by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“If you do too many LPs, it’s not fresh anymore,” says Tim Gane. “It becomes a weight around your neck, and it stops you thinking about music.”

A 14-year-long discography of a band as prolific (and as fond of vinyl) as Stereolab would make one heavy, blood-flow-blocking necklace, no matter how charming its contents. That’s why Gane chose to produce a series of seven-inch singles rather than an album when the band signed a new record deal last year. Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier has gone on record against singles and EPs—“I never really saw the point of releasing an EP… artistically, four tracks is not enough,” she told Magnet last year—but Gane says he couldn’t do without them, and not just for variety’s sake.

“The short format is very free, yet it comes with certain restrictions that imbue themselves into the music. A seven-inch carries a lot of preconceptions—they’re generally quite short, quite poppy, quite fast. I like to play with those things, but do it our way.”

The dozen A-sides and B-sides recently compiled on the Fab Four Suture CD offer slices of quintessential Stereolab, still in the space-age swing, heavy on the pop highs but light on the moody lows that infuse their albums with some necessary contrast. But, Gane says, Stereolab have hardly abandoned the LP. Though the work hasn’t begun, their label, Too Pure, which distributes product on the band’s own imprint, Duophonic, hints that their next album is due as early as 2007.

“All the different formats are very important to Stereolab. From the format to the sleeve, the title—they all go together to give you this whole package that’s more than just a dowloadable song. I find it difficult to think in that format, but maybe I will begin to work with that and try to do something different with it.”

Variety is the spice, they say, and it keeps Stereolab running smoothly, even outside the band. Sadier fronts a side project, Monade, but as the band’s chief songwriter, Gane doesn’t need another creative outlet (“If I wanna do something with bagpipes, I can do it with Stereolab”). Instead, he occasionally composes music for art projects and for films, the latter ranging from the latest Godzilla movie to documentaries about Bob Moog and Bruce Haack. He’s avoided the creatively stifling Hollywood route that a few of his composer friends have taken (“they didn’t find it a pleasant experience at all”), but even Gane’s commissioned work has its expectations.

“We tend to get asked by people who want us to do our own thing. The only problem is that they always want the Stereolab sound that they have in their mind, which is poppy, French, brass, electronic. You can do whatever you want as long as it recognizably sounds like that.”

The same is sometimes true of the remix requests Gane receives on a fairly regular basis but, as with his sporadic soundtrack jobs, it’s ultimately satisfying work.

“It’s really nice to approach the music without anything written and just follow an intuition. I’m always looking for puzzles and things to solve in the music.”

With Espers at la Tulipe on Wednesday,
March 15, 8 p.m., $25, all ages

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