Biography
Brad Laner, active as a guitarist, songwriter, and producer, ranks among the most productive participants in the Los Angeles indie rock community from the 1980s forward. Although he has issued hundreds of recordings across numerous bands and under assorted aliases, his debut under his own name, Neighbor Singing, did not surface until 2007.
Born in 1967, Laner initiated his musical work in the early 1980s with Debt of Nature, producing five cassette-only albums and contributing to several compilations. Before joining the noted noise rock band Savage Republic, on whose final two albums, Jamahiriya and Customs, he performed, he recorded with several other groups.
Laner formed Medicine in 1991; its combination of dense, heavily distorted guitars and refined pop melodies drew comparisons to leading figures of the British shoegazing scene and earned a deal with the prominent U.K. label Creation Records. The group’s first album, Shot Forth Self Living, appeared in the United Kingdom in summer 1992 and reached the United States several months later through Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Medicine disbanded after its third album, Her Highness, in 1995, yet Laner assembled a new lineup in 2002 to reclaim the name from another act using it, resulting in the 2003 release The Mechanical Forces of Love.
In the intervening years Laner worked with Lusk, Amnesia, Personal Electronics, and Vas Deferens Organization, though his most extensive and personal undertaking was Electric Company, which debuted in 1995 with A Pert Cyclic Omen and had added eight more albums and five EPs by 2004. He has also supplied session performances on albums by Brian Eno, Blinker the Star, 17 Pygmies, and Fourwaycross, estimating appearances on over 300 albums since beginning his career.
After Laner and his wife had a son in 2004, he redirected more effort toward home recording to spend greater time with his family, one outcome being Neighbor Singing, co-produced by Thom Monahan and issued by the independent Hometapes label in 2007. During this period he also collaborated with Alex Graham, who records as Lexaunculpt, in the band Internal Tulips; their debut album, Mislead into a Field by a Deformed Deer, appeared on Planet Mu in March 2010, the same label that had released an Electric Company album in 2001. Laner’s second solo album for Hometapes, Natural Selections, followed in August.
His solo work paused shortly afterward when the original Medicine members staged a surprise reunion prompted by Captured Tracks reissues of the group’s first two albums in 2012. They recorded and released a new album, the strong return to form To the Happy Few, for their new label in 2013. Laner resumed solo activity soon after with Nearest Suns, released by Hometapes in late 2013. Drawing Room Records issued a limited cassette by Laner titled For Magnetic Tape in 2015. A year later the label released Micro-Awakenings, a previously unreleased double LP of short experimental pieces recorded between 2003 and 2009.
Born in 1967, Laner initiated his musical work in the early 1980s with Debt of Nature, producing five cassette-only albums and contributing to several compilations. Before joining the noted noise rock band Savage Republic, on whose final two albums, Jamahiriya and Customs, he performed, he recorded with several other groups.
Laner formed Medicine in 1991; its combination of dense, heavily distorted guitars and refined pop melodies drew comparisons to leading figures of the British shoegazing scene and earned a deal with the prominent U.K. label Creation Records. The group’s first album, Shot Forth Self Living, appeared in the United Kingdom in summer 1992 and reached the United States several months later through Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Medicine disbanded after its third album, Her Highness, in 1995, yet Laner assembled a new lineup in 2002 to reclaim the name from another act using it, resulting in the 2003 release The Mechanical Forces of Love.
In the intervening years Laner worked with Lusk, Amnesia, Personal Electronics, and Vas Deferens Organization, though his most extensive and personal undertaking was Electric Company, which debuted in 1995 with A Pert Cyclic Omen and had added eight more albums and five EPs by 2004. He has also supplied session performances on albums by Brian Eno, Blinker the Star, 17 Pygmies, and Fourwaycross, estimating appearances on over 300 albums since beginning his career.
After Laner and his wife had a son in 2004, he redirected more effort toward home recording to spend greater time with his family, one outcome being Neighbor Singing, co-produced by Thom Monahan and issued by the independent Hometapes label in 2007. During this period he also collaborated with Alex Graham, who records as Lexaunculpt, in the band Internal Tulips; their debut album, Mislead into a Field by a Deformed Deer, appeared on Planet Mu in March 2010, the same label that had released an Electric Company album in 2001. Laner’s second solo album for Hometapes, Natural Selections, followed in August.
His solo work paused shortly afterward when the original Medicine members staged a surprise reunion prompted by Captured Tracks reissues of the group’s first two albums in 2012. They recorded and released a new album, the strong return to form To the Happy Few, for their new label in 2013. Laner resumed solo activity soon after with Nearest Suns, released by Hometapes in late 2013. Drawing Room Records issued a limited cassette by Laner titled For Magnetic Tape in 2015. A year later the label released Micro-Awakenings, a previously unreleased double LP of short experimental pieces recorded between 2003 and 2009.
Albums
