"He believed very much in randomness. His whole thing was to make music that wasn't created by him or created by humans - music that just somehow fell into place. In a lot of ways I look at him as more of a philosopher than a musician. He had beautiful things to say. I'll read a quote and it will just ring so true. It's the kind of thing I know intuitively, but he articulated it. It's great to find people like that."

Brad Laner, Medicine's guitarist and chief music manipulator, is talking about avant-garde musician John Cage - a major influence on the experimental art-core madness that is Medicine. Laner proudly points out the rare vinyl recordings and mis-matched editing, recording and sampling machines that line the walls of his one bedroom apartment in Sherman Oaks, California. This bedroom is where a majority of Medicine - the intense overdubbing and metamorphosing of sound as we know it - happens.

Constructed on pot, coffee and cheap machinery, Medicine's second American Recordings release The Buried Life pushes the definitions of song and music to new plateaus. Laner leads the three piece group, with Beth Thompson adding vocals and Jim Goodall on drums, through a labyrinth of electronic squeals and rhythms. Ranging from virtual chaos (tidbits of squealing chairs and sloshing rain boots) to nihilism (the last track on The Buried Life begins with a minute of silence), Medicine sees their environment as something able to be sampled and incorporated into any song.

"Anything can get into a song," says Laner, who also produces the band's albums. "It comes from just knowing that sounds exist almost everywhere, and from trying to use something different, something unique. I will never use pre-programmed sounds - you know, the kind of samples and things everyone else is using."

A Medicine album comes together like a gestalt puzzle, blurry and elusive, but with an underlying sense of shape. Laner's musical compositions vary so much from album to album and song to song that there could easily be a loss of continuity. The only major adhesive element fixating any Medicine album is Thompson's light and airy voice stringing song to song.

"Beth naturally puts herself inside the music, that's where she is most comfortable. She's not one of those singers that's going to wail on top of a song," says Laner. "The sound demands that anyway. While serving as a connecting factor, her vocal does become just another part of the melody, another texture to work with."

Serving time in numerous punk and industrial bands before Medicine, Laner is more than willing to pay his dues, slugging through the hard times any relatively new band must go through with a smile on his face. Poverty leads to creativity.

"I've never had the money to buy the big expensive effects, so I've always used what I had at hand," he claims. "I've never really even been a big tech-head. It's always just been a matter of having a cheap tape recorder or a short-wave radio laying around and using that to make a sound. Really, technologically I don't know anything. But it's more fun that way - you get more screwed-up sounds if you don't use standard equipment. I'd hate for tech-heads to listen to the album and go, 'Oh, I know how they got that sound.'"

Not catering either way, Medicine falls into an abyss somewhere between being a pop band and experimental trailblazers - "There are melodies in there, I swear," says Laner - at first sounding as if they destroy music. Laner sees his textural pyramids as something to be proud of, while still knowing they are probably misunderstood.

"I always think that the experiemental music purists hear us as total bubble-gum rock, and the pop people are the ones who hear us as experimental."

Shying away from most mainstream mechanisms, Medicine recently bent its own rules and contributed a tune to the soundtrack for the Brandon Lee movie The Crow, alongside acts such as Stone Temple Pilots, The Cure and Pantera. Medicine also appears in the movie, a break which may hook a few more Medicine fans and bring in a little bit more notoriety for the band. If it doesn't, however, that's no sweat off Laner's back.

"I feel we're laying really nice groundwork for the band. If we can keep our sanity and not kill each other, I think our patience will pay off in a big way. We're really working in a pressure free environment. We have very little to prove. And hopefully the music will get more and more interesting as time goes on," says Laner. "But come to think of it, almost all of the music I really enjoy is totally obscure stuff - not really appreciated when it was made. It's like I'm going to be like that - appreciated but dead."

--J.R. Griffin


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e-mail me at zyphichore(at)excite.com.