A weekly radio show on 94.1
KPFA in Berkeley, said to be the longest-running
freeform show in public radio. The show is every Thursday night (actually Friday morning) from midnight to 3, except for the first Thursday of every month. It was founded by
Don Joyce, who still is the official license-holder and the one responsible for filling the time slot every week, but the program has become associated pretty closely with the group
Negativland. Only occasional installments of OTE include all 5 members of Negativland, but the show always utilizes techniques and concepts that are important foundations of the band, like live
sound collage and "
receptacle programming", the unedited live phone calls which have provided a lot of the most truly unique and hilarious moments in the history of the program.
Don has been doing the show since the early 1980s, and the rest of Negativland soon discovered it and began participating. Other frequent collaborators in Over the Edge include Wobbly, Ronald Redball, and Phineas Narco. Many fans are regular callers who have developed on-air personas, and who often inject their own sound collages or music into the mix via the phone lines. Don also frequently collages recordings of previous shows and callers into new shows, so that at many times it's unclear (even to the callers) who is a live caller, who is a recorded caller, and who is a totally constructed monologue made from samples.
Don sells unedited cassette collections of the better OTE episodes, and Seeland, Negativland's label, has also released several Over the Edge CDs, which present edited thematic highlights of certain shows or series of shows, such as The Time Zones Exchange Project, JamCon 84, The Weatherman's Dumb Stupid Come-out Line, and Sex Dirt. A recent and very interesting OTE concept series is The Chopping Channel.
for more information, see negativland.com.