Viewed from the outside, by 1996 Stereolab must have seemed like a unit that could only ascend. Half a decade into the project, affectionately termed โthe groopโ by its nucleus members, the couple of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, Stereolab appeared to be going overground. 1994โs Mars Audiac Quintet had been their poppiest, sharpest work thus far โ and they had been rewarded with a near hit single in ‘Ping Pong’ and their first top 20 charting album. Theyโd toured the US as part of an all-star Lollapalooza line-up, becoming unlikely tour mates of the Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day. And to the record buying public, the 1995 release of the second in their continuing Switched On series โ gathering up odds and sods of non-album material โ would suggest a band at the peak of their powers. Internally, however, things were very different.
โIt was a difficult timeโ reflected Tim Gane to the Guardian in 2019, โthere was a lot of bad feeling, a lot of relentless touring.โ Mars Audiac Quintet had felt like as far as the group could take their formula of motorik rock and lounge-y avant-pop. For about a year, almost everything they tried seemed to be another creative dead end. Recording sessions had been a disaster. โIt was bass and saxophone and drums playing nearly the same riff for eight minutesโ remembered Gane, โthe engineer was like, youโre going to sell three copies.โ
The band had hit an impasse, and something had to give. Always one to keep busy, Gane had been invited to cover a track by 1960s psych pioneers the Godz, alongside bands like Comet Gain and the Apollos for tribute compilation Godz Is Not A Put-On. Listening to the track, ‘ABC’, it might sound fairly unremarkable โ probably one of the least interesting recordings Stereolab put their name to around that time โ but this throwaway cover would unlock the door to the brightest purple patch in their recording career. This is the stuff we talk about when we talk about Stereolab.
Like Remain In Light or Kid A, a change of approach opened up completely fresh pathways. Itโs very easy to see how Stereolab could have become something that peaked with ‘French Disko’ or ‘Jenny Ondioline’ โ instead, Emperor Tomato Ketchup would be one of the few 1990s rock albums that could look its contemporaries in hip hop or electronica in the eye. More than this, it was the supposedly retro, supposedly backward looking Stereolab who were doing it. It created a formula that they would then apply to glitchy electronica with 1997โs Dots And Loops, and their outlier avant-garde masterpiece, 1999โs Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night.
Gane took a four-note phrase from the original track and began to loop it, and then added a drum track and looped that too. Hardly revolutionary for the mid 1990s, but for Gane it had become a lightbulb moment. What if he applied the same logic to his own band? โIt was at the point when the rhythm went down that I had an insight into how to crack open something new in the musicโ explained Gane in the liner notes to the 2019 reissue of Emperor Tomato Ketchup. The motorik rhythm on which Stereolab had been founded had driven them into a corner, but suddenly โ thanks to looping small cells of music and building interlocking rhythms and ideas โ the possibilities were endless.
“It was like youโd come from a cave, or across a mountain, and there was another totally different landscape, like on the original Star Trek where every day you could look forward to going to a new star systemโ explained Gane to the Guardian. It began a period โwhere everything you try kind of works. Thereโs no bad door โ whatever one you go through, itโs another kind of greatness. It was a very โupโ period for meโ.
John McEntire had first met Stereolab when his then band, Gastr Del Sol, had opened for them in his native Chicago. He quickly recognised the group as kindred spirits โ speaking to the New York Times in 2019, he remembers being struck by Ganeโs โtotally encyclopedic knowledge of everything, and this is not an exaggeration at allโ. McEntire would shortly form Tortoise, releasing the excellent ‘Gamera’ single on Stereolabโs own Duophonic label the same year as Mars Audiac Quintet โ but really, McEntire wanted to record with The Groop. At the end of July 1995, with a whole album of new material demoโd, mostly using Ganeโs new writing method, Stereolab flew out to Chicago. Most of the album would be recorded at McEntireโs Idful Studios. โWe were excited to be in a new environment and working with the new friends we had madeโ wrote Gane in the Emperor Tomato Ketchup liner notes, “the whole thing about working with John at Idful was to be about exploring any and every kind of sonic possibility we wanted toโ. After sessions, the band and McEntire would hang out at the Rainbo Club directly below the studio โ commemorated in the Dots And Loops track โRainbo Conversationโ.
Many critics would pin Emperor Tomato Ketchupโs startling opening track, Metronomic Underground, on their new producer โ Gane was keen to stress that the track had been written fully prior to flying Stateside. ‘Metronomic Underground’ is the first serious vindication of Ganeโs new writing method. Until this point, Stereolab had always sounded like a guitar band โ though Laetita Sadier may have regarded shoegazers as Thatcherites, in the early 90s Stereolab made sense as part of a recognisable group of guitar acts. This would no longer be the case, Ganeโs new writing method rendering them more singular, especially in the plodding Britpop mid-90s.
Letโs start with how ‘Metronomic Underground’ sounds. For starters, itโs a lot like Gil Scott-Heronโs ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. Itโs also a lot like Yoko Onoโs ‘Mind Train’. Listen to Nancy Sinatraโs ‘Drummer Man’, especially the drop around the two minute mark, and you can hear that same groove. In 1994, if you bought Warpโs celebrated Artificial Intelligence II compilation then youโd be confronted with the slightly hip hop, slightly Krautrock throb of ‘Arcadian’ by Link โ and it sounds a little like that too. Where Stereolab records had previously tended to be crammed full of mid-range frequencies, the track begins unusually sparse โ the bassline holds with Samurai stillness as a conveyor belt of sonics pan left to right, creating and dissipating tension like a good dance record. It sounds like a band performing their own remix (a great idea for any indie band, really), its dubby sonic games with space and phasing earning it the working title Chrome Tubby.
The first vocal you hear on the album isnโt Laetita Sadier but Mary Hansen, introducing a two-part harmony between Sadier and Hansen that had arrived at a real sophistication by this point, inspired heavily by Brazilian music and sounding quite unlike anything else in Western pop. Emperor Tomato Ketchup would be the first album written and demoโd specifically with their vocal interplay in mind. Sadierโs lyrics, incanted with glacial coolness, are unusually Dadaist, throwing the track even further off-kilter. โCrazy, sturdy, I torpedoโ is repeated before a meditation on the vacuous and the infinite. During the bandโs painful creative impasse, Sadier had been turning to the I Ching – โit can tell you scary thingsโ she told the Guardian in 2019, “Itโs a harsh book” โ which fed into ‘Metronomic Underground’s lyrics. Discussing Stereolabโs great leap forward to Melody Maker in 1997, Sadier would jokingly compare their work with another key band of the era. โLook at Oasis, they have one song. No, they have two songs. But we have three.โ She isnโt really wrong – ‘Metronomic Underground’ would introduce lengthier, funk based pieces to the Stereolab oeuvre, which would become a key lynchpin of their work from that point onwards.
When the artist Charles Long was creating his abstract, poppy, slightly phallic sculptures, he liked little more than to listen to Stereolab at full volume. With an exhibition coming up at New Yorkโs Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, he invited Stereolab to collaborate โ they would create a piece of music for each installation in the exhibition. The brief presented a useful creative challenge to the group, forcing them towards a stillness that had previously been absent in their work โ the resulting EP, Music For The Amorphous Body Study Centre, is some of the best work they ever produced.
Sean OโHaganโs strung arrangements would be matched by burgling electronics, equal parts playful and optimistic. ‘Cybeleโs Reverie’ continues what they started on that EP to devastating effect โ one of the most singular and straightforwardly pretty moments in the Stereolab back catalogue. Closely inspired by French ye-ye pop, it is โ by the Groopโs standards โ a very simple, structurally classic piece of writing. Sadierโs lyrics, roughly translated, focus on childhood, asking what to do when weโve done, read, drunk and eaten everything in human experience, and contrasting that with the purity of the childhood experience. “Childhood is much nicerโ she sings in the verses, “childhood brings the magical.โ It would be the albumโs lead single, underlining the extent to which Gane and Sadier had โ to use the rock journalism clichรฉ – transcended their influences.
โOne set of people canโt believe weโve made such a pop recordโ said Sadier to Melody Maker at the time, โand another set of people canโt believe weโve made such an experimental record.โ This duality gets to the heart of Stereolabโs appeal, and nowhere is that duality better expressed than on ‘Percolator’ โ the pop and the experimental, the head music and the body music, in perfect symbiosis. Another early fruit of Ganeโs new writing technique, its 5/4 time signature gives it a nervous feeling, emphasised by its noodling, proggy bassline and stabs of dissonant jazz chords โ not to mention Ray Dickartyโs excellent saxophone part. You can draw a line from that Godz cover to ‘Percolator’, it does many of the same tricks, yet somehow creates brilliant pop from the discord.
Though Emperor Tomato Ketchup would mark the end of Stereolabโs affair with motorik rhythms – they would almost never be used afterwards โ tracks like ‘Les Yper Sound’ and ‘Emperor Tomato Ketchup’ are the bandโs best, most interesting expressions of that beat. Where earlier records had seen a piledriving motorik beat slathered in distorted guitars, here the sonic surfaces are crystal, wipe-clean. Gane was bored of the rhythm guitar heโd applied to that beat across previous albums, and asked McEntire to filter his guitar through synthesisers, rendering it crisply unrecognisable.
Stereolabโs interest in electronic music, always there, was dominating the group by this point โ indeed, itโs this interest that affords Emperor Tomato Ketchup its modernity, such was the speed and flamboyance with which developments in those genres had overtaken rock by the mid-90s. ‘OLV26’, which sounds like Suicide, genuflects to popular electronic musicโs year zero by looping a phrase from Kraftwerkโs ‘Autobahn’ (this would then be used as part of Stereolabโs ear-splitting 1997 Nurse With Wound collaboration Simple Headphone Mind).
One of the most interesting sub-plots across subsequent Stereolab albums would be their interest in 20th century American minimalism – this begins in earnest with the syncopated guitar part that drives ‘The Noise Of Carpets’, coming quite obviously from Steve Reich. Gane remembers recording the track, sat eyeball to eyeball with John McEntire to maintain timing. The only straight-up guitar track on the record is ‘The Noise Of Carpets’, a terrific and brief blast of power pop that sounds more like Buzzcocks than anything, complemented with Sadier and Hansenโs dual vocal attack, relishing in a takedown of 90s โfashionable cynicism.โ
Stereolabโs politics made them outliers in the post-ideological, end of history 1990s. Political indie in the preceding decade had failed to achieve anything interesting even on its own terms – held back by its formal traditionalism, nostalgia and Old Left earnestness. Few had tired of political indie more than Tim Gane, one of its active participants as the guitarist in McCarthy. From its politics to how they approached the music industry, much of Stereolab was a reaction against Ganeโs experiences in that band.
โFor most people politics in music means Billy Braggโ said Gane to NME in 1996, โand thatโs why I hate most political bands. The association is always with bands who havenโt had the imagination to combine the music with the lyrics.โ
Sadierโs lyrics would prove a thrilling counterpoint to this. Both literally and metaphorically a child of May 1968, Sadier went for the philosophical over the domestically political, and cited texts like Guy Debordโs The Society Of The Spectacle as an influence. She understood that form and function had to collide, and began to hone a talent as an effective, memorable and witty political lyricist. Fresh from the success of having nearly brokered an explanation of the Kondratiev Wave into the top 40, Sadierโs political writing is at its most focused on Emperor Tomato Ketchup. She observes how institutions designed to serve society end up reversing that relationship (โTomorrow Is Already Hereโ), how capitalism divides and conquers (โLes Yper Soundโ) and probing the bluff and confidence trick of late capitalist society (โMotoroller Scalatronโ). Simple messaging, repeated phrasing, plenty of question marks โ Sadier’s work has all the hallmarks of effective political communication. Juxtaposition was sonically always one of Stereolabโs great powers, and what Sadier achieves here is a forcing of political content into pretty melodies that were previously unused to such company. Alongside certain psychedelic soul records, itโs only really Stereolab that allows me to luxuriate in imagining a better society, how it might feel, look, what we might do. And if it doesnโt do this for you, itโs certainly more perceptive than the other path politics and pop music was on by 1996 โ Noel Gallagher’s eyebrow raising declaration at that yearโs Brit Award stage that only seven people were giving hope to young people in the UK, and those people were the 1996 lineup of Oasis, Alan McGee and Tony Blair. La resistance!
Of course, we now know that life inside the Lab was a little less harmonious than it may have appeared at the time. โTim took most of the artistic decisions in terms of writing, composition, arrangementsโ explained Sadier in a 2015 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, “and I had no say. I did want to write songs.โ Furthering this in a 2019 interview with the Guardian, Sadier explained, โthat was the contract that I did not know I was signing with Tim, that he would control the music absolutely and entirely.โ Sadier clearly had plenty to offer, and itโs worth reflecting on what could have been had her input been better expressed in the Groop. โI would hear the songs on a four-track demo, and their power and their essence, and I felt, this is beautiful. There was a way of working that was very industrial and mass produced, and that was really driving me crazy.โ Gane maintained control over Stereolab musically until their split in 2009.
Once the album was completed, Stereolab brokered a deal with Elektra Records who would release the record globally, whilst domestically it would still be released by the bandโs own Duophonic imprint (owned three ways, to this day, between Gane, Sadier and manager Martin Pike). Elektra afforded the group total creative freedom. Its album title would be lifted from an experimental Japanese film by Shลซji Terayama, whilst its artwork would be heavily inspired by the sleeve design of an LP of the music of Hungarian composer Bรฉla Bartรณk.
Though Stereolab had a complicated relationship with the music press โ not least in Sadierโs native France โ reviews for Emperor Tomato Ketchup were glowing. โThis is what all those years toiling away in the lab were forโ wrote Ted Kessler, reviewing the album for NME, โall their equations finally make sense.โ Simon Reynolds, one of the bandโs most consistent champions, declared the album the work of an โinspirational one-off… trying to pull off this same miracle would be pointless and redundantโ. Reynolds was right, but Stereolab were beginning to emerge as a powerful influence. Britpop had rendered Stereolabโs work that bit more singular, more separate, and around this time a disparate group of crate-diggers and musicians began oscillating around the Groop. You can hear the immediate influence in Plone, Stereo Total, Labradford, Quickspace Supersport, though the very best of these would be Broadcast, whose Book Lovers EP would be released by Duophonic the same year as Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Something was in the air intellectually too โ in 1997, you could watch Jonathan Meades on BBC Two asking many of the same questions that Stereolabโs music posed, like what happened to our vision of the future? By the mid 00s, these ideas were everywhere โ the films of Adam Curtis, the blogs of Mark Fisher, histories by writers like Andy Beckett and Owen Hatherley. Stereolab caught an idea that endures to this day.
โWeโre working at setting a precedentโ explained Sadier to John Mulvey in NME as Emperor Tomato Ketchup was released, โthatโs how you move along. You need some bands to just make a joint. My Bloody Valentine were a joint, and prior to that the Velvet Underground. Maybe weโre one of those joint bands that make things go a notch in a different way.โ Stereolab were unlucky in their timing, but this happened all the same. Almost as soon as they split in 2009, their stock began to rise and rise. The bigger slumps and bigger wars and smaller recoveries that Sadier had hypothesised had come to pass. Similarly, an early 2010s psychedelic revival in the UK proved to be a busted flush, but did create a ready audience who quickly gravitated to Stereolab. In the last decade, you can hear the ricochet of Stereolab in thrilling records by Jane Weaver, the Orielles, Vanishing Twin, Kit Sebastian, Whyte Horses, even in UK jazz like Tara Clerkin Trio. Thank God, then, for that Godz compilation.
First published 15/03/21
