cause you're always going around using people's real names
An Incomplete Catalog of Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
Danny and Dena Guglielmi's 'Adventure in Sound' & Elsa Popping's 'Delirium in Hi-Fi' are standouts. The latter's particularly French, a 1959 pop record made with concrète techniques.
― Milton Parker, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 19:18 (sixteen years ago) link
Since when is that verboten? Everyone's emails used to be on here WITH their names!
― Naive Teen Idol, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 19:19 (sixteen years ago) link
happier times
remember rivers, becky?
― Milton Parker, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 19:29 (sixteen years ago) link
I have the Elsa Popping record. it's pretty good but the descriptions of the songs on the back of the sleeve made it sound like it was going to be really really good.
― dmr, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 19:33 (sixteen years ago) link
I think that record's really really really good. side one's especially demented.
& the Boris Vian involvement is a huge connect-the-dots perk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b5Cs0AlsZM http://wapedia.mobi/en/Boris_Vian
― Milton Parker, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 19:38 (sixteen years ago) link
"Froth on the Daydream" is an excellent book
― zappi, Thursday, 1 November 2007 13:15 (sixteen years ago) link
Ok, Nabisco:
(a) the stuff up at the top of the thread consists of the same kind of iconographic / non-musical references most every band takes up in the service of creating an image/aesthetic
Yes...and no. Not every band does it by any means -- these guys worked extra hard at creating that image/aesthetic.
(b) the number of direct musical borrowings may not be as high as this thread makes it seem, considering that this band has released approximately 18,000,000 songs
Ha, agreed but...now I'm just guessing, but I bet it is.
(c) the only reason those borrowings get tagged as somehow significant is precisely because they were borrowing from sources that were (at the time) somewhat arcane -- a rock band that borrows just as much from obvious sources like the Kinks or Clash or Gang of Four or whatever is not considered to be plundering, mostly because they're interpreted as following in a common tradition, and not trying to get credit for those sources; it's not necessarily a safe bet that anything different is going on with Stereolab
The first difference with the Kinks, Clash and Gang of Four is that you wouldn't notice those sources as much anyway. With Stereolab, you do -- even if you don't get the references, as I was mentioning earlier in the thread, there isn't a moment in their catalogue (as I know it anyway) that at its most opaque doesn't sound at least like an homage to someone or something. Beyond that, though, is there ANYTHING they're done that doesn't hark back to some other source, be it a song title, lyric, instrumentation, artwork, melody, etc.? Again, this isn't something I really thought much about before -- but I'm asking seriously...
(d) it's somewhat off to act as if these borrowings were somehow discrete: one of the best things about their middle period was the way a lot of their influences just went bubbling around in an amalgam that could seem to be referencing, say, K Komeda and Neu! and Jobim and Francoise Hardy in equal parts and at the same time
This is a point I actually agree with, in large part. But I would chalk that up to the maturation process more than anything.
"Insane plunderers"? I dunno -- pop's been around too long to argue anything exists in a vacuum. But Stereolab very consciously seem to not even bother trying.
― Naive Teen Idol, Thursday, 1 November 2007 14:23 (sixteen years ago) link
BUT the coda for the song "The Free Design" is an intact borrowing of the intro to ABBA's "Dancing Queen"
Haha, I never noticed this! Probably because I wasn't really familiar with ABBA when Cobra and Phases Group came out.
― jaymc, Thursday, 1 November 2007 14:39 (sixteen years ago) link
Those YouTube clips are great; I think the Komeda/Sun Ra/Ono comparisons are the most striking - the rest are a bit of a stretch.
Of course, now I must go out and buy every Goraguer/Komeda soundtrack I can find.
― Michael Jones, Thursday, 1 November 2007 15:01 (sixteen years ago) link
Komeda did Rosemary's Baby, I believe.
― jaymc, Thursday, 1 November 2007 15:01 (sixteen years ago) link
Holy shit, so it does! That's why it's bothered me for so many years.
Hey and now Dancing Queen's always going to remind me of The Free Design.
― Autumn Almanac, Friday, 2 November 2007 01:37 (sixteen years ago) link
I think they got that part via "Oliver's Army."
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:33 (sixteen years ago) link
j/k
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:34 (sixteen years ago) link
Oliver and his army Will work on a project To make the people happy And further production
― Autumn Almanac, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:41 (sixteen years ago) link
NTI -- there was an ILE thread where people were having fun posting my real name a lot, so the Lou E. Jagga code got applied. This will be awesome if I become famous and successful and there are threads like "Nobel Prize awarded to BAN ME."
It's funny how it seems like you agree with me about the mechanics of point (c), but still see it as a problem! I think the thing I'm trying to get at there is that it's not necessarily a matter of varying levels of "creativity" -- the way Stereolab will approach a task like "sounding like Neu!" does not seem to me to be particularly less creative than the way some standard-ass rock band might approach "sounding like the Clash." And Milton's point about having an alternate history of basic references is kind of key here. I think I wrote somewhere (review of Oscillons?) that there was a later-90s point where any given Stereolab track seemed like a thought experiment in imagining different pop worlds: one song where pop's main influences were Hardy / Denny / Faust, another where pop's main influences were Can / Jarre / Gilberto, and so on infinitely. This made for interesting stuff, I think.
I am totally cool with you just plain being bored with it; I just tend not to agree with the idea that it's some kind of shameless mix-and-match "easy" plundering, largely because they've tended to do the mixing and matching in a really sophisticated and hard-working way.
― nabisco, Friday, 2 November 2007 18:30 (sixteen years ago) link
Wait, wait, wait -- I think you misread what I meant. I'm not saying they're boring -- I'm saying I may have missed how fascinating they are! I may have missed the extent to which they were essentially coding everything they did in, yes, another language quite apart from what we think of when we think of "pop." And yes, I'm saying that's actually a helluva lot more fascinating than, yeah, "Now let's juxtapose Neu! and Bridget Bardot."
I still find the depth of their plundering to be kind of remarkable -- it's certainly far more sophisticated than I'd thought when I listened to them during the mid-90s. I mean, Magma notwithstanding, there aren't too many acts who've essentially created their own language.
So, getting back to my earlier point, I guess that's the aesthetic then -- "Stereolab's Bizarro Pop Canon."
― Naive Teen Idol, Friday, 2 November 2007 19:12 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah, that's definitely a good part of the appeal! If you listen through the EP tracks on Oscillons, you get more of a sense of how they were working that angle -- a lot of their sidework tracks seemed like fun-experiment answers to questions, some of which actually may be as simple as "what if Bardot fronted Faust?" and the like. Did someone mention upthread how their on-stage set-lists would contain working titles that were just the sources -- songs referred to as, say, "Sun Ra Cage" or "Can samba" or whatever? The main one that always sticks out in my memory had the working title "Heavenly Van Halen," which is the kind of interesting pop-imagination experiment I can totally go for. (Was that the one that wound up being called "Pinball?")
― nabisco, Friday, 2 November 2007 19:37 (sixteen years ago) link
Wow, I must say -- I just dl'd Cobra Phase and listened to this w/o actually hearing it, until I played it back. It's pretty clearly intentional but buried beyond belief.
Incidentally, I'm only 3 songs into it, but Cobra Phase seems pretty packed with the Dave Brubeck "Take Five" grooves.
― Naive Teen Idol, Saturday, 3 November 2007 19:43 (sixteen years ago) link
Some further insights via Simon Reynolds' interview w/ them in 1996:
"I'm not into the kitsch element," Gane says. "I'm more into the futuristic side, the way orchestral big band music was crossed in the '60s with early electronic music – stuff that was originally done for cynical, commercial reasons often resulted in some very strange combinations and juxtapositions of sounds."
― Naive Teen Idol, Saturday, 3 November 2007 19:51 (sixteen years ago) link
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3a/Sound-dust.jpg/200px-Sound-dust.jpg http://img1.gildia.pl/_n_/film/filmy/cul_de_sac/poster-200.jpg
― dad a, Thursday, 8 November 2007 14:42 (sixteen years ago) link
Listened to "The Free Design" yesterday, off "Oscillons"...
Yep.
― Mark G, Thursday, 8 November 2007 14:54 (sixteen years ago) link
Here's parts V and VI from that dude who did the youtube dissections that nabisco and others linked to upthread.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZkpyzXVOFk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxxMQwzL0Y
Personally, I think nearly all of these are OTM. Only the Cybele's Reverie one was too much of a stretch for me.
― Jeff W, Thursday, 8 November 2007 19:38 (sixteen years ago) link
>-- dad a, Thursday, 8 November 2007 14:42 (5 hours ago) Link
thank you! I searched and searched but couldn't find it
I'd forgotten the degree to which they really just used that Polanski poster as clip art
― Milton Parker, Thursday, 8 November 2007 20:26 (sixteen years ago) link
yeah that's amazing
I already knew the majority of musical stuff in this thread but the visual ones like the Polanski poster and the Peng! cartoon are great
― dmr, Thursday, 8 November 2007 20:37 (sixteen years ago) link
Milton, you were so comprehensive I had to read the thread twice to make sure I hadn't overlooked it! For extra credit here's Komeda's Polanski soundtrack:
http://www.soundtrackcorner.de/images/cul_de_sac_HRKCD8137.jpg
― dad a, Thursday, 8 November 2007 21:09 (sixteen years ago) link
It sez something about Stereolab that pt six of that vid has two equally plausible origins of Metronomic Underground (and that's before anyone Kraut rock is considered too.)
― Raw Patrick, Thursday, 8 November 2007 21:58 (sixteen years ago) link
the "Symbolic Logic of Now!" rip of Archie Shepp's "Akai" and the "Margarine Melodie" rip of Ron Grainger's "Theme from Omega Man" sound like insane plundering to me, Nabisco
better Philip Glass tracks to illustrate "Kybernetická babicka": "Music In Twelve Parts, Part 11" or some of the choral pieces from "North Star"
ok they're referencing 'The Omega Man', 10,000 points to anyone who can find a "Demon Seed" or "Phase IV" reference
― Milton Parker, Friday, 9 November 2007 00:03 (sixteen years ago) link
and putting "symbolic logic of now" and scrolling past about 15 mail order hits, you get a fragment of an online book called "PERFORMANCE ANTHOLOGY" about California Performance art in the 70's and a reference to a piece by video artist Joel Glassman
http://books.google.com/books?id=lu7KPDCfcXMC&pg=PA520&lpg=PA520&dq=%22symbolic+logic+of+now%22&source=web&ots=M6h1noVnPN&sig=LXv4xzXCgcPI_0AhFnnvddU8HvU#PPP1,M1
anyone saying that they may not be borrowing _that much_ only makes me think that person isn't even bothering to notice their project, these are not just songs, but clues
― Milton Parker, Friday, 9 November 2007 00:25 (sixteen years ago) link
oh and I just found two Cluster samples on Fab-Four Suture, if anyone has the packaging perhaps they can tell me if they even credited or paid. they obviously go on listening tears to specific artists while recording single albums.
'Excursions Into Oh, A-oh' samples a loop of 'Prothese' from Grosses Wasser 'Widow Weirdo' samples a loop of 'Caramel' from Zuckerzeit
― Milton Parker, Friday, 9 November 2007 00:38 (sixteen years ago) link
No mention of Cluster samples in the FFS (FFS!) artwork, such that it is (single card insert, CD back cover, that's it).
― Michael Jones, Friday, 9 November 2007 00:57 (sixteen years ago) link
not to be self-righteous about uncleared sampling or anything
the loops themselves are more winking ornamental shoutouts than integral elements
― Milton Parker, Friday, 9 November 2007 01:13 (sixteen years ago) link
10,000 points to anyone who can find a "Demon Seed" or "Phase IV" reference
Add N to X got there first on Demon Seed: http://www.discogs.com/release/325990
...but Andy Ramsey from Stereolab does play on this track!
(/lab geek. I deserve my 10,000 points for that one!)
― Jeff W, Friday, 9 November 2007 16:09 (sixteen years ago) link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sound-dust.jpg http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/Castle_Grayskull.jpg
― Moodles, Saturday, 10 November 2007 05:14 (sixteen years ago) link
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/0/05/200px-Sound-dust.jpg
― Moodles, Saturday, 10 November 2007 05:15 (sixteen years ago) link
Golly, I'm drunk
The Incredible Shrinking He-Man
― Autumn Almanac, Saturday, 10 November 2007 11:51 (sixteen years ago) link
Was just listening to Steve Hillage's "It's all too much", the refrain of which bears striking resemblance to "I'm going out of my way" from Transient Random Noise Bursts, right down to the overdriven organ.
― Sparkle Motion, Monday, 21 January 2008 06:16 (sixteen years ago) link
According to this interview the title of Sound Dust comes from the liner notes to a Messiaen record. Which one?
― dad a, Monday, 28 January 2008 22:48 (sixteen years ago) link
not sure, it'd be appropriate for any of them. tim mentions the Turangalila here. a lot of Sound-Dust strikes me as Komeda production & arrangements of Messiaen chord sequences). One of my favorite Stereolab moments ever is that shifting filtered sequence at the end of "Gus The Mynah-Bird", which reminds me of "Vingt Regards".
Messiaen POV / POX
Parts 7 & 8 of the 'Stereolab Origins' series, part 8 includes a bit of the Turangalila
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV78kmTqH3k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn7vfuC-waE
― Milton Parker, Monday, 28 January 2008 23:49 (sixteen years ago) link
Maybe he's talking about this? Pupils of Messaien, A Capella Works by Messaien, Stockhausen & Xenakis - one of the Stockhausen pieces, Agnus Dei, describes the Lamb of God by saying, "its step makes the sound of rainfall on the dust."
― dad a, Tuesday, 29 January 2008 03:27 (sixteen years ago) link
Anyone heard the Monade record? I like it but it's basically just Cobra and Phases Group without the fiddlier bits.
― Dimension 5ive, Tuesday, 29 January 2008 03:34 (sixteen years ago) link
the other day I found a copy of the "Stereolab" edition of Tchaikovsky's Symphony #6 Pathetique on Vanguard - the 'Lab nicked the cover design for the sleeve of "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music". Wish I could post a scan, can't find an image online...
― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 11 September 2008 17:42 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.discogs.com/Stereolab-Explosante-Fixe/release/1469221
http://www.amazon.com/Boulez-Explosante-fixe-Ensemble-Intercontemporain/dp/B0007404HI
the Stereolab Origins series on Youtube is up to episode 13. It's so much fun, you try to guess which track is about to be cut to, providing a vague match, but I'm out of my depth by this point (though man, it's clear I really need to hunt down every last Don Cherry album I can find)
― Milton Parker, Monday, 20 April 2009 19:11 (fourteen years ago) link
4) The alternate set list name for "Blips" is "Emil". Surprised?
Nooo
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519FURrEsmL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
― Milton Parker, Monday, 20 April 2009 19:19 (fourteen years ago) link
ha ha WOW the first one on part IX, biggest laugh yet
― Milton Parker, Monday, 20 April 2009 19:21 (fourteen years ago) link
More film references:"Fuses": http://www.ubu.com/film/schneeman_fuses.html"Three Women": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQPnxmVJMrY
And updated links for previously mentioned films:"Kyberneticka Babicka": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbHIKwoXCM"Emperor Tomato Ketchup" (NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46xmL9OcwrE
― ernestp, Saturday, 24 October 2009 15:03 (fourteen years ago) link
Ok, noob here but haven't found a more specific Don Cherry pointer so here goes.
The bass line in Percolator comes from Don Cherry's fantastic Relativity Suite album of 1973, more specifically from the end of "Tantra" or the beginning of "Mali Doussn'gouni".The Rhodes Piano ostinato riff in Metronomic Underground I think comes from "Desireless" of the same album.
Check it out: http://thebrewingluminous.blogspot.com/2007/04/don-cherry-relativity-suite.html
― AdjustMe, Tuesday, 11 May 2010 07:21 (thirteen years ago) link
If you're a spotifyer, check out Sweden jazz giant Lennart Åbergs cover of aforementioned Don Cherry work here:
spotify:track:3f5Z65Jasm4QHl14FGQOPm
― AdjustMe, Tuesday, 11 May 2010 12:14 (thirteen years ago) link
http://cdn1.ioffer.com/img/item/139/182/933/ecHJ.jpg
JOHN WRIGHT AND CLEMENT BROWN - HI-FI SOUND STEREO TEST RECORD. Hi-Fi Sound Records HFS75 UK Stereo LP 1974.
― zvookster, Tuesday, 11 May 2010 23:34 (thirteen years ago) link
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41S2T56GREL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements
― zvookster, Tuesday, 11 May 2010 23:36 (thirteen years ago) link