The National Cynical Network

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.

NCN is a satirical self-exploration by, and for, members of Generation X - particularly those who grew up in the safe, yet boring and isolated, environs of American suburbia - seeking to celebrate the creativity inspired by a boring existence.
The main assembler behind 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 .

PHASE 1: (1987-1999) THE OTEYEARS

Phineas Narco discovered the shows in 1982 as a highschool teenager. .
All three members (Narco, Redball andNewport) worked intermittently with Negativland member DonJoyce (who runs the "Over the Edge" show to this day) starting in the mid tolate eighties. The three were part of what was unofficiallytermed 'the webpack', a group of regularly appearingguests on "Over the Edge". They met through their associationwith that show and their simultaneous involvement with the 'boxscene' (described below in PHASE 2).
One of the "Over the Edge" shows thatRedball and Newport created was called 'The NationalCynical Network', a name made up by Redball and featuringRedball, Joyce, Wobbly and Newport.
During these years, (roughly1987-1999), the trio perfected their mixing and writing craft and eclectic style cutting theircreative teeth under the intermittent tutelage of Joyce andcarrying on a more or less loose association with each otherthrough his show and over the boxes.
Narco was heavily influenced by the manicallyimprovised late-night live psychedelia of KPFA's "The Subgenius Show"(aka 'More Than an Hour, Less Than a Show') which heparticipated in initially via phone, and laterin-studio. The Subgenius Show later became ' The Puzzling Evidence Show ' which runs to thisday on KPFA. He was also heavily influenced and inspired bythe work of RogerWaters during the early eighties and his dramatic andintensely dark use of sound-collage in the albums including (andafter) Dark Side of the Moon and oninto Waters' solo career.
Other influences on Narco include themusic of PeterGabriel , Trent Reznor , Oingo Boingo , the comedy of Monty Python's Flying Circus and GeorgeCarlin , and the performances of The Church of the Subgenius , EricBogosian and the work of the late Frank Zappa .
Narco experimented withvarious sound collage styles during the mid-eighties before performing live onthe air with Negativland's Joyce. The first show wascalled 'Pain and Passion' and was indicative ofNarco's interest in, and experience of, emotional extremes.

Around a dozen other Narco "Over the Edge" shows followed, exploringvarious themes including the early work of Frank Zappa,death, parents, and television crime coverage.
Redball's influences aren't specificallyknown, but he is a great admirer of radio personality PhilHendrie .

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. He also penned and provided the voices for the very popular 'PepRidge Farm Commercial' parody that NCN did.
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 “philo-babble”: 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 are available here . Originally born & raised in the USA, he currently lives in England with his wife and pets.

PHASE2: (1999 - 2003) Midnight Voicejail / The KFJC Years andRetro 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. 1:115 (Newport) setup his box, "Club Manic-Depression" shortlythereafter followed by Ronald Redball's "The Global MaverickSociety".

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 calledthe boxes for entertainment but did not have boxesthemselves.
The scene broke up around the mid-nineties,presumably when everyone discovered the worldwide web.
Interestingly, 'The Boxes' turned out to bea type of pre-web precursor of what we now know as ' blogs ': serving partly as journals, but also as creative outlets,political soap-boxes, and a means of social networking for themostly teenage and twenty-something crowd of the day. Many ofthose who, at the time, looked down on 'the boxes' have blogstoday.
Just about everyone in 'the box scene' hadtheir own collection of tapes of box messages bothincoming and outgoing.

Reportedly, it waswell-known at the time that ' voicejail ' (a term coinedby George Locke (sp?), friend of legendary 'voicejailer' andnow online poet FatherLuke in the latter years of the scene) material was being widely collected, freelycirculated, and would someday be used for... 'something'.

That 'something' turned into a 50-episode series thatpremiered at midnight on 4/20/00 as a feature on Angel D. Monique's show 'ClubManic-Consciousness' on KFJC.
Midnight Voicejail was produced and compiledby Phineas Narco (who at that point had been working at thestation for a year and a half) with material provided byMonique, Newport, Redball and Joe Sledgehammer .
Midnight Voicejail is in effect an audio documentary about, and an extension of, the box-scene milieu in that it presents show-long public 'outgoings' (i.e. outgoing greeting messages as in the 'box scene' days) in a pre-produced, cut-up, collage format. Its sound is much like that of outgoing messages on the old voicemailboxes with the new bonus of many of the features are 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.

The phrase 'Needle in the Red' came out of astudio session at KFJC with Narco, Redball and Newport.

Newport kept pointing out how 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 finally 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, Narco became more and more reclusive to the point of agorphobia.

During these distressing times, he kept working on shows, eventually producing over 30 episodes as of the Winter of 2006.
He currently works on a sunday night webcast on Subgenius Taphouse Radio .

STYLE, THEMES andTECHNIQUES

Many people ask what the 'style' of NCN is.

While it identifies itself with no particular genre,seeking instead to creat its own style, the best words one can ascribe to it are:'variety' and 'stream of consciousness'.

Like many Generation X-er's themselves, 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 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 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 and new age mysticism, extreme states of mood and consciousness, work, liberalism vs. conservatism, the phrase 'how dare you', the word 'types' and the number 59.
All of the above, at any given time, can be lampooned or taken very seriously.

We do not seek to change minds but rather to desribe the times as seen through our own subjective lens. We do not seek to oppose forces, but to use them.

The shows are presented as surreal sonic snapshots of the vast media environment we live in now. Whenever historians look back to see what a civilization was like, they first look at the art. As artists, we appropriate the right to approproiate. "Officer, here's my artistic license". Artists always have taken from their environment and made rearranged duplicates of them to present back to the world in a framed format. To deny appropriation is to deny art. After all, today's environment is made up largely of the media.

Types (heh... 'types') of material runs the gamut from improvised mixes, produced comedy skits, straight up found sound-collages, political parody, abstract sonic expressionism, dada, 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 showis rather like going on all the rides of an amusement park at once. Themood of a show can be, at any given time, scary, funny,disturbing, absurd, ambient, psychedelic or spacey.
Wear headphones while listening for the besteffect... .