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Fun, fun, fun on the Autobahn >> Stereolab have been at the crossroads of every vital influence on post-grunge rock since 1991. What do they do for a encore? Go Brazilian! Get brassed off! And hit the road! by CHRIS YURKIW
"Stereolab," read the poorly photocopied cover of the advance cassette, "Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements." Whatever. A music critic's work is never done, and someone's gotta do it--even at the tail end of a vacation. But that's the beauty of music: you can take it in while doing other stuff, like driving through the country and trying to see if the cows are standing up or sitting down. Don't even have to pay attention, really. But when the tape started to roll I couldn't do anything but pay attention. The lines of a review immediately started to congeal, in spite of the heat: "The first group you'd call for a Velvet Underground tribute," "Stereolab, or Vox organ-donor clinic?" and "Two thumbs way up the fat ass of rock!" Actually, that's a lie: in the face of a sound I had never heard before I was speechless, wordless, less than articulate. All I remember is a blur of distorted organ riffs, a song that lasted as long as the gap between service centres, and a feeling that the metronomic beat of the music was one and the same with the click of the odometer--if an odometer made a sound. I didn't notice any cows. "We wanted to do something that was unique," says one half of Stereolab's braintrust, Tim Gane. "In fact, to be unique or different was probably more important than even being good." Four years and the same set of tires later, I'm finally understanding what hit me that day and why it's still resonating. It's like this: in the early '90s, Stereolab presaged just about every significant post-grunge influence on rock--from hypnotic German Krautrock to psychotic French yéyé, from lounge music to electronica, from Jimmy Webb to John McEntire--and threw them into Parisian vocalist Laetitia Sadier's Cuisinart. Yet Stereolab are all of these things and none, making them beautifully elusive. Looking back to those earlier days of the London sextet, I can now see the keyboard centrism that was soon to capture rock fans' imaginations via electronica, the imminent lounge revival in the pimped album title Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (1993), and the shift from America to the U.K. as the site of the most vital music of the day (Britpop, trip hop, drum & bass--not that the Stereolab do any of those). Gane lets us in on the earliest experiments in the 'Lab, when it was just him and partner Laetitia back in 1991:
"But later on I changed the way I played guitar. Mainly because I wanted to go for a more lateral sound, like in the type of guitar music I was listening to at the time, which was Neu!, Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham. So I started playing chords of just two notes, as opposed to three or four, and that opened up all these things, really. And around the same week we bought this cheap Farfisa organ, which had such a grungy sound you could only play chords of two or three notes maximum. So I took that as a sign that it was a good thing to go down this road." If you want to talk about Stereolab going down a road, then you can't resist saying that it sounded like they were travelling in a circle. Songs and singing were built upon glorious repetition; song titles curled back onto the music itself ("Avant Garde M.O.R.," "Analogue Rock," "John Cage Bubblegum"); the music seemed to be about music, which is a perfect hook for self-conscious observers of the self-reflexive, and which might in part explain Stereolab's surprising popularity with the college crowd. "Music doesn't have a reason to exist other than that it does," says Gane. Would that be from Philosophy 101, or just an uncommonly articulate artist? Travelling in circles is fine (when's the last time you walked around your block, just for the heck of it?), but by the time of 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet it was wearing thin, even for Stereolab. In a move that restored the faith of all those who believe in the great cross-pollination of rock across the Atlantic (Chuck Berry influenced the Beatles, and the Beatles influenced the Beach Boys, and the Beach Boys in turn influenced the Beatles, and the Beatles influenced Big Star...), Stereolab trucked off to Chicago in '96 to record parts of Emperor Tomato Ketchup with post-rock poster boy John McEntire, a producer and member of Tortoise. That album was the creative rebirth of the 'Lab, injected with phat bass and lock-grooves and strings. It encouraged Gane, Sadier & Co. to return to Chicago for their latest opus, Dots and Loops (Elektra). Dots and Loops? Are we coming full circle then? Yes and no. Yes, because Stereolab have always maintained that certain minimalism and motorik beat. And no, because this time Stereolab get real cozy with McEntire, embracing both his vibe and vibes. Some have called it the band's most accessible album to date, perhaps due to the warmth that touches of acoustic guitar, bass and brass bring to it. But it's certainly Stereolab's least song-oriented record, including a couple of lengthy multi-part pieces (à la Tortoise's famed "Djed"?) and a subtle Brazilian influence that may or may not have been inspired by their track on last year's Red Hot & Rio compilation ("One-Note Samba" was their choice from Tom Jobim's repertoire. How fitting). In keeping with Stereolab's artier side, Gane says that his concept or "starting point" for the album was experimental film, including two shorts by Canadian film pioneer and founder of the National Film Board's animation department Norman McLaren. Their titles? Dots and Loops. "So the "dots and loops" are film loops, really," says Gane. "They're not musical loops or tape loops or samples--which a lot of people seem to think they are. Then again, I knew people would think that, because it is music, isn't it?" Upon hearing that McLaren was Canadian, and not American as Gane had assumed ("He did another film called Stars and Stripes!"), Tim laughs and retorts, "Apparently William Shatner is Canadian too!" I'd like to take Tim Gane on a drive along the Trans-Canada. It might lead to their next album being called Wawa Wah-Wah... With Mouse On Mars at Cabaret, Saturday, Nov. 8. 8:30pm, $15.50 + service
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I first heard Stereolab while driving the Trans-Canada, somewhere between Tweed and Ottawa. It was a hot August afternoon and I had somewhat boldly kicked off my shoes so as to drive barefoot, perhaps getting a little carried away for the first few hours in my first car. Barefoot and fancy free on the highway! It was just like "Me and You And a Dog Named Boo," except that it was just me and a Blaupunkt and a tape by who?
"We recorded two songs to see if it would work--two cover versions. One was Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's "Bonnie and Clyde," and the other one was Nico's version of "I'll Keep It With Mine." Those were the first songs we played, and in some ways we've kind of stuck to that sound.