| If, according to the well-worn proverb, cynics are merely frustrated idealists, Stereolab should be the most bitter band alive.
Since forming in 1991, the durable British groop have modeled themselves after the wide-eyed worldview of the post-war, space-age nuclear family, in nervous but cheerful awe of a future that could never be as bright as our daydreams promise. Using styles of music that were never a part of the accepted rock lineage – bossa nova, French pop, ’60s easy listening, freeform German krautrock – Stereolab’s near-faultless catalogue is one long, blissful hallucination of a better tomorrow.
Of course, the future rarely becomes what we hope for – a hard lesson that Stereolab recently learned as a result of especially hard circumstances. Margerine Eclipse, the band’s eighth studio full-length, was recorded in the aftermath of two events that would bring most bands to a swift finale. First, founding members Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier split as a couple after close to 15 years together. Then, in December 2002, guitarist Mary Hansen, whose childlike trills provided a trademark counterpoint to Sadier’s caramel-rich lead vocals, was struck by a truck and killed while riding her bicycle in London. At the time, Gane was equipping Stereolab’s new studio outside of Bordeaux, France.
Yet, miraculously, Margerine Eclipse is seemingly the sound of musicians energized by tragedy, determined to draw the best from a bad situation. Longtime fans say it harks back to the comparatively simpler, brisker (and, some would argue, better) style of the band’s early records, before 1997’s masterful Dots and Loops unveiled the soft-edged, lushly orchestrated thread they’ve been pursuing since.
Speaking from London, Gane good-naturedly disagrees.
"As much as people say all our records sound alike and this is a return to our ‘normal’ sound, I don’t listen to it like that at all," he says. "You can’t escape what your obsessions are. In music, I like the juxtaposition of a set number of elements and I like working in a smaller area, but quite extensively. I can’t switch to suddenly writing music to what other people think. So, of course certain elements are going to be the same, but I don’t know anyone that does change radically over time and still remains interesting."
Gane reveals that he approaches each album with the express intention of finding a fresh way to manipulate his music. Sound-Dust (2001) was deliberately dense ("a blurred, imprecise feel," he says). The title of Dots and Loops is self-explanatory, each track having been built up from a brief loop recorded onto computer.
"The songs have always had a certain malleability to be stretched and moved in all sorts of different ways," he continues. "I always have to have another series of obstacles, because that will bring out the element that I’m looking for."
That said, the initial concept for Margerine Eclipse was that it wouldn’t have one. "We were about to begin to build the studio, so the idea was that I would write the songs very quickly. The studio would probably be quite basic and primitive, and I concentrated on writing quite simple, catchy songs without any kind of connection between them. There was no real intent to develop any kind of sound world that exists on albums like Sound-Dust and (1995’s) Emperor Tomato Ketchup. It was just a collection of stuff."
This tactic was also meant to prevent the band from becoming victims of the limitless freedom provided by their own studio. "I know the idea is that if you have your own studio you can tinker about like Pink Floyd for nine years," he says, chuckling, "but it wasn’t like that at all. Everything was so delayed that we were raring to go. We didn’t have any days off.
"It was originally planned that we play it more or less live, but about eight months later, when we actually began to record the album, with all of the things that had happened, I just didn’t want to do that anymore."
It was then that Gane hit upon the simultaneously quaint and radical idea of recording Margerine Eclipse as two independent parts, one for the left ear and one for the right. "Nothing exists on the left speaker that exists on the right – they’re totally separate. You could listen to them separate or together," he excitedly explains. "I’d been working on a couple of remixes and I’d been thinking of the question of space: how to have the space to allow the nuances of ideas and the layers connecting to each other, and how to have a lot going on but not be so dense. So, this was a way of solving that problem – I feel that the record is a lot more relaxed because tracks just exist in their own areas and the relationship is a slightly different one to what you’ll get on a normal stereo record.
"I like these kinds of games and puzzles. For us, it makes some of our most interesting music." |
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