The future of Stereolab

The couple of times I saw Stereolab pre-break Tim stood in the middle of the band surrounded by everyone else basically. So yeah, different from those times for sure.

I saw the Minneapolis show too and also found the sound unpleasant but wondered if it were somehow mixed for earplugs (which I forgot to bring; the music sounded better when I yawned, though). I appreciate hearing that it wasn’t just me.

Huh. Sound was perfectly fine in SF and the mixer there, who I gather was the tour mixer, is an acquaintance of a musician friend, Sarah Hennies, who was thrilled to note she was doing that job. Strange!

Yes, that's who it was in Boston. Sounds from her CV like she is super experienced musician/composer. Maybe they're dependent on whatever board the venue provides, I dunno. But hopefully they clean it up as the tour goes on. Not everyone wants to press themselves up against the stage like Gerald McBoing Boing!

So I listened to side 4 of the dots & loops expanded edition and the first song was definitely Parsec. Don't really know about track length changes though.

wtf

let me post what I have

here is the first minute or so of what begins my side 4 and purports to be "Parsec"

https://soundcloud.com/sleeve-the-dj/untitled?si=69f892dfeea846be90505ebb60bc5c54

oops that got removed, Moodles I will ILXmail you

So, decided to do a little Stereolab review project...but not about Stereolab specifically:

https://theshfl.com/guide/the-stereolab-halo

awesome

I haven’t had a chance to really dig in, but great concept - there’s so much to mine just outside of the official Stereolab canon.

Really is and I surprised even myself -- a ton of things I had no idea existed.

Lots of great albums on that list

Looks great. Richard Harrison played bass with the 'lab though, not drums/percussion.

Hm, must have misread something! Will correct.

also it seems to mention 2002 in the first para? surely that's 2022?

i love copyediting

Great piece Ned, lots of stuff I hadn't known about at all. Curious to check out that Ghost Power, had no idea!

Wow, nice article! I have about half of those, but it has inspired me to dig deeper - thank you!!
One minor thing (this is extremely nit-picky) - I thought Laetitia's singing debut with McCarthy was earlier than *Banking...*
Just did a little Googling, and this page says the *Get a Knife Between Your Teeth* EP is from April 1990 (on which Laetitia is credited), but this page says *Banking...* came out in August 1990.

IIRC the recent reissue boxset credit her with being on the At War EP. from 1989 and even the earlier Should the Bible Be Banned EP but it feels like an error.

Either way, by Enraged, they were starting to experiment more and showing the seeds of Stereolab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb2ENkP7t4M

I will keep that in mind re McCarthy -- I've kept updating poor Caleb at Shfl all my glitches today so maybe down the road! But thanks all for the corrections, and of course the kind words.

Any idea what they're ending with on their current tour, assuming they're playing the same-ish set? "Contact"?

Super-Electric when I saw them in Sept. Encored with Simple Headphone Mind and French Disko iirc.

Ta, everything.

It's a bit of a blur but I think they ended their main set with Super Electric and then played three songs as an encore. Tim looked really into Super Electric and the last song of the encore. Refractions in the Plastic Pulse was particularly good.

Ta, everything.

It's a bit of a blur but I think they ended their main set with Super Electric and then played three songs as an encore. Tim looked really into Super Electric and the last song of the encore. Refractions in the Plastic Pulse was particularly good.

^ Not sure how that happened. Sorry.

Apparently the last song of the encore was Excursions into oh-ah-oh.

scored used copies of the reissues of ETK and D&L at the local shop. someone must've bought them new and returned them right away, cuz I noticed they were missing from the shelf lol

crazy how good Dots & Loops is. obviously this is no secret to anyone on ilxor.com but for some reason it never clicked with me back in the day.

dig those demos on Side F too. reminds me of the discussion we were having on the Police thread re: "songwriting". for example "Les Yper Sound" is cute in demo form but everything I love about that track is in the production. though I must say a stripped back Stereolab still sounds really good!

the demos have been a big revelation & my favorite thing about the reissues. a whole new way to enjoy stereolab

Yeah, for a band whose sound is as texturally deep as Stereolab, the demos are amazing in how they retain the pure essence of the song.

Would be cool to have a comp of just the demos. I prefer the early rougher sound of Transmissions and Bachelor Pad, and feel like something was lost as their albums got more polished. That may be why I tend to go to Electrelane or some other band when I’m craving a VU inspired drone rock fix.

Sorry, Transient not Transmissions. Don’t know where that came from.

Dots and Loops isn’t necessarily my favorite, but it fits into my middle-aged life better than the others. It’s the one I’m most likely to reach for.

I can't bring myself to sell my original CD copy of Simple Headphone Mind in the shiny metallic sleeve even though it's also on the latest Switched On compilation.

Sell it? That's the kind of thing I'd want to be buried with.

Weird - convinced that Stereolab had announced their retirement last night but can't see anything about it (Likely scenarios: 1 - dreamt this, 2 - read something while drunk).

Does anyone know what the song "The Free Design" is about? To my knowledge, the phrase only existed as the name of the 60s sunshine pop band, but in the song, Lætitia Sadier seems to parlay this phrase into a deeper concept. I'll post the lyrics here, in case anyone can figure it out:

Where it had been left hundreds of years ago?
Extract from the depth is but a setting sun
Paradise is scarce in this light that won't shine
What is our earthly task but a worthy design?

Some held it in sight for scattered it may have been
They're ready to fight in a priceless inkling
The request is here ready to resurrect
What else can we do but recover the project
Our earthly design can be so detached
What crushes our desire not to be trapped?
When the higher spheres tell us to and not to
Everyone agrees demanding more veto
Our earthly design can we be so detached
What crushes our desire not to be trapped?

Socialism bruh

The backing tracks get working titles, sometimes they change to reflect the lyrics, but usually not.

Well, she doesn't actually say "The Free Design" in the song. And as much as Lætitia Sadier was a doctrinaire socialist, this song doesn't seem to have socialist themes to me, at all.

Despite having heard that song hundreds of times and owning the Cobra CD with lyric sheet since it came out, I still thought "Paradise is scarce" was "Paradise is chaos", "Our earthly design" was "Or a free design", and "When the higher spheres" was "When the highest fears".

Guess I need to sit down with that lyric sheet and figure out what else I've been mishearing for the last two decades...

"The Free Design" is pretty cryptic but to me it seems to deal with a desire freedom from oppression of some sort (religious? governmental?)

What crushes our desire not to be trapped?

Capitalism, imo.

xp yeah, I'd always thought of "Free Design" as one of the rare Stereolab songs where the title shows up in the lyrics, but I guess not! Drawing a blank now -- are there ANY actual examples of this in their catalog?

"The Seeming And The Meaning"

^Yes. A few more of their earlier songs come to mind: "Super Falling Star," "Orgiastic," "Doubt," "Changer," "Laisser-Faire," "Des étoiles électroniques." Seems like they stopped doing it after '94 or so.

Also "Brigitte"

It's interesting how many of the lyrics seem to have been written with the title in mind, phonetically if not conceptually. Rainbo Conversation is a good example.

1993 Berkeley, CA (instore + club performance):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytObArOro8

Only 950 views as of posting, I'm responsible for at least 25 of them.

Only too happy to add more

I watched part of this when it was pretty newly posted and then forgot to finish the rest. It's super cool, and bonus points for being recorded exactly one week after the first time I saw them.