The Greenville Drive-In is
getting its 2024 season underway on May 31 with an evening under the stars featuring
two of the experimental music world’s leading lights, Negativland and Matmos.
Formed in the San Francisco
Bay Area in 1979, sound collage group Negativland are legendary for their
surreally subversive “culture jamming” approach, in which they often employ loops,
samples, and found sounds to lampoon consumerism and contemporary society. The
band famously generated legal controversy in 1991 with their EP U2,
which incorporates the music of the titular arena act and the hilariously irate
rantings of “American Top 40” DJ Casey Kasem. For the Greenville event,
Negativland will be accompanied by “real-time cinema” artist Sue-C to present the
multimedia performance “We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here.”
Also formed in San Francisco,
but now based in Baltimore, the electronic duo Matmos is known for their use of
highly unusual sound sources (the amplified neural activity of crayfish, “the snips,
clicks, snaps, and squelches of various surgical procedures”). The band collaborated
with Bjork on her albums Vespertine (2001) and Medulla (2004) and
in 2023 released their 14th album, Return to Archive, which finds them
remixing field recordings from the Smithsonian Folkway label’s catalog.
Negativland + Sue-C and Matmos will perform at the
Greenville Drive-In in Greenville on May 31 at 7pm. Rodney Allen Greenblat will
play in the outdoor cinema’s biergarten prior to the headliners. Tickets are $25.
This article appears in Spring/Summer 2024.
