by Dan Berman (Guest Critic)

Film Director Craig Baldwin takes us on a wild head-trip through the radio airwaves in his 1995 filmic venture with Sonic Outlaws. Outlaws, normally refers to classic western films where the stagecoach thieves will take the most valuable of possessions. But in this documentary, these are not ordinary Outlaws. These guys are the ones behind what we call ‘culture jamming’. They are the group of guys who give a whole new meaning to alternative radio where they are plugged in.

They record our conversations through transmissions that we send on our cellular phones, and CB radios. To these Sonic Boomers it’s just another day of creating an alternative world of unusual sound bites and video clips. Baldwin, navigates through the days of early radio broadcasts and how sound and image are not all that they actually seem. It’s a barrage of art films, advertisements, and Orson Wells cinematic pictures. He creates the embodiment and a documentation that are seized from the corporate mass media and redeployed for subversive purposes.

These kinds of broadcasts originated from the amateur radio world where they interfere with major markets across the country. Where pranksters would get in the way of the transmission through acts of destructive foolishness. The real backbone to Baldwin’s Sonic Outlaws recounts the legal tripe of the music group Negativland. Their recent legal battles, documented in detail by the film, began when they released a record parodied by Irish rock legends U2. When they embarrassingly made outtakes of the top 40-radio personality Casey Kasem, Island Records, and the music label of U2. The ordeal set off a chain of events that effectively suppressed any further recordings.

While the activities surrounding this high frequency cinematic cult flick stays on the fast track. Baldwin never relinquishes his hold on the human eye as those images come from every direction. He creates a sonic centerpiece for all those ‘culture jammers’ out there as he brings his wild, cultural, media boom to the forefront.

Dan Berman