The Groop Played ... Well, Whatever The Hell It Wanted

With a brilliant new album -- Sound Dust under its belt, Stereolab has proven once again that it makes music one way: its own. A conversation with 'lab main man Tim Gane

By Sean Flinn | January 4, 2002 Kinda blue: Tim Gane on stage with Stereolab in Solana Beach, Calif., November 13 2001. Buy Stereolab's music Visit Stereolab's Web site Visit Stereolab's Label Elektra Records I'm sitting backstage at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, Calif. with Tim Gane, Stereolab's founding songwriter, guitar player and main ideologue, and we're lying to one another. Gane is pretending to give me direct, concrete answers to my questions about his band's work methods, its history, its fondness for certain producers, and I'm pretending to believe him. We're going along like this, happily, because approximate truths are about as close as one can get to nailing down anything about the group. For a band whose "sound" is, at least to its fans and serious observers, instantly recognizable regardless of album or song, Stereolab is surprisingly mercurial. Listen closely to any two of their albums back to back, and the differences between them will begin to reveal themselves. The instruments are balanced differently; their owners play with rhythm like Maceo played with James Brown. They paint with a broad palette of tone and mood; they wrestle with a broad range of social issues. Try to pin them down on their much-vaunted ideological concerns, and they'll make a quick, slithering turn out from under you, claiming, as Tim Gane did during our conversation, that they never felt the way you deduced they felt. You've been misled. You're mistaken. Boom, flash, look at the monkey. Stereolab has slipped away again. And yet, they remain recognizable, almost iconically so, because, wherever they wander, they're sure to leave clues to their whereabouts. While perhaps not card-carrying Commies, they do -- or at least, vocalist Laetitia Sadier's lyrics do -- consistently espouse a firmly left-of-center stance on everything from the efficacy of war in resolving international disputes (see: "Ping Pong" from Mars Audiac Quintet or "Les Yper Sound" from Emperor Tomato Ketchup) to the merits of socialized medicine (or rather, the lack of merit in most things commercial). Heavy shit, all of it, but rendered light as gossamer by their musical arrangements, which borrow liberally (small "l") from Latin jazz, exotica, modern composition, avant garde electronic music and, yes, good ol' rock 'n' pop. Heavy lyrics, digestible tunes. That's the key right there: subversion is Stereoloab's calling card. That's what audiences identify when the group plays live. It has to be, because Stereolab sounds different every time it plays; the last time the group made the trek from its native England (vocalist Sadier is from France) to play the Belly Up (in November of 1999), it leaned heavily on synths, laying down a smooth, slightly jazzy drone that coated the venue in rich warmth. And when it returned to town this past November, to showcase the songs from its most recent album, Sound Dust, it stripped back the Moogs and favored slightly bouncier, grittier arrangements heavier on guitar and more aggressive in their musical attack. Not punk, but not lounge. Maybe the best word would be "poignant," since their punch and vibe and lyrical bent favor the current schizophrenic mood of the world right now: we're desperate for hard news, but equally desperate for "comfort food" entertainment. Stereolab may be the only group in the world capable of satisfying both urges at once. Still, it remains resistant to convenient analysis, as Gane made deceptively clear to us during our little chat. Sean Flinn: The first questions I have deal with the new album, Sound Dust. How long did you guys spend putting it together? Did you approach it differently than previous albums - and if so, how? Tim Gane: OK, the first part of the first question, the answer is: about four months, four-and-a-half months, something around about that. We were there [in Chicago, at Soma Electronic Music Studio] from October [2000] through to February recording and mixing. We came back [to England, where they reside] for Christmas and New Year's. It's about the same as what we normally do, or have done on the last three or four records - maybe two weeks longer or a week longer. But our way of working is really kind of slow, so it seems like a long time. We don't have the songs written other than very basic stuff written on a cassette recorder, which contains a lot of the stuff that you'll hear, but it's never rehearsed and the other guys don't get to hear it until we go in there. So it's just a question of a lot of that time you're spending thinking about what to do and how to approach it. The second part would be: it's very difficult to ascertain, for me, whether we approached the record in the same way, because in a technical way, a practical way, they're always the same. I write the music kind of loosely. I just write the basic chords, melodies, sometimes bass, sometimes little instrumental things -- but pretty simple -- and I try to keep it open. So, in terms of how I did it, I did it the same: I did it on a cassette recorder, and so on. But in terms of, like, an idea of the sound or a concept of the sound, it's different. Every record is different. The methodology is, I'm trying to think of new ways to approach ideas that I have and ideas that I want to come back to, I suppose, but I'm always trying to put them in a new way or a slightly different language or a slightly different environment. So, I think that the basic beginning point is always very different. It depends on how you look at it. I know you recently told Play Louder magazine that you'd designed Sound Dust to be a little bit more approachable, as opposed to something like Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, which you had dubbed - at least in this interview - as being a little too introspective and a little too long. " The idea that we'd make a record to be more commercial or sell more records is never true and certainly wasn't true of this record ... " Yeah, but I mean … that's true, but in the sense that what I was trying to say was that I don't judge [Cobra and Phases …] badly for being that. I'm just saying that that's what it was and that's what came out at the time, because that's how we were, and that's what comes out. I don't judge records on a scale of commerciality or approachability. On this record, I just felt that a lot of what people said about the last record is that it was a bit sprawling and a bit long. It's true. But it was OK for that record, I think. Maybe in that respect I would have changed it, but being retrospective about it is kind of pointless - you just do what you feel at the time. But I didn't want to just do that again, so I did have an idea of - well, it wasn't just me, it was Laetitia as well, and everyone - that we'd maybe try and keep it to around an hour or so, so people have a chance to be able to get into the music and not find it such an epic Charlton Heston movie. That was it, really. There was no real attempt to make things more approachable in terms of the music. The music came out how it came out - and I don't know what's going to come out. So the idea that we'd make a record to be more commercial or sell more records is never true and certainly wasn't true of this record, because I just don't know what going to happen. It's really just work from a very intuitive level, and I'm not thinking of audience or thinking of opinions or thinking of record labels or record sales. It just absolutely doesn't enter my head. What is it about Sean O' Hagan that keep you guys coming back for more? I know, from what I've read recently at least, that you guys really kind of share a fondness for the Beach Boys - but what is it about his working style that draws you back to him as a producer? I think he's amazing because he's very able to tune into ideas quite precisely and, without lots of explanation, really get to the heart or the essence of an idea just by listening to something. He's very enthusiastic, and he's very good at tweaking and adding some layers and levels to ideas which were already there in order to make them blossom out - and he always does it very intuitively, or in tune with the ideas that I have. So for instance on this record, he came over and played a lot of keyboards and so on - which were the chords [that Tim had written beforehand] - but he's great with keyboards. I don't play the keyboards, I just play the guitar, so I'm trying to say, "Well this is this, but I'm trying to have this feel from it which is not the same as this version of it." And he understands that! He's always trying to go with that, and it's very good to have him say what he thinks. We have good conversations about stuff like that. He knows very much how I work, and he's very quick in understanding things. He's amazing. I don't know anyone who's as quick as him. Vocalist / lyricist Laetitia Sadier croons at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, Calif. And, for instance, on this record, I had an idea of the brass -- it wasn't what the brass was playing, but I kind of wanted a statuesque column of brass coming in at one point on the first song, against kind of floaty music. And I might say that, but I don't actually do that. He does that. But when he came back with the [arrangement], it was more than I wanted. He's just good at progressing with the ideas as well. I think it's a shame that, in talking with people, they get the idea that Sean and Jim O'Rourke and John MacIntyre have this one thing that they do, and you can go to them for that reason. And that's not true. They're able to turn their hands at any kind of stuff, really, and try to find what is the best, or most interesting way forward. I really think that, when we are actually working with these people, it's totally different than what people imagine. We don't use Sean because we want a harmony / Beach Boys thing, we don't use John because we want a Chicago sound, and we don't want Jim because we want a late '60s West Coast arrangement style. We use them because they have very interesting ideas, and they're very good players and we have a good time and they're good friends. I couldn't think of other people more suitable for us to use, you know? And it's not because we want to keep doing the same thing. I think all the records we've made with John are, sonically, very different. I don't see that Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Dots and Loops and Cobra … and Sound Dust are that closely aligned, sonically. I think they're all quite different. Cobra … it was a real hard slog to get anything out of that record technically, because we had to record it in London and the studio we found was actually someone's house. And when we got there, the gear was totally full of MIDI music. So we had to change absolutely everything, and buy stuff and re-boot it. And, it there were just so many technical problems to overcome. I don't think the first week we spent with Jim anything was recorded. It was all just trying to make things work. So that album suffered a little bit, in my opinion, sonically just because it was such a struggle to overcome basic things. And when we actually got around to doing the music, it was like, "Whatever. Just get on with it. It sounds fine. It's not right, but I want to get something done because in two weeks we've done a couple of drums and we need to get nervous about it." | Next