), swearing her heart out against The State and Patriarchy, as she has done since the late 70s. I had just been reading a WIRE (magazine) Primer, wherein Alan Licht devotes several pages to Ms. Lunch, who hit New York like a firestorm as the leader of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. "Performance art" was a new thing and there was a lot of intermedia experimentation, with combinations of spoken word and music, dance and film. Ms. Lunch's brand of sonic disturbance blends goth darkness and a dead seriousness similar in ways to Throbbing Gristle with the threat of violence in the form of sex and drugs as weapons of resistance. Lydia's lent her image and aura to Richard Kern and Nick Zedd's "Cinema of Transgression", a nihilistic take on subculture filmmaking reminiscent of Kenneth Anger. It was impressive to see that Ms. Lunch has survived her ballsout approach to life. She presented a series of similarly aggressive pieces, one dedicated to "the war weary and the battle fatigued". In another, she blurted that "I have a gun, because when they come to try to take me away, I'm not going without taking a few of them with me."

Back in the main building, the death metal band Malfaktor finished its set and Negativland got underway. Mark Hosler, Jon Leidecker and Peter Conheim did a marvelous set of found audio collage pieces, accompanied by live Booper feedback bursts, samples and keyboards. (I thought the Booper was also a radio call-in interface, but Peter informs me: "The Booper is strictly a feedback-generating device made from amplifier and radio parts. You might be confusing it with the other David box, the Teletour box.") Mr. Leidecker's Roedelius was flanked by two Mobiuses, a Cluster reference if you don't mind my saying. In the interest of disclosure, I have performed with Mr. Conheim in a film band called Wet Gate and I've also performed with Mr. Leidecker, who does solo music under the name Wobbly. Mr. Hosler is a founding member of Negativland, going back to 1980 or so, and Misters Leidecker and Conheim have participated in the Negativland radio show Over The Edge (with Don Joyce) for years before joining the group as performing members. This trio seems to have a good rapport and be guided by the same interests and goals. Their set was underpinned by a track of cut-up found audio pieces which they then embellished with noise from the Booper units and Mr. Leidecker's dulcet keyboard accompaniment. There was also something like a rhythm machine digging into its industrial patches. The set featured a piece on the melting of the ice caps, a real estate development called Sycamore, a version of the old chestnut Guns (Peter informs me: We didn't actually do the "Guns" piece; we did "The Gun and the Bible", which I think was on the FREE album), a list of rock band and entertainment names, and someone shouting "I want a piece of meat." The subtler segues and nicely cut-up sentences and juxtapositions made for some good head scratching. There was a fine balance of politics and humor to the set and the extreme futurist audience was appreciative enough for an encore.