Stereolab
Concertos for Groop. By John Mulvey.
Space age bachelor pad music. Transient random noise-bursts. John cage bubblegum. analogue rock. chemical chords. Wow and flutter. pop molecules… Few bands have ever made the life of critics as easy as Stereolab did, packing song titles with so many vivid descriptions of their superelectric music. Tim gane and Laetitia Sadier’s constantly evolving, inquisitive band spent the best part of two decades collapsing the boundaries between art and pop, between electronica and indierock, between the avant-garde and lounge music. “What sets us apart is a certain obsessiveness,” gane told me in 1996. “To me, music must always be in motion, it must be heading towards something without ever quite arriving there.” That questing produced an extraordinary – and, to a neophyte, daunting – glut of music. Between 1990 and 2009 Stereolab released 10 albums, three mini-albums, seven compilations, and well over 50 assorted singles, eps, split singles, 12-inches and tour releases, presented with a care and idiosyncrasy that encouraged their fans to be as obsessive as the band themselves; should they eat the stick of pink gum that came with 1992 7-inch John cage Bubblegum, or save it for posterity? The cultish, collector aesthetic was vital to gane. “Records are ultimately important to me,” he said in 1991, during one of Stereolab’s first interviews. “a really good record has changed my life, changed the way I think. I’d rather spend £20 on a really good Lee Hazlewood album than on drugs any day of the year.” By then Stereolab had been running a year, gane having left c86era agit-indiepoppers Mccarthy to form the band with his French partner, Sadier. a combination of Velvets drone, motorik propulsion, yé-yé harmonies and hardcore political theory became instantly recognisable, even as the personnel around gane and Sadier changed, and their eclectic influences multiplied. But where to begin with this “Nihilist assault group”?
“Music must always be in motion.” Tim Gane