The future of Stereolab

I find the 'stereolab should have just done krautrock for 30 years straight' fans mystifying.

I greatly prefer phase one of Stereolab, but they were pretty good live last weekend playing the, uh, lobbyrock stuff. Even the crowd's weirdly misplaced devil horns and hooting had a charming enthusiasm. Laetitia clearly disappointed we didn't go the climate march earlier in the day, but come on... September in Texas is not when you go to outdoor marches.

my souvenir from their friday concert in brooklyn:

https://i.imgur.com/rfUpFr5.jpg

Wow... that is better than I expected.

Yeah it's hard to really pinpoint my frustration, especially because AA is right, it's not actually "worse", it is really good at doing what it's attempting to do. I guess it's just that it's a whole other set of neurons that get stimulated with the latter-day stuff, it just is, in my view, such a departure

And no I don't think they should've kept making Neu!rock for 30 years I just guess I would've liked it if they evolved in a different direction, started aping Faust instead or something

i’m biased because ‘dots and loops’ is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, but the direction they choose is the right one because… it’s their art and their choice.

people who ask for a different direction (or no change in direction at all) are basically saying ‘do what I want you to do’ (and not ‘i trust you to do what you want to do’), which is a hallmark of a successful fan base but also missing the point of liking people’s art for what it is. (if they had sold out for easy ca$$$h, that would be a different conversation.)

btw i don’t mean to be all hardarse about this, especially as i have a history of being annoyed with musical artists for not doing the things that i arbitrarily like.

Oh for real, I'm not actually tasking this band that has recorded several of my favourite songs with revising their change of direction from twenty-five years ago, I'm just being a dickhead is all

it’s cool, i’m just on a directionless rant

i like krautrock stereolab so much more than the lounge-y material (though some of it's very good, there's just as much that's frustrating and grating to me). this meant that it took me forever to actually get into them because people always recommend ETK as their masterpiece when to me it sounds like a weird transitional record between those two phases, and while it has some real highlights it doesn't really do either of those things anywhere near as good as the records before and after it.

Ah that’s interesting, I always felt like it was an excellent hybrid, not a transition record. There are a couple tracks on ETK that are among my favourites (and as I stated elsewhere, “Cybele’s Reverie” is one of my fave lyrics ever)

It's not just Neu!rock that went by the wayside. It was their massive talent at writing in tight, evocative pop structure.

ETK was a huge record for me because it was such a surprising break from the krautrock vibe that really had worn out its welcome on MAQ. I thought they were running out of ideas, and they immediately took it in an entirely new direction that dazzled.

Wow, I don't know. MAQ was such a smorgasbord of things, and things they hadn't necessarily done to death in the past. Krautrock was part of it, sure.

Ha, I'm scanning through it - there's a lot of Neu there, no doubt

It felt like they were trying to push a very particular sound as far as it would go. There are definitely standout moments like Ping Pong, etc, but there's a lot of the same thing over and over as well.

sometimes I just feel like I'm listening to a different band than the stereolab judas-screamer-fans. cobra in particular is not an easy listening album! it has a few easy listening reference points, but they're small blips in what is otherwise a very dense and proggy album.

I totally used the word 'blips' subconsciously there

Some brief thoughts:

1. I don't really see ETK as a radical break: it feels to me like there is more continuation between MAQ and ETK than between ETK and D&L. What does happen with ETK is this sudden sense of the band taking sound design really seriously. Stylistically, songs like "Les Yper Sound" and "Olv 26" and "Anonymous Collective" are all still very much the work of a band trying to translate krautrock into a (then) modern context (though you could argue that there's more references to stuff like Can and Suicide than before), but the modernity really leaps out at you such that for the first time the stylistic affiliations stop seeming revivalist: the sound of the synthesisers and the bass and the drums on these tracks is so startlingly great and up there with anything else that was happening in 1996... e.g. whereas D&L flirts with drum & bass-style rhythms at points, "Les Yper Sound" is straightahead krautrock-pop that sounds like it was engineered by a D&B producer.

2. By contrast D&L is stylistically "braver" (albeit in this relaxed, subtle, breezy manner), and there's no longer really any distinction between sound design update and stylistic leap, the two impulses are totally fused together. But the vibe is a bit like "what if we apply our newfound production-nous to different/new styles?", so there's a sense of both break and continuity with ETK.

3. In this regard, I think a pathway forward for Stereolab that would have made a lot more sense for people would have been for the band to keep on leaning into their relatively newfound sense of modernity but with incremental expansions or variations of the stylistic template to give them new raw material to which they can apply their tools. If Margerine Eclipse had been the next album after D&L I think it woudl have been greeted much more warmly than Cobra was: it's bright and shiny and filled (almost cluttered) with digital trickery but the arrangements feel very open.

4. Whereas ("Blue Milk" and a few other moments aside), Cobra and (in a different way) Sound Dust can feel like a repudiation of that very simple narrative: "oh, you thought that we were all about translating the past into a modern context? Guess again". So Cobra is dense almost to the point of exhaustion but not in a way that sounds modern: it's as if they're saying, "if we take our debt to stuff like esquivel seriously (and we do) then we need to resist the temptation to simply reach for contemporary sonic reference points, we need to reinvent this stuff from the inside rather than from the outside". From an intentions standpoint I find it admirable, but it's an album I rarely want to reach for. Sound Dust is dense in a different way - more layered, lush and inviting - but likewise rejects the simplistic equation of old stylistic dogs / new production tricks, and again is more interested in reinvention at the more molecular/organic level.

5. That sounds like a defence of Cobra and Sound Dust, and in a way it is, but on balance i tend to prefer the more superficial, timestamped approaches taken on ETK, D&L and Margerine Eclipse. I see some people sniffily dismiss people rating ETK as their favourite as if that's the shallow option, and perhaps it is, but I'm not sure that shallowness ever sounded so good?

Wow, excellent post!

ETK is indeed incredible, and all these years later has barely dated at all

I find the 'stereolab should have just done krautrock for 30 years straight' fans mystifying.

― iatee

Also, booming post, Tim

When I hear Für Immer or Jenny Ondioline, I want them to never ever ever ever stop

gotta say, when they closed with this on friday's show, i was a bit disappointed they just did the single version, not the never-ending transient noise bursts

I was ready to stay for the long haul, and then after 3 mins it just...stopped

I was at the Friday show too - fun dance party up at the front, but yeah I wanted 10 more minutes of "Jenny Ondioline."

If x = the post-gig line up for the women's bathroom, then 6x was the men's line, and 45x was the march line.

Looking at the setlist of the show I missed was some consolation... less Cobra

Also Bitchin Bajas were Friday only

Bitchin Bajas had some nice analog jams. I got to enjoy them while waiting in the giant merch line.

Tim, could you possibly expand on what you mean by "sound design?" My guess is you're referring to a method rather a style of music, perhaps prioritizing instruments-as-sound, structure-for-its-own-sake, etc.?

sound design is what dance music producers do when they're like, fiddling with aspects of arrangement and production that they have minute control over

Computer shit

Tim, could you possibly expand on what you mean by "sound design?" My guess is you're referring to a method rather a style of music, perhaps prioritizing instruments-as-sound, structure-for-its-own-sake, etc.?

― timellison, Monday, 30 September 2019 04:02 (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It means different things for different artists at different times, but like, on ETK, it feels like a lot more care has gone into making the sound of, say, the synthesisers or organs used distinct and interesting from track to track. This can come down to just using different instruments, or tweaking them differently, or it can be in post-production - so it's not necessarily always computer shit, though it certainly can be, and it's certainly not something which is just imposed pre-existing songs (see final paragraph below for more on this). So, like, on "Olv 26" it sounds like there was at least some discussion of "hey let's go for that really gurgly/churning Suicide synthesiser sound". It's not that their earlier work sounds naive or ignorant of those potentialities, but it feels like there was a serious step-change in focus and emphasis with this album.

Though it's not always straightforward, and any hard distinction between songwriting and sound-design is open to attack as imposing a binary where none exists: like, my understanding is that on ETK, for the first time, Gane typically built the songs by starting with a bassline rather than guitar chords, and then he added stuff on top of that. This is a songwriting choice, but it can have sound-design implications, both because basslines often by their nature are felt as much as heard, so this hierarchy tends to push people towards a relatively-more textural/timbral focus; and because (all other things being equal) I find that tracks centred around a bassline feel more self-consciously "layered".

"Metronomic Underground" becomes an important statement of purpose for this album in this regard, as it adds its various components successively and in such a way that the listener's awareness of the progressive layering is half the point (c.f. the archetypal early Stereolab song which hits you with a wall of sound from the outset). Unsurprisingly, that goes both to what kind of song results and also to how it sounds, and trying to divide those frames neatly in two is probably a fool's errand.

In fact you could say that from ETK onwards at least part of the "point" of Stereolab became to invert the usual assumed relationship between songwriting and sound-design - i.e. to cut across the lazy conception we might otherwise have that songs are songs and good or bad production is something that happens to them. So with D&L I understand that at least one of the motivating ideas was to record microscopic samples, loop them, and then have the band recreate those looped samples.

It might have been partly suggestion from something Tim Gane said in an interview but I remember having the impression that ETK was quite 'programmed', built on sequences. Not to its detrument, just as a matter of process. The remastered album goes some way to dispelling this inasmuch as the instruments seem to have a less homogenised texture. The bass and drums espwcially rule. It may have been partly written as MIDI sequences but you can hear the parts being played for 'real'. Also I think he's written in the liner notes that they weren't using Pro Tools extensively until D&L.

I have such a distinct memory of when and where I first heard that album. Actually this is the case for so much from this band.

I would've liked it if they evolved in a different direction, started aping Faust instead or something

― i could chug a keg of you (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, 29 September 2019 23:58

They did at least one more big Faust lift on Escape Pod (From The World Of Medical Observations). Yeh I know that's not what you meant.

I was thinking earlier about what I meant, and basically I am just glad Electrelane existed to press the same brain buttons that Switched On presses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ChXOgewiCs

Not sure who pushed the same buttons that “Ping Pong” pushed, though.

Great posts from Tim itt

I feel where fgti is coming from w/r/t the motorik stuff. I like the post-kraut albums, but if they’d kept exploring infinite variations of Jenny Ondioline I wouldn’t be sitting around today lamenting their lost potential at never adding marimbas and trumpets.

it took me forever to actually get into them because people always recommend ETK as their masterpiece when to me it sounds like a weird transitional record between those two phases

This was p much my experience – ETK was the first one I heard and aside from metronomic underground the rest didn’t connect with me at the time. (It prob didn’t help that the pressing of my vinyl copy seemed particularly bad, so all of those arrangements and tunes just sounded v soupy and dull.)

When I heard Transient a couple years later I flipped for it and worked my way through all the motorik albums, and by the time I got back to revisiting ETK I was able to figure it out – after fully absorbing all the motorik stuff the lounge stuff eventually made sense to me. I kind of had to go on the journey with them. That’s why I always recommend people begin at the beginning with them, so many of their choices are just way easier to figure out if you know what came before.

It did please me today as I was playing Stereolab from Tidal that the vast majority of the “favourite tracks” skewed unreasonably toward Peng and SO 1

When I heard Transient a couple years later I flipped for it and worked my way through all the motorik albums, and by the time I got back to revisiting ETK I was able to figure it out – after fully absorbing all the motorik stuff the lounge stuff eventually made sense to me. I kind of had to go on the journey with them. That’s why I always recommend people begin at the beginning with them, so many of their choices are just way easier to figure out if you know what came before.

I agree with this completely.

ETK was also my first Stereolab album and - while it's relevant to note I was 14 at the time so any opinions were a bit unformed - what I kind of took away from it was that their aesthetic was ~being eclectic~ which is a fun but vaguely flimsy foundation. So, perversely, I sort of took away from it that this was all the Stereolab I needed, and I didn't get anything else for several years. (When I did, it was also Transient that won me over first and hardest).

Whereas, the aesthetic is so clearly and firmly realised and articulated across all their prior records that, coming back to ETK with that background, the songwriting decisions feel much more internalised and natural and expressive of a defined character, so then as a listener you can focus much more on the sound-qua-sound, rather than try to understand a band that would follow "Metronomic Underground" with "Cybele's Reverie" with "Percolator" and so on.

I feel "The Free Design" so much more than the Krauty stuff. I don't know if it's because I heard early Stereolab after I already knew a decent chunk of Krautrock; whereas 'Dots & Loops' and 'Cobra' were my gateway into Library, lots more Brazilian/Italian/French stuff, mid-century electronics, things like USA/White Noise etc... Also, it was "indie music" I could love age 18, even as I fostered a growing hatred for "indie rock".

like tim i came in at ETK or D&L, though in the context of a newbie u.s. college indie listener picking up on their buzz; i don't recall what the talk was like at the time, but it seems like D&L was not being promoted in the critical discourse as a 'development', though it could well have been based on their earlier records and the era's hunger for artistic development narratives. maybe that has something to do with the pull of the different musical materials defusing that critics' impulse?

Not sure I follow that. You're saying there was a "hunger for artistic development narratives," but D&L didn't fit that for some reason?

It's pretty interesting to me that everyone's entry point into Stereolab had such a wildly different impact on how they perceived the rest of their catalog.

xp well yeah i'm saying it fit well enough but for some reason (unless i'm forgetting how the talk really went) wasn't counted as a Major Artistic Development a la i dunno this is not the most apt example, but ok computer / kid a

It seemed like a pretty significant step to me, tempered perhaps by their uncharacteristic willingness to jump on contemporary electronic trends.

My sense is that both D&L and Tortoise’s TNT were greeted by mixed critical reactions in that, in both cases, the band’s sound was being pushed forward, but in a manner that also embraced refinement and understatement, which for a lot of listeners wasn’t what they had had in mind.

At the time I thought of Stereolab as an archetypal ‘Spin’ band, which aesthetic I also associated with the bright colours of, say, Bjork’s Post or Cibo Matto’s Viva La Woman. That framing works just fine for ETK but requires adjustment to make sense for D&L.

i agree that the sound design on ETK is wonderful and they certainly put more effort into it, but the shift in the songwriting means that the immensity of their previous organ + motorik grooves isn't there anywhere near as much and i really miss it, and they hadn't yet fully embraced the lightness of D&L or CAP yet either

For me it's simply that LS's vocals just aren't up to the light/lounge stuff and are more suited to drone/noise.

I heard D&L before anything else, and was non-plussed. Another friend then lent me Switched On, which I heard before I'd heard any of its precedents (it was the late 90s, so the only access one had to Neu! was to buy a $30 bootleg CD, which I did not do, but then found it at Amoeba on a trip to SF for $15, which I did do, and first listened to "Hallo Gallo" at age 21 driving around those highways)

But Switched On was always perfect, Peng was perfect. ETK was recommended to me despite my stated aversion toward D&L and I really dug it, kind of a hi-fi version of what had come before, but hadn't descended into full-tilt goofiness.

I still do not enjoy D&L. Lots of people talk about what a watershed moment "Blue Milk" or whatever the long track on CAP is, but it means nothing to me. Just yesterday I was playing early tracks and contrasting them with later tracks for my boyfriend and he couldn't believe they were the same band.