Electric Company is a solo project of Brad Laner, who most notably played guitar and noise for the excellent early 90s alternative rock/shoegazery-ish band Medicine. Electric Company was also a children's television program in the US, but that is immaterial to this post. I came upon these records as various interests of mine converged many years back - being innovative rock, noise music, and general laptoppery. While these two albums are quite different in style and technique, they each handle the creation of artsy-noise-music-that-is-almost-catchy in a playful manner.
a pert cyclic omen
this is noisy, hazy, crazy. a musician having fun in the studio. there are hints of shoegazeryness, but full of loops running on their own power - collisions, elisions.
exitos
exitos was released on tigerbeat6 - and in many obvious ways differs a pert cyclic omen, very electronic, glitchy and spare. but the sense of noise, contrast and collision is still present, along with some serious hooks. this is definitely what makes Electric Company one of my favorite "lost" acts of turn of the century laptopping - so idiosyncratic, yet at ease with hints of genre, equal parts challenge and ease.
I go through my collection, looking for something to put on the stereo, and can't believe I have these records (among all the other records I can't believe I have). This makes me happy.
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also, a boozy toast to aporia6 joining the crew here.
bb
13 comments:
name your poison, next round's on me muthafukaz!!!
A Pert Cyclic Omen has been one of my faves since it was released.
Funny story about this record. Once when I lived in an enourmous group house in D.C. I would constantly find groups of my housemates and their friends in my room listening to my records when they were high as kites on who knows what. Usually this annoyed me quite a bit and I would gently kick them out. However on one occasion I found ten people crammed into my tiny room, all of them on lsd, listening with looks varying from blissful abandon to utter horror to the second side of Cyclic Omen. I sat and listened with them, everyone totally silent to the end. In the days after they all asked for copies of the record as they had been totally blown away by it. The one guy even gave me this elaborate theory that the music had been talking to itself while he was listening.
Without exception they all *hated* the record on the repeat listen. :)
Thx for this bill, these are good ones...here is Laner name-checking some of his 'favorites' for Dusted Magazine's "Listed" series, just recently:
http://dustedmagazine.com/features/661
n9 haha funny story! thanks for sharing. for me this stuff is a teensy bit 2002 if you know what i mean but is holding up better than some other music from that time.
oh that's a good one n9...
yeah I agree w/zhao that exitos is full of slightly overripe barely-21st-century cliche, which is partly why i've posted it. way back in the bwogge I posted kid606's ps i love you and ps you love me which are equally ripe. I don't think that time has made this records "bad" - I think that it shows where the Electric Company project pushed the envelope (if only a little) and wasn't entirely comfortable in the "glitchtronic/clicks_+_cuts" compilation scene. I still like a lot of that music, there are a lot of revelations in that scene from 1999-2002 (what a brief epoch!) that I still here in today's records, and some were much bolder with what they would try out in their music and software. anyway, blah blah blah you get it.
and zhao - my poison this week is "HUDSON MANHATTAN RYE" from Tuthilltown distillery. thanks!
man i bought so many IDM cds back then... (blush) Exitos is actually one of the fews i kept. well it's in storage now...
class choice! (actually i've never heard of it before but it sounds well sophisticated) i love a good whiskey but i'm totally ignorant. what's the difference between bourbon and scotch? and what about "blended"? what's that about?
This is a very special request: GARY WILSON - FORGOTTEN LOVERS
Thanks again. ALEX
Bourbon is an American form of whiskey named for Bourbon County, Kentucky. By United States law, it consists of at least 51% corn — typically about 70% — with the remainder being wheat and/or rye, and malted barley. Scotch is whiskey distilled from a distillery located in Scotland. Blended whisky is whiskey made up of several whiskies mixed togetherto produce a consistent taste, Single malt is a single batch from a single distillery. "Purists" consider blended to be inferior to single malt. :)
DIFF WATERS WHISKEY BOOZE PARTY TIME
zhao will get educated.
dang! my brain jus like, got BIGGER n shit!
time for a new hat z?
fwiw "a pert cyclic omen" came out in '95 and "exitos" in 2000.
I'm going through music I've downloaded but haven't listened to yet.
this is so weird that i have to comment...i just heard Shot Forth Self Living today and was blown away. then the next album i put on is A Pert Cyclic Omen (downloaded a few weeks ago based on the favorable write-up). pure coincidence. totally rules. keep up the good blog! one of the better ones out there...
zhao's blog is killer too.
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