Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 15:55:45 +0100 From: David Thorpe Subject: Stereo frolics (long) [apologies for spelling errors - if you're unsure what anything means let me know and I'll look it up in the original - djt] This article appeared in the Guardian Newspaper's Friday Review section, 19th September 1997. It is Copyright (c) Guardian Newspapers. Reproduced without permission. *** Krautrock boffins or weird minimalist anarchists? Stereolab are neither - they just plough their utopian furrow and make great pop music. John O'Reilly met them: There is some curious data surrounding Stereolab. 1) If you were listening to Stereolab on your hi-fi and a butterfly flapped its wings on the other side of the world, the Stereolab song is so light it would fall over 2) In another dimension, barely separated from us by a thin film of cynicism, Stereolab are on Top of The Fops every week, and in this world people frolic and gambol happily to their music. This is only partly true. But Stereolab have produced enough material since forming in 1991 to have been on TOTP every week. And though they inspire suspicion in sealy-eyed reviewers on the inkies, who believe they are some avant-garde collective, Stereolab can create the most bubble-bursting pop sounds around.=20 Stereolab are a five-piece band with Tim Ganr as the main song- writer and space-age dlva Laetitia Sadier as singer and composer of the most enigmatic, oddly beautiful, subtractcd lyrics. But if their melodies appear to escape gravity altogether; then this is partly due to the backing vocals and harmonies of Mary Hnnsm. And though the band have excavated a seriously minimalist aesthetic since forming, this hasn't stopped their sound- scape resonating with musical impulses from The Velvet Under- ground and The Beach Buys to John Cage and easy listening On their new album, I)ots And Loops. there's even a tincture of drum'n'bass. The morning I met them, GanE had been up most of the night recording a new single for the tour.=20 "We do a lot of things that other bands wouldn't bother doing. They wouldn't have bothered panicking over the last two days trying to write and record. From practicing during the day to recording in the=20 evenings -- a little tour single that has no commercial benefit what soever, other than it would be nice fur people to come if they want to get one: it's very cheap."=20 Which is why their fans love them and why they are so loyal. Stereolab are bet- ter known in the States, where they headlined the second stage at Lulla- palooza, than they are over here. They do sell enough albums to get into the charts, but because they have their own Duophonic label here, they dodt stock the shops from where the charts are compiled. There is nothing artificial about this. Stereolab aren~t making a point. They are not occupying some morally incorruptible high ground. But everything they do has an air of the utopian and carries the distinct Stereolab imprint. Hearing their songs. you wouldn't expect the busi- ness to be conducted any other way.=20 Lf there is a signature Sterwlab song, it is probably International Colouring Contest from Mars Audiac ~uintet. With a melody out of John Barry's You Only Live Twice played on Farfrsa organ. I.aetitia sings off-key about a char- acter called Lucia Pamela going into space. "Before Armstrong took his steps, I She'd been there with friends, / They took all instruments and recorded on the moon, / Gath- ered a variety of sound, / From=20where the air is different." Then Lucia has another dream of an International Colouring Contest.=20 Some of the music press can't quite grasp that Stereolab are nei- ther kitsch nor purveyors of a cold, soulless sound. What's most charm- ing is their complete guilelessness and fitting, frothy ingenuousness. Which is why Stereolab are pop.=20 The endearing stubbornness of the band is also apparent in the music. Stick on a Stereolab song, go out, get married, have kids, get a bus pass watch the demise of the next Tory government, come back and you will still hear the same chord being played. Ah sorts things have happened musically in the last six or seven years, but Stereolab have continued to explore an acutely minimalist aesthetic that generates unexpected delights.=20 Cane explains: "To be moder- ately successful allows you some control. The reason you started is still there. Once you get to a certain size there are incredible pressures on you, people are dependent on you. Every album has sold a little more than the previous."=20 Their name and their monotonic, Krautrock influences (Neu and Can) have created an image of them as pop boffms in white labcoats, to which they increasingly sensitive. Gane, with slight air of weariness, says: 'iWhen we started there was a s humour in the title But it kind backfired, because that's what became knmun for Mix- ing chemicals together and waiting for the explosion to happen. It was just like a lab where you could mess around with sound."=20 The anxiety about the image is misplaced, because Stereolab`s music conJures up an air of inno- cence and pop utopianism that marries with a time when people did believe in the future, when images of the earth were first sent back from space, when people had a sense of the possible. Even their newsletter, The Lab Report, com- municates the sense of some amaz- ing project at work, with its detailed account of business meth=F9 ods and = a discography long enough to worry any tree-hugger. [n short: Stereolab have done what the best writers do and have created a world with its own imagi- native space and vocabulary of sounds and images. A world bent slightly out of shape. a surrealism refracted through a prism of inno- cence.The song titles are micm- narratives of this: Nlhilist Assault Gmup, Ping Pong, The Noise oI Carpet and Exploding Head Movie.=20 Even if they could conceivably belong to a genealogy encompass- ing, for example, early techno gurus Cabaret Voltaire, they add Astrud Gilberto, Michel Legrand and The Human League to the vial. On their new album, songs such as Miss Modular and Flower from Nowhere mix synth doodles with clavinet and Sadier~s woodwind voice. Unlike those of mainstream rock, the songs are expressive without con- triving or imposing a mood. Com- pletely absent is the mechanical, droning dirge of Krautroc~. This is to do with their love of sound.=20 Tim confesses: "I love people's obsessions in music and film and art, because there is a vitality there that can~t be disguised. When you do music it's a desperation plr almost, and you can't cover that up. At least the music is alive with some Itind of personality." And this fasci- nation with vectors of sound, the places it can take you, is reflected in the variation of each record. Their last album, Emperor Tomato KetchuR was almostfunky.=20 Sadier points out that each album Locates itself in a slightly different genre: "Our music is very distinctive from one album to the next. And Even though it incorpo- rates a variety of instruments, the sound is carved by our ears and With a lot of work."=20 The utopian element stems not just from their exper- iments in sound but also from Sadier's interest in Cornelius Castoriadis, who wrote Socialisme Ou Barbarie with JF Lyotard in the 1960s. She sings on the fabulously bright tune Wow And Flutter: "I thought IBM was born with the world, / The US Flag would neat forever, / The cold opponent did pack away, / The capi- tal did follow, / It's not eternal, / [mperishable, / The dinosaur law."=20 What's amazing about Sterwlab's futurism is the way they have cre ated something new and unimagin- able from the past. This is why they differ from drum'n'bass and techno, where the technology is fetishised in a more or less creative or dog- matic way. Stereolab have created a futuristic world by sheer force imagination, by adding an extra sonic dimension to collated sounds.=20 Jacques Attali. another philoso- pher and bureaucrat, once ulote that "music makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible". Listen to Stereolab, watch the scales fall from your eyes and get frisky with the future.=20 Stereolab's new album, Dots And Loops (Duophonic) is out on Monday.=20