For a guy who plays in a band whose music is so frequently characterized as fin de siècle pop, you’re not likely to get Stereolab’s Tim Gane too excited about Y2K.
“I’m not sure they’re talking as much about it in Europe as they are here,” he muses during our phone interview. “But there’s still some commotion -- especially in Britain, with the whole millennial celebration, the Dome, etc. Frankly, I’m a bit fed up with it all. It just all seems so big, there doesn’t seem to be much humanness in any of it any more.
“As far as the band, I assume we’ll be in London. We were hoping for the backing band gig with Barbra Streisand in Vegas and some of that $10 million dollars, but Barb’s people didn’t get back to us. Oh, well.”
In the meantime, Gane will have to settle for a Western U.S. tour in support of Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, the band’s recently released LP on Elektra.
We told Gane we liked the album, and it’s true, at least to the extent that we like it better than ‘97’s somewhat dreary Dots and Loops. Describing a Stereolab album is one of those high-calorie music-critic pleasures that only ambles by once or twice a year. With heavy influences from rive gauche arch, frothy Bacharach à la Francais pop and gently anarchist electronica (see, wasn’t that fun?), Stereolab strikes a cool balance between chilly intellectualism and gushing pop-grin joy. Or as one nameless critic once observed, “Blip meets hip.” Remarkably, the new album, which exhibits the band’s fondness for free jazz and a new obsession with the fundaments of rhythm, required less preparation for the group to record than it takes for critics to pick apart.
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“We took a little time off, but we didn’t really do nothing,” says Ganes. “For one thing, Laetitia [Gane’s longtime creative partner and wife] and I had a child, about 16 months ago. We also spent some time building a home studio -- and this in addition to putting together this record.”
Gane was ambiguous about whether or not fatherhood had much of an effect on the creative process.
“It tends to add a dimension to your life rather than significantly change the ones that were already there. We recorded the new album shortly after the child was born, and a lot of our fans have asked us if becoming parents had an effect on the outcome. For my part, probably not, but I’m much more interested in sound and arrangements and so on. Laetitia writes the words, so I assume if it did have an effect, that’s where it should show up.
“[Our son is] on his first tour. He just sort of runs around and explores. All this will seem perfectly natural for him as he grows up, I suppose.”
We told Gane we especially like “Italian Shoes Continuum” on the new record, a schizo piece of dreamy pop musing gently carried by Laetitia Sadier’s leaf-in-the-breeze vocal riffing, pasted in different shades, followed by a creepy sonic synthesizer meltdown and a slick, treated vocal outro over a galloping beat. It is Stereolab at their self-indulgent and visionary best -- though Gane says that most longtime fans do not like the tune.
“Everything I’ve seen or heard indicates that the fans hate it, which I find interesting, since it’s my second-favorite song on the album. The main part of the song is a paste up of seven different takes we recorded. We just taped different versions together and mixed it down. The other part was a bit we had recorded a long time ago; it was supposed to be a commissioned piece for a party, but that all fell through for one reason or another. I liked it and wanted to put it on the tail end of another song. This just happened to be it.
“I really think it’s important to do things like this on a record. We seem to be in a period where everyone is concerned about making the perfectly framed album. I still think you have to experiment and explore. Even if what you come up with doesn’t work, it may leave something you can borrow or work from later. Sort of, investing in new sounds and new ideas for later.”
Dave Kirby is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colo. He contributes a regular column to Boulder Weekly and has written for High Fidelity and Blues Access.
