Over the Edge (radio)

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Over The Edge (or, OTE) is a radio program hosted and produced in the United States by Negativland member Don Joyce. OTE is broadcast live on KPFA every second, third, and fourth Thursday night from 12am to 3am. On the rare occasion of a month with a fifth Thursday OTE runs an additional two hours, from 12am to 5am.

Joyce has broadcast OTE since June 1981, usually solo, but sometimes with collaborators. The show began as a rather conventional music show, though Joyce gradually experimented with the format. In the mid-1980's, when Joyce began collaborating with Negativland, OTE established distinctive format it currently follows.

The opening theme music is from Heaven and Hell (1975), by Vangelis. At the end of each episode, a woman's voice is played, reading a statement attributed to Man Ray: "To create is divine. To reproduce is human."

Joyce typically follows one theme for an entire program. Topics vary wildly, from motion pictures, to various music and copyright issues to UFOs and the CIA; one episode each was devoted to Ken Nordine and to radio comedy team Bob and Ray.

Joyce uses sound collage techniques, weaving many sources together throughout the program. Sources might include recordings of other radio programs (including old time radio shows), portions of documentary films, songs and various special effects. Joyce declares that with OTE, he and his collaborators "create 'direct-reference' collages, manipulating and mixing both found and original sounds to produce a new kind of audio animal. O.T.E. is always concerned with recycling existing cultural elements to some new, unintended effect."[1]

The audience phone participation ("Receptacle Programming") is another element: listeners are encouraged to call-in, and are placed on-air with no prior screening. The highly improvisational content and late hour of the broadcast attract a variety of colorful callers. There are only two rules for callers: 1)When the phone stops ringing, you're on the air. 2)Don't say "Hello." In the same essay cited above, Joyce writes that Receptacle Programming is, ideally, a collaboration: "Receptacle programming is there to deposit ideas and sounds from the real, live, simultaneous life outside our broadcast studio. Real-time participation allows a direct interaction with our mix as it is happening. Thus, musicians can join in with an over-the phone instrument and follow our live beat or provide a responsive bed for our elements. This, as we like to say, is best accomplished by listening to the show on stereo headphones tuned to KPFA when you call, and holding the telephone like a microphone. Then the caller is "in" the mix, hearing his or her own real-time sounds being broadcast right along with our mix in headphone stereo. Some callers have their own mixers which they connect to their phones and send in their own rather elaborate mixes of music and tapes with their own effects added.

Crosley Bendix was a pseudonymous radio announcer personality created for a series of commentaries for the radio program. Bendix was, in fact, Negativland member and Over The Edge host Don Joyce. Bendix was touted as the head of the Universal Media Netweb; a fictional, authoritative body on all things multimedia. Most famously, Crosley Bendix introduced listeners to squant, the fictitious "fourth primary color", which was also the only primary color to have its own unique scent.

Throughout the 80's and 90's and beyond, Over The Edge has also been an outlet for Negativland's creativity. The group participated in many of the shows, a few of which have been released as edited-down CDs:

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