tim Gane on making “pop music influenced by things and musics outside the usual ones”
The first Switched On gathers together the first three Stereolab singles, from 1991, B-sides and all. What are your memories of the group’s very early days?
Being in a group at the beginning is nearly always great, and it’s true that for us it was a very exciting time, to feel that something you were only just starting to do seemed so full of possibilities. I recall things just gliding along somehow, things falling into place powered along by their own forward motion.
We were on the dole, living in south London, going to gigs most nights or the pub, and we were very familiar with what was going on in the London music scene. We started to get our own gigs up in north London supporting other groups we liked, and I know that there were already some expectations about us as we had just released our first 10in and at the time people were also surprised at how we sounded, and they really got how we sounded pretty much straight away and understood what we were trying to do. I felt that we stuck out a bit in terms of the dynamics of the music.
The Switched On series tells an alternative narrative of Stereolab… What kinds of freedoms did the smaller-scale releases offer the group? They seemed to be a particularly potent space for exploration and experimentation.
Whenever I used to get asked to pick one record that someone who didn’t know the band should listen to, I always picked the compilation Refried Ectoplasm. I think it really gets to the heart of what the group was about, and if you really wanted to understand what it was that drove us, that’s the one that would give you the greatest insight.
The influences for it are all those releases that escaped the main flow of the record business river – made-upon-the-spot B-sides, a famous band’s out-there-moment 7in that was a total commercial failure, an amazing pop track on an LP of murky drones, a murky drone on an LP of amazing pop tracks. These are some of the most exciting things in music and are a total inspiration to me personally…
The collaborations with Nurse With Wound [were] something special to me and I wanted to see what connections could be made. I had wanted Steve Stapleton to produce the first LP, Peng!, but he came to see us and thought we were too rock or no good or something, but with the help of Nick Brown from the Clawfist label, we managed to get it together. They remain at the top of my favourite Stereolab recordings.
Aluminum Tunes starts with
six songs from Music From The Amorphous Body Study Center, Stereolab’s collaboration with artist Charles Long…
Charles was a fan of the band and would come to see us when we played in New York. One day we got a message from him inviting us to participate in an art show he was planning, he wanted us to contribute the music to a series of amorphous sculptures he was designing. The idea was that each sculpture would have its own set of music that could be listened to with headphones whilst looking at it and perhaps touching the pieces…
The original idea was for the music to play continuously within the sculptures with no gaps and as seamlessly as we could make it… Having not really thought too much of how to exactly do the music yet, I got inspiration whilst casually listening to “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” one day – specifically the looping coda section and the way in which the chords circled around and came back to the beginning again with a kind of lurching motion.
Stereolab always had a good way with a song title, often drawing on broader cultural references – across the
Switched On series there are references to avant-garde composers, Faust lyrics, analogue keyboards and tape recorders, Italian horror films…
There is something implicit in the sound of words that overrides the exact meaning of them, especially when they are written down. The thing I’m interested in, then and now, is the juxtaposition of these words plucked from wherever and forced into a collage or montage style to make a third meaning, this way divorcing them from their strict original contexts to be free to be like an allusion to the sound of the music you are hearing.
“John Cage Bubblegum” seemed the perfect name for that track, it sums it up whilst also setting out the way we thought about our music, that it was pop music influenced by things and musics outside the usual ones and that it was still pop music. Our pop music.
Listening back to this music, there’s so much terrain covered. How did your approach change over those years?
Our approach to writing, making, recording [and] playing music changed enormously during the period of the releases [compiled on Switched On] – the rather primitive early singles basically played live in the studio with maybe a vocal overdub added later. We got tired of this and in 1994 we made the decision to stop rehearsing for recordings and just play the music for the first time when we got into the studio. I brought in my four-track cassette with the basic track on and we would work out how to deconstruct it and build it up again from scratch.