“You could pop on the internet right this second and find people road-raging,” says Mark Lane. “It’s so ubiquitous, such a part of the culture.”
That unabashed anger so often on display online and in the streets is what Lane is referencing in “Yelling at Cars,” the title track from his latest EP, released last November. “I saw you standing in the street/Yelling at cars,” he sings over a beat that’s a little electro, a little EBM, a clubby sound that still conveys the shock and dismay of his observations.
“It’s really hostile now,” he says. “The record touches on this psychosis of imagined road ownership. These people really believe, the road is mine. You see it over and over.”
Lane is one of L.A.’s early synth adopters. He began making music in 1980. Four years later, he released the seminal minimal synth EP, Who’s Really Listening? He continued to record and perform during a long stint living in Europe. After returning to the States, he went to art school and embarked on career as a fine artist. Meanwhile, his early recordings were gaining traction with underground music fans.
I first met Lane in the late ‘00s through my friends from the parties M/R/X and Wolfpak and went on to write a profile of him that ran in L.A. Weekly back in 2008 and (shockingly!) is still available to read online. We have kept in touch over the years and when he recently sent me Yelling at Cars, I was struck by the the title track. On a literal level, people yelling at cars is such a common sight in Los Angeles. Sometimes, I’ve been the person yelling at the car. Maybe you’ve been that person too. But, it’s also a great metaphor for our online lives, scrolling through one pointless argument after the next. We are all yelling at cars.
“I kind of knew that this record was going to be really good,” he says. “I could feel it. The first things I put down were kind of magical.”
Still, it took some time for the songs to come together. Lane’s process was different from how he normally works. “In the old days, I would do something and try to build on it no matter what it was,” he says. This time, Lane recognized the best bits, recorded them and set them aside. “I would leave for a week, sometimes three weeks, play it back to myself and go ahead ah, I know exactly know how to make that perfect. Then I would go in and make the adjustments and then start building on the adjusted part.”
In the midst of this work, though, Lane was mugged. “I got banged up a lot worse than I let everybody know because, at the time, I didn’t want the sympathy,” he acknowledges.
Lane paused the new music as he recuperated from his injuries. “When I came back to the work, it started to cascade,” he says. “I would go and work for four or five hours and so much would happen. I would leave my little studio with almost completely different work than I walked in with.”
Amongst the synthesizers Lane used was the ARP Solus, which appears on the EP’s title track. The synth dates back to the 1970s and Lane triggered it with an ARP sequencer from the same era. “Just getting the stuff in tune was really the whole game because those machines are so rich, they’re so expressive,” he says. “They feel human or something.”
Lane also pulled out the Prodigy that he used on Who’s Really Listening? — “It’s like a museum piece to me now. I keep it covered all the time,” he says— and an Oberheim OB-X eight voice synth. The latter lends the harmonic sounds that come into play on the songs “The Ghost of My Heart” and “Revlon Slough.” “To say I was lucky would be an understatement. Some of the stuff I just stumbled on in that machine,” he says. “I had only maybe had 100 hours on that machine, which is almost nothing on something like that.”
On ‘The Ghost of My Heart,” the sound takes a turn towards For Your Pleasure-era Roxy Music, a band that is certainly in Lane’s frame of reference. He remarks of Roxy Music’s early albums, “It’s as though the music are works of art. They’re not being treated as songs. Bryan Ferry isn’t out there to tell you a story, he’s out there to give you an impression, to take you into another world. All those sounds from Eno and the violins, later they came from [Eddie] Jobson, and things like that, they’re all art, the way that they’re placed in there is like art.”
For “Yelling at Cars,” Lane struggled with the lyrics. Then, one day he noticed a man at a freeway offramp yelling at cars. Lane recognized the man as someone he knew from high school. “The whole thing shocked me,” he says. But, Lane isn’t big on storytelling in his own music, so the phrase “yelling at cars” stuck with him and came to represent a much larger swath of society. “It so melded into this statement about the culture that we live in right now, the nervous edge out there and how one group is trying to gain power over an unearned aspect,” he says.
The song would also influence the album art, made by Lane that’s inspired by an ad for a vintage tape recorder, but is, in fact, a digital drawing of a device that doesn’t actually exist. The drawing does look like it could be a speaker or it could be a microphone. That’s the point. “If they have to think about it, that’s the good part,” says Lane.
After about a year-and-a-half of work, Lane had six songs, which he cut down to the four that appear on Yelling at Cars. When he dropped off the recordings for mastering, Lane had a feeling that he says he hasn’t felt since Who’s Really Listening? “I left knowing I’ve got something really different here, something special,” he says. “It wasn’t just another rendition of what I do. It was a step up, a step in another direction. Yet, it was still drawing on the entire catalog.”
Yelling at Cars is Lane’s 99th release. As he has a few things in the pipeline right now, it’s likely that he’ll hit 100 releases fairly soon. “You don’t start off thinking you could ever make 10,” says Lane.
“In five more years, I’ll have been at it for 50 years and have over 100 pieces,” says Lane. It’s a forthcoming milestone, he says, that makes the musician think, “this is going to really work out to be something.”
Get Yelling at Cars by Mark Lane.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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