Negativland announced today that Don Joyce, one of their core members ever since joining the band, died yesterday of heart failure. He not only worked with the band on scores of albums and projects, but also kept their radio show, OVER THE EDGE, running for decades on KPFA, producing loads of new content and co-writing loads of content, both musical and spoken word, for the show.
In their announcement Negativland also mentioned that by the end of this year the entire archive of OVER THE EDGE will be made available online, and once that's done I think people are going to realize just how much work did on that show. His work in the 1980s on the Negativland albums (especially the epic Escape From Noise) still influences countless audio collage artists to this day. He is really going to be missed.
I only had one interaction with the man, when Vicki Bennett of People Like Us alerted the Snuggles mailing list that it was his 50th birthday. I immediately sent him a short note wishing him a happy day, and he wrote back thanking me and saying, "It's never too late to get old."