Stereolab: Laboratory Secrets
- Issue #149 (Jul 96) | Interviews
- By: Peter Shapiro | Featuring: Stereolab
- Printable version
Are Stereolab the perfect pop group? By combining a rigorous DIY aesthetic with a playful reverence for the arcane relics of musics past, they have managed to make a reality out of that most elusive of notions: experimental music that actually sells
While trying to explicate his usual working process, Stereolab's Tim Gane says, "I love contradictions in music, I think it should be contradictory. My favourite music is music which I can't tell if it's good, bad, what it is... I think music should convey something for which there's are no words." If nothing else, Stereolab's music certainly lives up to Gane's aspirations. Impenetrable, avant garde ideas about the organisation of sound collide head-on with the most unapologetic, saccharine pop tactics for audience manipulation. Wheezing antique synthesizers, churning one-chord guitar riffs and the deadpan vocals of Laetitia Sadier (who displays all the emotional histrionics of Nico) blend seamlessly with tear-jerking, Beatles strings and the unreal, Prozac chirpiness of Brill Building choral arrangements. Despite Stereolab's seemingly infinite storehouse of references, their sound is nothing if not unique.
The core of the Stereolab sound is the drone. Whether it's the manic insistence of one note played endlessly on a Farfisa or Vox organ, or the rumble of a severely over-taxed, single minded guitar riff, the metronomic, mechanical hum of a Stereolab record is relentless, but never monotonous.
"I like the intensity of the drone" says Sadier. "You have to maintain this incredible concentration even though you are only playing one chord. [Laughs] There was this promoter in Vancouver and he said, 'That's the first time I've ever seen kids be so into just one note.' He was really amazed, he was this Heavy Metaller. He had to ask himself a lot of scary questions that night."
"That's where the most tension comes from," adds Gane. "Where you have intensity but you have to stay restricted to something simple. Most people would go [imitates Al DiMeola guitar theatrics] which ruins it, everything dissipates. I find slow evolvements fascinating. I like to take accepted formulas and make them alien again by the simple process of extending them way beyond their expected time allotment. It draws you in, and once you're drawn in , your defences drop and you are open to certain ways of reinterpreting things that have been over-used so that they're non-effectual. Music like Steve Reich's Four Organs, where four organs play these two chords fast and then they slow down so that at the end they're completely different to the beginning, yet it's the same thing. You can see it working, the mechanics are there, but you can't quite see how it works, even though it's such a simple thing."
The whole Stereolab package is wrapped up with the French-born Sadier's almost surreal lyrics, which read like a Situationist/Marxist pamphlet, but actually sound like someone reading fortune cookie epigrams aloud. (Of course, having a non-native Anglophone write mostly English lyrics is a contradiction in itself.)
"Maybe our music and lyrics shouldn't work together," suggests Gane. "But they do, because the works and the music are both exploratory in the sense of trying to find out things about yourself, about the things around you, being curious about forcing certain elements together in a way that shouldn't be done."
"Or forcing things together which were artificially separated," Sadier adds. "It's basically exploratory, that's why it's not preaching. A preacher has an absolute notion of what he's talking about, or a least he thinks he does, whereas I don't."
The core of the Stereolab sound is the drone. Whether it's the manic insistence of one note played endlessly on a Farfisa or Vox organ, or the rumble of a severely over-taxed, single minded guitar riff, the metronomic, mechanical hum of a Stereolab record is relentless, but never monotonous.
"I like the intensity of the drone" says Sadier. "You have to maintain this incredible concentration even though you are only playing one chord. [Laughs] There was this promoter in Vancouver and he said, 'That's the first time I've ever seen kids be so into just one note.' He was really amazed, he was this Heavy Metaller. He had to ask himself a lot of scary questions that night."
"That's where the most tension comes from," adds Gane. "Where you have intensity but you have to stay restricted to something simple. Most people would go [imitates Al DiMeola guitar theatrics] which ruins it, everything dissipates. I find slow evolvements fascinating. I like to take accepted formulas and make them alien again by the simple process of extending them way beyond their expected time allotment. It draws you in, and once you're drawn in , your defences drop and you are open to certain ways of reinterpreting things that have been over-used so that they're non-effectual. Music like Steve Reich's Four Organs, where four organs play these two chords fast and then they slow down so that at the end they're completely different to the beginning, yet it's the same thing. You can see it working, the mechanics are there, but you can't quite see how it works, even though it's such a simple thing."
The whole Stereolab package is wrapped up with the French-born Sadier's almost surreal lyrics, which read like a Situationist/Marxist pamphlet, but actually sound like someone reading fortune cookie epigrams aloud. (Of course, having a non-native Anglophone write mostly English lyrics is a contradiction in itself.)
"Maybe our music and lyrics shouldn't work together," suggests Gane. "But they do, because the works and the music are both exploratory in the sense of trying to find out things about yourself, about the things around you, being curious about forcing certain elements together in a way that shouldn't be done."
"Or forcing things together which were artificially separated," Sadier adds. "It's basically exploratory, that's why it's not preaching. A preacher has an absolute notion of what he's talking about, or a least he thinks he does, whereas I don't."
Posted 17/10/11
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