The future of Stereolab

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.

I heard Switched On first (and Peng! and Low Fi) so that was the sound that got me into them. Transient and MAQ felt like an extension of those to a large degree, where they got louder, longer, dronier. The first time they sounded like they were really heading in some other direction was that Charles Long disc in 1995 which felt lighter or more whimsical. Even the most rocking track on it (Melochord 75) felt lighter than the stuff on MAQ just a year earlier. And I really liked ETK when it came out but it was clear they were trying new stuff on there from the sound of some of it (Metronomic Underground, Percolator, Les Yper etc) and from reading the liner notes and seeing that John McEntire was now involved. I still liked D&L but it was clear by then that they had moved on from the organ and guitar wall of noise that defined those earlier shows/albums. I still like a lot of the post D&L stuff, though oddly some of the great stuff ended up as EP tracks or tour singles.

yeah the real demarcation point (imo) is the Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center EP, Tim Gane even mentions this in the new ETK liner notes

kind of a hi-fi version of what had come before, but hadn't descended into full-tilt goofiness.

this totally nails the ETK/D&L dichotomy (again, imo)

would've been cool if Mouse on Mars & Stereolab had done a full LP in the late 90s

Oddly enough, I don’t think I ever listened to TGPSABPM until yesterday? Assumed from the title that it was an early Esquivellian foray? Nope, and it’s terrific!

(The Groop Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music is the acronym jicymi)

yeah I love that one, along with Lo Fi it's unjustly neglected

Seems like Lo Fi isn't getting the reissue treatment for some reason.

Which sucks, because I’ve lost my copy

I remember loving everything up to Transient, which I still loved but saw as a big departure from the previous stuff. After that they reminded me of the muzak I'd hear in Whataburger on a sunny afternoon waiting for my parents to pick me up from the mall, something I reflexively wanted to get far away from then. Now years later of course I miss it, so I'm ready for their second and third acts... same goes for the latterday Siesta Records releases where they shifted from indie pop to easy listening, at the time I dropped them unceremoniously but now it's fun territory to explore.

yeah the real demarcation point (imo) is the Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center EP

Yes, for me as well, that EP was the absolute perfection of all they had been doing. I still dug ETK but D&L and Cobra left me cold, but as mentioned, subsequent EPs and tour singles often had some of their greatest post-ETK moments.

The Groop Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music

this was the first thing of theirs I got and if I had to pick just one release to keep this would be it tbh

U.H.F. - M.F.P. is a top five track

I agree about Amorphous..., at the time it felt a bit like a fun diversion. Then they released the Cybele's Reverie single, and it still felt like more of the same. None of that prepared me for stuff like Metronomic Underground, Percolator, Spark Plug, etc. Those really felt like radical departures that were not at all hinted at by anything they'd done up to that point. The funky grooves, odd time signatures, and focus on original track-by-track sound design, was all very unexpected for me.

Keep in mind that Tim Gane very purposefully used the exact same chords, instrumentation, and moog layers on most of MAQ to give it a unified sound.

Sorry if that wasn't clear, meant to add that in retrospect Amorphous really was a turning point.

Keep in mind that Tim Gane very purposefully used the exact same chords...

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles)

I was looking for a tab archive to confirm this, I know there's a lot of E major....

U.H.F. - M.F.P. is a top five track

Yes!! in the Space Age reissue Tim mentions that it was to have become a b-side to We're Not Adult Orientated, and that it was unfinished in some sense that it would have had drums coming in if it were more completed. I think it's 100% perfect as is and sounds like it could have some from early 1980s UK DIY/Rough Trade band.

xp

the way Tim describes it in the MAQ liner notes, he wanted to use "the same three chord guitar shape and movement", he did this on tracks 1, 3, 8, 13, and 14.

He used the stacked Moog chords on 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 14.

Ah, now I'm curious about all these reissue liner notes!

They're very good and quite detailed, especially on the Elektra albums, but Peng! And Space-Age Bachelor Pad also have good ones.

the separate note on remastering, though, seems to be the same on all, or at least the three i looked at

Yep

Anyone clock the stage invasion at Chanel's Paris Fashion Week show yesterday?? The song playing seemed apt somehow!
I hope they got a kick out of it..

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49897299

Numerous xposts: There's no point when Stereolab started sounding like a completely different band. With the possible exception of maybe 2 songs, they are always unmistakable throughout their whole career. Listen to Oscillations from the Anti-Sun, which has tracks from day to the Sound-Dust era all mixed up. It's cohesive work. The early and later tracks integrate perfectly.

Stereolab are eclectic in a similar way than some of their peers at the time like St Etienne or Blur. ie. they are moving through different styles and influences but specifics like certain instrumental techniques, lyrics, vocals, moods etc are always there.

ended up having severe FOMO and got tix off Craigslist for the Minneapolis show on Saturday, so stoked

i keep waffling about going next week — kinda blew my live music budget in recent weeks ... but yeah stereolab FOMO is real

@ everything, I extremely disagree with you! “Sounds like the same band” maybe, but like “the same band playing ska” vs. “the same band playing Beach Boys covers”