Over the Edge (radio)
| Genre | Sound collage |
|---|---|
| Running time | 3 hours |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Home station | KPFA |
| Hosted by | Jon Leidecker ("Wobbly") |
| Created by | Don Joyce |
| Recording studio | Berkeley, California |
| Original release | June 1981 – present |
| Website |
www kpfa |
| Podcast | kpfa |
Over the Edge (or OTE) is a sound collage radio program hosted and produced in the United States by Jon Leidecker ("Wobbly"), who took over in 2015 after the death of longtime host Don Joyce.
Leidecker, like Joyce, is a member of the pioneering sound collage band Negativland, other members of which have frequently appeared on the show. A series of Over the Edge episodes have been released under the Negativland name. Critic Ned Raggett describes Over the Edge as "a merry trip into an alternate world," while critic Stephen Cramer describes Over the Edge as "the longest-running block of free-form radio in the history of radio ... essentially live performance art."
Founded in 1981, OTE is broadcast live on KPFA in Berkeley, California, every second, third, and fourth Thursday morning from midnight to 3 a.m. On the rare occasion of a month with a fifth Thursday OTE runs an additional two hours, from midnight to 5 a.m. The show is also available online, streamed live from KPFA.org (which podcasts the show), or from Negativland.com, where many older episodes are available as well. Thousands of episodes are stored at the Internet Archive. It is the group's plan to digitize and archive every episode ever made.
Negativland members—often just Joyce—have broadcast OTE since June 1981. OTE began as a rather conventional music show, though Joyce gradually experimented with the format, due to his disapproval for what he saw as radio's primary function (encouraging listeners to buy music recordings). The show has changed time slots a few times, but now broadcasts in the Thursday midnight to 3 a.m. slot. Due to various obligations on the part of the host(s) or the KPFA DJs on before and after him, the show is sometimes not aired at all, or is sometimes much longer. Usually these kinds of scheduling changes are announced the week previous, or in the closing minutes of the previous show.
Joyce declared 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."
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