It’s safe to say that in the context of today’s rather cut-and-dried musical climate, Milemarker are unlike any band you’ve ever heard -- or heard of, for that matter. This Chicago-by-way-of-Virginia quartet has, to say the very least, blazed its own unique musical trail. Earlier this year, after releasing three excellent full-lengths (Frigid Forms Sell, Non-Plus Ultra and Future Isms) and a clutch of seven-inch singles on several small labels, the band joined the prestigious ranks of Jade Tree Records and released their fourth full-length, Anaesthetic. The newest chapter in the ever-evolving Milemarker régime, fuses the artsy austerity of Bauhaus, the piercing metallic fury of Ministry and the pure punk aesthetics of Fugazi, resulting in an icy-cool sound that’s too arty to be punk, too punk to be pop and too damn good to ignore.

We dispatched Splendid newbie and all-round Milemarker expert Steve McMahon to talk to the band before a recent Chicago performance. Their conversation went a little like this...

Splendid: To start things off...You guys are originally from North Carolina and decided to move to Chicago. What prompted that decision?

Roby Newton: We all wanted to leave Chapel Hill, which is kind of like a small college town and it seemed like it would be a good idea to move to a bigger city where there is more stuff going on. We were on tour in Europe when we decided where we were going to move. Every day the band would come with lists of where we wanted to move and some of the places matched. We finally came to the conclusion that Chicago was the best place to move. It was sort of random, but none of us had lived in the Midwest, we had all lived on the east coast for most of our lives, so it was nice to be in a different region.

Dave Laney: It's affordable to live here, also. That was one of the major factors.

Splendid: Are you enjoying Chicago?

Roby Newton: It's awesome. Chicago is great.

Al Burian: I think that when we lived in Chapel Hill, it wasn't bad to live there, but being in Chicago you feel a lot more of a sense of community. Whatever you're doing, there are other people doing it, rather than being the person who sets up a house show or that weird guy who works at the copy store and makes the zine. You're able to find other people who do stuff and not feel so isolated.

Splendid: Do you find the people in Chicago more accepting of you?

Roby Newton: Well, it's not so much a matter of acceptance, it's just that there are twenty of you here. For instance, if you are a writer, well, there are twenty other writers here that you can talk with. Or if you are a puppeteer, there are lots of puppeteers here. You are no longer the isolated art freak.

Splendid: The band's sound has obviously changed since your earliest releases. Was that a conscious thing? Did you just decide one day to change things or was it something that just happened?

Al Burian: I don't think we have a conscious direction that we're trying to go in. I think that's pretty natural. I think the idea of changing as much as possible is defiantly conscious. If something we do is successful, then we feel like it's successful, we did it, and we try to do something else. I think we defiantly make an effort to try new things and to be different with every record we do, to constantly reinvent ourselves as much as we can.

Dave Laney: My idea about playing in a band is to not make the same record twice. Playing in a band would not be as fun to me if we did.

Splendid: One thing that I've noticed is that all of your full lengths have been on different labels. Is this due to the fact that you weren't really happy with any of them, or did you just want to try a bunch of different labels?

Roby Newton: With smaller labels that happens. I don't even know if the first two labels we were on are even labels anymore. I think that's the nature of the beast with really small punk labels; they agree to do a record for you and then when the next record comes around, they can't afford to do it for you, so you go with someone else, and so on.

Dave Laney: When we started the band, the idea was not to be indebted to a label, like "Oh, did you hear the new whatever band?" Like you wouldn't have heard of them if it weren't for the label.

Al Burian: Like putting out our fourth LP on Jade Tree, for instance. I feel like we can put that out and that is the label that it's on, rather than us being a "Jade Tree band".

Splendid: How did that all work out? Were you shopping around for a label and decided to approach Jade Tree, or did they approach you?

Al Burian: I feel it was mutually consensual. I was at a party, they were at the party. We exchanged phone numbers.

Splendid: A while back, Ben Davis left the group. What were his reasons for leaving?

Al Burian: The main reason is that he had a kid. He had to do what he had to do because of that. We were starting to really tour a lot right when that happened. It was just sort of agreed that that was the best thing to do.

Splendid: Al, one of the many things that you do outside of the band is publish a zine, Burn Collector. How long have you been doing that?

Al Burian: I've been doing it for like eight years, kind of sporadically.

Splendid: When you started it did you just have writings that you wanted to get out there, so that other people could read them?

Al Burian: I've always just kind of made zines. It's one of those obsessive-compulsive things. Your hands are fidgeting and you find yourself cutting and pasting. Burn Collector was initially just a zine that I made a few issues of that kind of caught on and people liked. Out of the zines I had done, this was the one that people kept writing me about, so I kept making them.

Splendid: When you write something, do you know whether or not it is going to be a Burn Collector story? How do you decide what's going to be published and what isn't?

Al Burian: I write all the time. I don't really think about it. I have, like, six or seven different topics that I am working on and eventually a couple of them will come together. At some point I start feeling like I have amassed enough stuff that I can put it into something. I don't really have a way of deciding what goes here and what goes there. It's a little more freeform than that.

Splendid: Another literary object I've seen floating around is Media Reader. I've noticed all your names in it, so who actually puts it out?

Dave Laney: I kind of have the burden of overseeing the production and trying to get things together. Roby Newton usually does all the illustrations, and then everybody writes reviews and helps out with the general cohesiveness or feel of it.

Splendid: Did that start after the band started, or was that something that was going before the band?

Dave Laney: It started after the band, I think two years ago. We are on issue number four now. The fifth one will come out in January.

Splendid: Back to the band. How does the writing go between all of you as far as the songs go?

Al Burian: It gets pretty crazy sometimes.

Dave Laney: It's generally pretty egalitarian. Nobody ever writes a song and then brings it in and we all play it; it's pretty diplomatic.

Roby Newton: Someone will bring, like, a riff, and then we will play the riff for a while, and then someone will find something to add.

Al Burian: Some of our songs are performed by only one person.

Dave Laney: That's right, all the little weird Casio shit. The songs that we play live were all written together.

Splendid: I've noticed an insect theme on some of the songs from the different albums. Whose doing is that?

Roby Newton: That's Al.

Al Burian: When I was a small child I was trapped in a room with spiders. I was forced to live in a basement. I wasn't let out for weeks at a time, and I was only fed bowls of fly wings. I don't think my mother is a bad person. Well, she grew up after World War Two, when there wasn't a lot of food around. She has great recipes for it. It's a perfectly natural source of nutrition.

Splendid: So is this story true?

Al Burian: No, that's a total lie. I guess one of my themes is people's misconception of themselves as not animals. People's dependence on computers as making people conceive themselves as not part of the natural world. Like everyone wanting to have these hydraulic toilets that flush away their waste so that they never have to see it. I perceive people as sort of in this evolutionary stage of halfway between a bug and a machine. A lot of our behaviors are still really reptilian and very basic, and those are the things that we are ashamed of, which is why it's always gross to talk about bugs, because no one wants to admit that about themselves. No one wants to admit that their courtship rituals are not any different from those of snails or cows or whatever. On the other hand we have all this sort of brain engineering going on where people are trying to figure out the exact chemical combinations that you can take in a pill form so that you can be happy. As if your brain is just a car engine that you just need to give an oil change to every 30,000 miles. I think that comes from perceiving things going that way and just being disturbed by it.

Splendid: You're talking about the idea of people concocting things to make you happy. What about your idea of drugs that you take to "balance levels" in the lives of "unbalanced" people? I have this theory that if you went to a high school in any American city and took all the kids in to see a psychologist, you could put 97% of the kids on either something for ADD or something for depression.

Al Burian: Even if you look at the literature for drugs like Prozac, they advocate that everybody should take Prozac. It's not like a drug for people with a problem, it's like aspirin.

Roby Newton: They're not looking at the problems that are making kids that way. Like "Oh, you're watching seven hours of TV a day, you can't pay attention in school? Here take Ritalin, that will help you. Take the Ritalin and swallow it with Coca-Cola, that will work." It's just stupid that none of them are looking at the problems that are causing it.

Al Burian: If you have a society where pretty much everyone is depressed and unhappy, there is something wrong with that society. It's kind of like if you have a classroom and everyone in that classroom flunks, it doesn't mean all the students are stupid, it means that the teacher is bad.

Splendid: It's almost like depression is a man-made thing. Sometimes, I find it very hard to believe that it is just a chemical thing that sprang up in our bodies. I think it was almost subversively engineered into the race. It's like dehumanization, isolation, and all that shit was created.

Dave Laney: If you look at other cultures that are less industrialized than the US, the depression rates in those countries don't even compare to those in the US and Japan.

Al Burian: A lot of that has to do is that human welfare is not the bottom line as to why decisions are made, the reason why things are organized the way they are is for profitability. The reason why we have industrialized society going the direction it is, is for profitability, for the benefit of the industry and not for the benefit of human happiness. Human happiness becomes sort of a side issue, sort of a glitch to fix, rather than the essential focus.

Roby Newton: They are taking away the pride of craft. People are naturally inclined to work. That's normal. If people could take some sort of pride in what they are making and feel good about it, instead of pushing a button all day, they won't be so depressed. When you take away any human touch, they don't feel any relationship to what they are producing. It's fucked up the way the industry is working right now.

Splendid: You talk about everything being an assembly line, as far as objects and stuff. You see stuff from other cultures like tribal stuff, masks, whatever, and they are much more beautiful, there's much more personality in those things.

Al Burian: When you talk about American culture, we look at out living environments and we think, "what is it?" Any connection you feel to it is artificial because it's not an expression of the people who are living in it; it's something that has been foisted on them. That inherently breeds alienation. Then once people are alienated, then it's diagnosed as some sort of chemical malfunction that needs to be remedied because dealing with the root causes of that it's impossible to do without fundamentally questioning the structure.

Splendid: A couple of final questions... You are always playing with different types of bands, at least here in Chicago. Is there one particular band that you've always wanted to play with, either opening for you, or you opening for them?

Al Burian: I guess probably Black Sabbath.

Tim Herzog: I'd be into Black Sabbath. Maybe Milemarker, Fugazi, and Black Sabbath.

Al Burian: That sounds like a good bill.

Tim Herzog: Maybe Public Enemy would be cool too.

Al Burian: I'd like to play with some rap bands, I think that'd be cool.

Tim Herzog: We could have Kraftwerk play first and they could broadcast from their studio.

Roby Newton: Yeah! That'd be cool.

Splendid: Final thoughts? Comments?

Roby Newton: Drop out of school and get a public library card, kids.

Al Burian: Get a library card and become a puppeteer, you'll be much happier.

Tim Herzog: It seems a lot like what you guys were talking about earlier. It seems animal instinct is to follow the path of least resistance. That is one of the fundamentals of the universe. Humans just have this thing where they can change the environment to make that easier for them. Like if we are talking about insects, ants aren't going to do something over and over again that they know is not going to work. Humans just have this thing where we can just change everything around us to make it so we can put it all on an assembly line, and we don't have to work for it at all, and that's what has alienated everybody. Maybe the things that are better are the things that are harder. Maybe the easy way out is not always the best way.