The future of Stereolab

Cannot let this High Llamas bashing stand -- Gideon Gaye is one of the best albums of the 90s! ONE OF THE BEST.

How did it do in the recent poll(s)?

probably poorly.

(Wasn't being sark, just wondered...)

agree about the ABC Sessions being awesome - was kinda blown away when a friend passed that on to me last year

xps

shakey, I'm surprised that a (fellow) beach boys + stereolab fan could hate the high llamas so much!

hey given all the comparisons it kinda surprised me too, but I honestly don't hear a lot of the Beach Boys in the High Llamas. its more like they mine a verrrry narrow vein of the BB's ouevre (specifically the instrumentals from the Pet Sounds era, which is like what, a year and a half?) sans the vocal melodies/harmonies, and without any of the Boys' oomph or weirdness. O'Hagen seems primarily concerned with aping the Wrecking Crew's Brian Wilson-penned AM pop arrangements, and it's just not that interesting to me. it's very flaccid.

yeah, as o'hagen himself will tell you, the beach boys thing is a little bit overstated when it comes to the high llamas stuff. sort of like saying stereolab is just a krautrock tribute band. i mean, the influence is there, but there is plenty of other stuff thrown into the mix. i understand why some people wouldn't be that into the Llamas but I love 'em. For me, each album is a wonderful little world to get lost in.

its more like they mine a verrrry narrow vein of the BB's ouevre (specifically the instrumentals from the Pet Sounds era, which is like what, a year and a half?)

I always felt like it was more that they did a focused study on this period of the BB ouevre, trying to see what else could be done within its margins. admittedly a lot is lost without the harmonies, and nobody believes o'hagan is 1/10th of the songwriter that BW is - but he certainly has a talent for arrangements.

high llamas have long been my go-to study music in school. I don't listen to them a lot now that I've graduated, but I always found the music - 100% pretty arrangement, zero 'song' - to be ideal background noise when I was trying to focus on something else.

yeah, as o'hagen himself will tell you, the beach boys thing is a little bit overstated when it comes to the high llamas stuff. sort of like saying stereolab is just a krautrock tribute band.

this is true when it comes to the content of the music, but I think in each case you feel the shadow of the beach boys / krautrock even when they're doing something unrelated - like even when o'hagan is going bloopy or stereolab is making bossa nova. this is not meant to be a criticism really...I am willing to rep for basically anything that either band has released.

I personally love High Llamas, but I think Gideon Gaye is one of their weaker albums. I recommend trying out Snow Bug or Beet, Maize, and Corn. Neither of these are very Beach Boys-sounding, but they are very good for other reasons. Stereolab singers sing a bunch of the songs on Snow Bug.

For more of a Beach Boys vibe, check out Hawaii.

Gideon Gaye has some Steely Dan moments.

Checking In, Checking Out is basically a straight rip of Pretzel Logic-era Steely Dan. Probably why it's my favorite song on Gideon Gaye.

I saw the 'Lab KILL "The Seeming and the Meaning" at the Granada in Lawrence in 99 (I think?). Top five concert moments for me.
A guy in the audience requested "Surreal Chemist" with wild fervor, the band seemed confused by that. It was funny.

with shakey mo and whoever else: loved basically everything prior to dots & loops, and basically nothing thereafter. not sure what the difference is, exactly. more complex and subtle arrangements, obviously, and an abandonment of heavy, druggy guitar & organ jams over a simple beat, but the latter approach was largely gone by emperor tomato ketchup, and i adore that record. as others have said, to my mind, their ear for undeniable pop hooks went out the window somewhere around this point - or else they lost interest in that kind of appeal. i still like some of the beats and sounds, but the sum total comes across as a tasteful but forgettable wash.

Sound Dust is something of a reclamation album, imo. Hated Dots and Loops, never owned it and probably never will.

sound dust is my favorite stereolab album by a huge margin

"a tasteful but forgettable wash" = a strange complaint, cuz extended, basically tuneless droning is one of my favorite things about early stereolab. there was something very inviting and soothing about those early fuzz tunnels, though - thinking here of stuff like "contact". it didn't sound like pop, but it worked like pop, at least for me. i suppose that as their sound became less overtly psychedelic and monomaniacal, it became less welcoming to me, but perhaps more interesting to others?

I personally like Dots and Loops, Cobra and Phases, and especially Sound Dust. Everything post-Mary Hansen hasn't been as good, but there have been plenty of enjoyable moments.

Is it wrong for me to say that they would be better if they found someone to replace Mary? The singer on the last Immitation Electric Piano album or the bassist/backup singer from Monade would both be great choices.

i should give sound dust another try. though it was clearly an attempt to reclaim some of their early territory and appeal, it didn't hook me immediately, and i wrote it off without giving it much of a chance. seems to have a lot of supporters, though.

though it was clearly an attempt to reclaim some of their early territory and appeal

it doesn't sound like their early work at all tho! it does sound like some of their mid-career aluminum tunes era stuff

I'm pretty sure that Sound-Dust was Tim Gane's attempt to sound like Holst's The Planets.

KUDOS to gerald mcboing-boing. thx2u dawg.

it doesn't sound like their early work at all tho! it does sound like some of their mid-career aluminum tunes era stuff

― iatee

it's super, super lush - some of their earlier stuff hints and this, but none of it quite reaches it. holst is a pretty good reference - melody nelson too. (it's also their most 'french' album imo.)

hints at* this

hahaha, i started listening to the LOW-FI songs eagerly anticipating my first listen of these tracks until I realized that I actually owned this at one point in time (either 10" or plastic sleeve CDEP or maybe both :( lol)

ahhh ex-collectorism...

'Captain Easychord' on Sound Dust was the song that got me into them. Always thought they had a very appealing thing going on for them before but that's the one that really grabbed me.

Dots and Loops is my favorite Lp by them though.

Sound Dust is really good, agreed! I came to it late cuz I hadn't been paying attention any more but I was thrilled when I finally heard it.

I'm with the bailed-after-Dots crowd, in fact I finally got around to selling it this year. The "Oscillons" box clued me in to some of their better post-Dots singles and of course it gathers up all their UK EPs, though it shuffles the order (which still works well, remarkably).

I didn't bail after D&L, but they weren't one of my favourite bands from then on. For me it was a gradual loss of interest (I didn't really appreciate "Sound Dust" until I heard the versions on "ABC Music") until "Margarine Eclipse", at which point I stopped caring completely.

I've said this elsewhere, but Dots and Loops really felt like a revelation to me when it came out, like I had been waiting all my life for an album that sounded like that. (Before that, I'd heard Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Transient Random Noise-Bursts, but they didn't have quite the same effect.) I was probably at the peak of my fandom in 1998-2000 -- bought a couple older albums I hadn't heard before (I particularly liked Mars Audiac Quintet) and really got into Aluminum Tunes and Cobra and Phases Group and First of the Microbe Hunters, too. So for me, it wasn't until Sound-Dust that I felt disappointed in them. And even then, it wasn't that I disliked it, it just seemed too predictable. And I suppose that's kind of how I feel about everything else they've released this decade.

first of the microbe hunters is so awesome. i kind of wanna walk the earth with a boombox on my shoulder playing "outer bongolia" on repeat til the end of time

The 1997 Peel session is kind of interesting

I'm listening to this now - what's the story with this? Is it live from Peel Acres or a proper Maida Vale Peel session?

Live from Maida Vale, according to the Peel Sessions book. Thanks for putting these tracks up btw.

Did Laetitia's album come out yet? She seemed to be playing everywhere the end of last year.

from a pre-Chemical Chords interview w/Tim Gane:

"I cut a loop from a record, and it’s so tiny it sounds like it’s blurring when you loop it. For instance a tiny sample of less than a second, half a second or something like that, and I loop it sixteen times and mix it down to a piece of audio, and then I find another loop and mix that down until I have eight different loops, and I put them in an order at kind of random. And then what we do is listen to what’s going on in the sample and try to excavate what we can hear. What you can hear, is difficult to hear, because it is so short and sort of blurring that you don’t know why you should play anything, so you don’t get any kind of even flow. You hear a little guitar, but I don’t actually write anything on it. We just kick out what we don’t think you can hear, but what you hear isn’t really exact, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on. ... For me it’s the loops we recreate and the real instruments, as the band, that reproduce these tiny little sounds."

no wonder stuff composed this way sounds tuneless

out 9/21 Laetitia Sadier TBA LP/CD
out 11/16 Stereolab Not Music 2xLP/CD

A+++ will anticipate!

yeah, interested to see what a Laetitia Sadier solo rec sounds like. I dig Monade.

out 11/16 Stereolab Not Music 2xLP/CD

?! is this the other stuff they left off Chemical Chords...?

I was sorta unimpressed with the Monade records

gonna assume it's a rarities collection of some sort ...
i'd say give monade another chance. it didn't make a big impression at first, but I came around to really liking it.

where is this info coming from?

email from drag city

Laetitia also has a song on a 4 way split 12" that we're on (srry for spam) that comes out in the fall i think? track is great.

looks like "Not Music" is indeed the Chemical Chords II thing they had mentioned a while back. http://pitchfork.com/news/38978-new-stereolab-music-on-the-way/

And that is fully confirmed now via this promo mailout:

Not Music is Stereolab’s twelfth album and is released during the band’s self - imposed hiatus from recording and touring.

The tracks that make up Not Music were recorded in early 2007 - half of the recordings from the session would be released in August 2008 as Chemical Chords – Stereolab’s eleventh album!

About the recordings –

Tim Gane started messing with “a series of about seventy tiny drum loops” on top of improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone. “Building them up from there – later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up – a totally new way of doing songs for us…”

With typical prolificacy, the band laboured over the summer at their studio, Instant Zero (in Bordeaux, France), helping transform these blueprints into 32 luminous new songs, with keyboardist/technician Joe Watson manning the mixing desk.

Not Music will be released via Drag City November, 16, 2010.

cool, looking forward to this. the 'Lab may be on hiatus but there's plenty of music to enjoy. The Laetitia solo album is a gem.

heyyy, both of these records (the trip and not music) are awesome.

What are they like?

not music is obv. pretty similar to chemical chords since the songs come from the same sessions/era. some nice horn arrangements, cool bass lines. the highlight for me might be the 10-minute emperor machine mix of "silver sands" which out-kraftwerks kraftwerk. sadier disc doesn't sound like a radical departure from stereolab/monade. less manic/busy, more space in the arrangements. great nico-esque version of "summertime."

i need to check the sadier. in my dl queue waiting to be unzipped.

not-music isn't anything special in imho, but this isn't shocking as it's from the chemchords session and that album also left me cold. it's like their hearts weren't in it, you know?