ELECTRIC COMPANY-LIVE IN CONCERT, 10" & 7" SET, 1995, USA

Following on from my posts of his work in Steaming Coils, To Nije Sala and the Electric Company collaboration with my band Vas Deferens Organization, here's an overlooked classic by Brad Laner (formerly of Medicine and Savage Republic, among others) that was issued at the beginning of his work under the Electric Company moniker, though it's pretty dissimilar to both any other Electric Company material or any other recordings he's issued elsewhere, both in terms of this particular recording being a collaboration with one Justin Meldal-Johnson (who's recorded with everyone from Beck to Air to...er...The Dixie Chicks and held the bass slot on the final release of Medicine's first era, "Her Highness") and by dint of it's aesthetic thrust, which is stark and austere, but possessed of an uncanny and severe beauty. Correlations could be made between the sound here and This Heat at their most rigorous (think: Testcard and Graphic/Varispeed) and the species of spectral post rock maneuvers deployed by the likes of Tone Rec, Brise Glace and Radian in their wake (though the thread yoking this to rock is even more tangential here); all sounds poised, nuanced and deployed with a masterful economy of construction and a firm grasp of how to sustain tension by unobvious means. Wide-angled planes of preternatural and steely atmospheric drifts are rent by precisely calculated deployments of monolithic rhythmic hits or insectile percussive chatter before ultimately coalescing into a more constructivist though no less unnerving ediface on side B of the 10". Just one more demonstration that wherever his muse leads him, Laner invariably has the midas touch.

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