Search - Electric Company :: Studio City

It's hard to know whether former Medicine man Brad Laner is an unrecognized musical savant, or simply out of his tree. Here we have irrefutable evidence for the latter theory. Following the rather limited success of his las outing, the multi-instrumentalist and Los Angeles scene veteran of nearly 20 years returns to the disorderly white noise confines of his experimental sideproject Electric Company. With Studio City, Laner wastes no time bringing on the clamor. The opening track "Arbor Sirens" bursts through the speakers with a haphazard assortment of squeaks, fuzzy rhythms and scrap metal clanging. In short, it's the sound of someone trying to play jungle music through a broken modem. While the onslaught of digital feedback doesn't really improve from there, a vague collage does start to reveal itself in layers. "Darken an' Slobbering" takes dilapidated drum & bass rhythms and matches them with a warped orchestral loop, which eventually breaks off and spirals into a hypnotic blast of beats, like a grisly car wreck involving My Bloody Valentine and DJ Shadow. "Throb Ear" starts out with a scratchy reggae rhythm and Space 1999 style effects before disintegrating into a fidgety psychedelic jam of piercing intensity, living up to the promise of its title. It's not so much that Laner is lacking vision, it's that he makes his music physically impossible to bear. --Aidin Vaziri