Stereolab
Reissues
In the early 90s, when electro music was all about starting futuristic rave fires, Stereolab dared to dream in oscillations. Inspired by the surrealist and situationist culture and disguising a political passion beneath their boffin deadpan, Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane defied the techno revolution to hark backwards to krautrock and its lab-coated origins, draping Gallic 60s pop melodies over the sort of synth drones that people with clipboards used to get out of computers the size of buses in 1962. The result is arguably the first convincing example of electronic retrofuturism, and the true root of modern laptop-tronica.
Reissuing 1992’s debut album Peng! (9/10) exposes indier origins than you might expect. This enthralling art-pop record is a Radiophonic twist on the drone rock of The Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3 and early Spiritualized, the warped screes of My Bloody Valentine and the C86 jangles of The Wedding Present. Buried beneath K-Stars and Surrealchemist, though, is electronica’s future; the glitchy clicks and buzzes that are as ubiquitous in leftfield pop today as facial tattoos.
The 1993 mini-LP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (8/10) focussed the aesthetic further, creating a cult sensation with its harmony-drenched clash of hypnotic sci-fi easy listening, android rock’n’roll and cranky tonal experiments. Radiohead probably got a copy stuck in the tour bus’s CD player; whatever its time is, it still sounds ahead of it.