Negativland’s Don Joyce Has Died

Photo via Negativland’s Facebook

Negativland member Don Joyce has died. He was 71 years old. The cause was heart failure, the band wrote on Facebook , as Billboard points out. He passed away yesterday in Oakland, California. 

Joyce became involved with Negativland in 1981 after they were alerted to Over the Edge, a radio show he’d started in the Bay Area that would, over the years, become a launching pad for much of the group’s music. He joined as the band was heading in a more conceptual direction, thanks to the input of Ian Allen (who passed away earlier this year). According to the band, he was responsible for the “idea of reshaping previously recorded words” emerging in their subsequent output. Joyce also came up with the term “culture jamming” to describe Negativland’s aesthetic.

“As an extremely shy and often quite reclusive person, radio was a perfect medium for Don,” the band writes. “He could reach thousands of people each week without having to deal with very many actual humans, just as he preferred it. Creating art was not only Don’s full-time pursuit, it was literally his life’s work. He had made it clear to the group as recently as a few weeks ago that he was happy and satisfied with what he had been able to achieve in his life, and were he not able to continue to work, his life would feel as good as over.”

Joyce stopped touring with Negativland in 2010, but he ended up contributing to almost 30 of their albums. 

Read the band’s full obituary here.

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