NationalCynical.com National Cynical Association official site with webcasts
Title
The National Cynical Network Home Site
Description
Negativland co-conspirators out of Silicon Valley who produce voicemail art as well as all manner of audio collage.
The National Cynical Network (NCN) is a long-running 'alternate programming' project assembled by San Francisco Bay Area absurdists expressionistically recasting their media environment through the twisted lens of their own subjective experience.
It is at once a satirical self-exploration by, for, and about members of so-called Generation X - (particularly those who grew up in the safe yet boring and isolated environs of American suburbia) and a surreal celebration of the manic creativity which begs to fill the vacuum of a boring and stupid existence.
The main assembler behind the bulk of the project is Phineas Narco who, along with Alexander T Newport and Ronald Redball formed the core trio of NCN in 1999 at the Los Altos, CA college radio station KFJC.
ROOTS AND INFLUENCES:
PHASE 1: (1987-1999) THE OTE YEARS
The roots of the project extend back to the early eighties when two shows began: KPFA's "The Subgenius Show" and Negativland's sound-collage show "Over the Edge" (also on KPFA).
Phineas Narco discovered the shows in 1982 as a highschool teenager.
All three members (Narco, Redball and Newport) worked intermittently with Negativland member Don Joyce (who runs the "Over the Edge" show) starting in the mid to late eighties. The three were part of what was unofficially termed 'the webpack', a group of regularly appearing guests on "Over the Edge". They met through their association with that show and their simultaneous involvement with the 'box scene' (described below in PHASE 2).
One of the "Over the Edge" shows that Redball and Newport created was called 'The National Cynical Network', a name made up by Redball and featuring Redball, Joyce, Wobbly and Newport.
During these years, (roughly 1987-1999), the trio perfected their mixing and writing craft and eclectic style cutting their creative teeth under the intermittent tutelage of Joyce and carrying on a more or less loose association with each other through his show and over the boxes.
Narco was heavily influenced by the manically improvised late-night live psychedelia of KPFA's "The Subgenius Show" (aka 'More Than an Hour, Less Than a Show') which he participated in initially via phone, and later in-studio. The Subgenius Show later became 'The Puzzling Evidence Show' which runs to this day on KPFA. He was also heavily influenced and inspired by the work of Roger Waters during the early eighties and his dramatic and intensely dark use of sound-collage in the albums including (and after) Dark Side of the Moon and on into Waters' solo career.
Other influences on Narco include the music of Peter Gabriel, Trent Reznor, Oingo Boingo, the comedy of Monty Python's Flying Circus and George Carlin as well as the music of Negativland, and the performances of The Church of the Subgenius, Eric Bogosian and the work of the late Frank Zappa.
Narco experimented with various sound collage styles during the mid-eighties before performing live on the air with Negativland's Joyce. The first show was called 'Pain and Passion' and was indicative of Narco's life-long interest in, and experience of, emotional extremes.
Around a dozen other Narco "Over the Edge" shows followed, exploring various themes including the early work of Frank Zappa, death, parents, and television crime coverage.
Redball's influences aren't specifically known, but he is a great admirer of radio personality Phil Hendrie. Redball once ran the infamous 'Shoebox Tapes' site which featured much long-lost early Phil Hendrie material given to him by Alexander T. Newport now (probably) available on Hendrie's site. He also seems to be influenced by the humorous stylings of the Firesign Theater and The Simpsons. He is also a long-time enthusiast of the works of musician Philip Glass.
Once called "Mr. Chameleon - Man of 1000 Voices" by Don Joyce, Redball is adept at imitating all manner of celebrity and cartoon voices including Hendrie's character Bud Dickman, Ray Taliaferro of KGO, his own character named "Bug", Homer Simpson and others. He currently lives in Cupertino and is looking for work as a comedy writer.
Redball completely wrote and produced, the very popular 'Chap in the Hood' segments from the Voicejail series and helped co-create the song 'Free Will' which is his and Narco's earliest 'work' which debuted on the Droplift Album in 2000.
Redball has done at least 40 "Over the Edge" shows with Don Joyce (with Newport guesting on many of those shows and Narco on some of them).
The third member of the group, philosopher, writer, and poet Alexander T. Newport (aka Mr. 1:15) has authored three books of “philobabble”: The Vomit Factory (Life is Fake: Death is Good), Ice Cream & Poop (Making the Best of a Stupid Existence), and The Steering Wheel Ain’t Connected to the Wheels (It’s Just for Show) and most recently "It's No Joke, We Live in Hell' which are available here. Originally born & raised in the USA, he currently lives in England with his wife and various pets.
PHASE 2: (1999 - 2003) Midnight Voicejail /
The KFJC Years and Retro Reality Radio
The roots of Phase 2 lie in the Phase 1 years.
The 'Box Scene' was started in 1986 by a personal ad in the San Jose Metro. The ad directed the reader to a voicemailbox for "The World Suicide Club" started by a character named 'Ed Note'.
Note placed an ad in the Metro attracting and inviting Silicon Valley 'freaks' to call. The incoming calls were cut up and used in collage form as the 'outgoing' messages on the same box, inspiring and attracting even more creative weirdos.
Note's free DIY entertainment voicemailbox acted as a feedback loop of insanity that was a clarion call for disaffected outcasts of the 1980's Silicon Valley yuppiefied social scene.
Mr. 1:15 (Newport) set up his box, "Club Manic-Depression" shortly thereafter followed by Ronald Redball's "The Global Maverick Society". The scene migrated to other more regular voicemail systems where at its peak it contained no less than 50 different mailboxes all interacting with each other, trading and re-broadcasting messages, and making creative outgoings.
Countless others called the boxes for entertainment but did not have boxes themselves.
The scene broke up around the mid-nineties, presumably when everyone discovered the worldwide web.
Interestingly, 'The Boxes' turned out to be a type of pre-web precursor of what we now know as 'blogs': serving partly as journals, but also as creative outlets, humorously political soap-boxes, and a means of social networking for the mostly teenage and twenty-something crowd of the day.
Many of those who, at the time, looked down on 'the boxes' have blogs today.
Just about everyone in 'the box scene' had their own collection of tapes of box messages both incoming and outgoing.
Reportedly, it was well-known at the time that 'voicejail' (a term coined by George Locke (sp?), friend of legendary 'voicejailer' and poet Father Luke in the latter years of the scene) material was being widely collected, freely circulated, and would someday be used for... 'something'.
That 'something' turned into a 50-episode series that premiered at midnight on 4/20/00 as a feature on Angel D. Monique's show 'Club Manic-Consciousness' on KFJC.
Midnight Voicejail was produced and compiled by Phineas Narco (who at that point had been working at the station for a year and a half) with material provided by Monique, Newport, Redball and Joe Sledgehammer.
Midnight Voicejail is documentary of and an extension of the box-scene milieu in that it presents show-long public 'outgoings' (i.e. outgoing messages as in the 'box scene' days) in a pre-produced, cut-up, stream of consciousnes collage format. It is much like that of outgoing message on the old voicemailboxes with the new bonus of many of the features were now in stereo and made specifically for the show.
The owners of the messages used on the show, and most of all the participants therein, know about the show and their response has been so far consistently positive and supportive.
PHASE 3: (2003 - onward)
NEEDLE IN THE RED
The phrase 'Needle in the Red' came out of a studio session at KFJC with Narco, Redball and Newport. Newport kept pointing out the needle of the VU meter kept going into the red during their boisterous play sessions. In jovial frustration, the trio suddenly burst into singing an impromptu song based on the melody "The Farmer in the Dell" with the words "The Needle's in the Red" instead.
In 2003, in the wake of the dot-com bust and 9/11, and with the world wide web in full swing, Narco was weary of working on voicemail material, disillusioned by incomprehensible station politics, devestated by an aborted friendship with comedian George Carlin, tired of dealing with Redball, and spooked by very odd and apparently prescient synchroncities in his sonic creations. He wanted to spend more time abstractly exploring and expressing personal inner landscapes through collage and began spending more and more time at home, working obsessively on intricate collages and weaving programs together under the name 'Needle in the Red'.
The first 6 "Needle in the Red" episodes appeared on KFJC in 2003 before Narco left the station.
In this new series, the voicejail material took a backseat to the collage, if they appeared at all, rather than the other way around. In later shows, Narco re-appropriated and converted some of his "Over the Edge" shows, now heavily post-produced, into Needle in the Red episodes, bringing the project full-circle.
During this time, as reflected in his online journal, Narco became more and more reclusive to the point of agorphobia. His schizoaffective disorder, latent to varying degrees since 1983, became full-blown and he experienced all manner of psychotic and paranoid states during which he was hospitalized repeatedly and lost several friends, including Redball. During these extremely distressing and psychologically painful times, he kept working on shows, eventually producing over 30 episodes as of the summer of 2006 that, to a large degree, represented his fragmenting and unstable mental state. Some of the best hour-long episodes bear titles such as "Schizophrenia", "Paranoia" "Bodies" and "Kill Me".
Narco is currently recovering from his illness and continues to create new NCN material using material from Newport, the media environment, and recordings from when 'the band' was still together.
Future plans for Narco include finding a job, touring, and writing more books (Narco has written two) and releasing the body of work that's been created by the group on dvd.
STYLE, THEMES and TECHNIQUES
Many people ask what the 'style' of NCN is.
While it identifies itself with no particular genre, the best words one can ascribe to its style are: 'variety' and 'stream of consciousness'. Like many Generation X-er's, the project rejects idealogy and therefore suffers from an indecisive lack of identity. It bears a host of 'logos' instead of one identifiable one.
In effect, NCN seeks to frighten and amuse by painting mostly impressionistic and abstract sonic paintings, self-portraits, that use the media environment as it's palette.
Common leitmotifs and techniques are: cynicism, psychedelic intensity, experimental music, political and pop culture caricature, drugs, an obsession with the TV shows 'Star Trek-The Next Generation' and the short-lived comedy series 'Sledgehammer', an identification with 'nerd culture', the necessary 'illusion' of being in a subjective reality, sophisticatedly vulgar humor, Newportian Dreamgame Theory, Buddhism, new age mysticism, extreme states of mood and consciousness, work, liberalism vs. conservatism, the phrase 'how dare you', and the number 59.
All of the above, at any given time, can be lampooned or taken very seriously.
"SO, WHAT??"
Types (heh... 'types') of material runs the gamut from improvised mixes, produced comedy skits, straight up found sound-collages, political parody, abstract sonic expressionism, surrealism, social commentary, voicemail messages, field recordings, naive melodies, 'psycho-philobabble' (the expression of an amalgam of various philosophical standpoints) and novelty songs.
Listening to an NCN show is rather like going on all the rides of an amusement park at once. The mood of a show can be, at any given time, scary, funny, disturbing, absurd, psychedelic or spacey.
