Shindig! #164 – Stereolab
As their first new album in 15 years takes everyone (themselves included) by surprise, STEREOLAB are still crafting an yper-sound like no other, wondrously suspended between past and future yet never content to rest on its laurels.
CAMILLA AISA is your guide through four decades of audacious noise bursts and loops, reborn bachelor pad music and tireless calls for la resistance
The original version of Stereolab’s hymn to la resistance, by then spelled ‘French Disco’, appeared on the Jenny Ondioline EP; the title track had been the lead single of The Groop’s second full-length, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements. Still retaining some of the shoegaze-adjacent guitar abrasiveness of Peng!, the album’s references and samples (from Antônio Carlos Jobim to Moog pioneers Perrey & Kingsley) revealed Stereolab to be indie-pop’s most musically literate and voracious practitioners. “Certain songs, like ‘Jenny Ondioline’, are pure Neu!, and we never denied it,” Sadier would tell The Wire a few years later. Krautrock, with its propulsive mystery, was a major influence on The Groop, especially in the early days. “It’s music that you don’t really know where it came from,” Gane said of Faust. “They had some supremely melodic music, still with musique concrète added onto it, but an unusual interpretation of melodic music.”
The drive of motorik, hypnotic riffs and guitar drones: early on, Stereolab’s signature sound benefitted heavily from the less-is-more lesson of kosmische musik. It came coupled with the trippy adventurousness of early electronic music recorded in the ’50s and ’60s, a sound that reflected a rather utopian outlook. “That idea of the future seems quite crass and naive,” Gane told The Observerin ’94, “but also full of optimism and infinite possibilities, which is different from our current idea of the future. I like the fact that people thought, ‘The future is going to be fabulous, and, WOW!, this is the weird music we’re going to hear there.’” While anticipating some of the concerns of hauntology, Stereolab made “retro-futuristic pop” a far more popular term than it had been before. But synthesisers weren’t the only thing Gane was interested in resuscitating from the middle of the century. As ‘Fiery Yellow’, the last track on 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet, explicitly pointed out, Stereolab were partial to exotica. “It’s really good music, really extreme if you take it out of its context as background music,” Gane told Simon Reynolds. “It did a lot of avant-garde things earlier than other more artistically serious forms of music did; it made shockingly original connections and juxtapositions of styles. A lot of the reason why it’s popular now is simply that it’s very modern music.” Writing about Stereolab, Reynolds himself would go on to declare that “the cycle of fashionability has come full circle. Muzak, the anodyne background music designed to lull shoppers into a state of mindless relaxation, is now cool.”
Click here to order issue #164 and read the full article. Subscribe here.
