This Is Not A Surrender

Sermons! Special Select Vol 11: Stereolab: Deeper Frequents Radiating From the Echoplasm 1991-1999

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re back.

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I.

I did try.

I looked into alternatives. I asked myself questions. I asked friends their thoughts.

And now, I’m back in your inbox / on your desktop.

That story isn’t interesting. Technology didn’t work the way I wanted it to, the alternatives cost me money I couldn’t justify, and an ethical internet is a mythology. Once you claim a hill, there are more, bigger ones to die upon.

Since I wasn’t ready to completely disconnect myself, here we are.

A reset.

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II.

I was stunned earlier this year when Stereolab awakened from deep slumber and released an album. I think it’s a good album, one that drops right back in like they hadn’t quit for ten years. I’m not a music journalist and I don’t think I’m one to write about that. Loop did this too, when they released Array and then Sonancy after a twenty year departure. My Bloody Valentine may have led the way with this kind of necromancy, although the m b v album never landed with me. I think about three of my favourite bands essentially being eternal, music existing continually somewhere else that occasionally crosses the threshold of time space into our world.

Stereolab recently toured North America as well, and I hadn’t given much thought to seeing them. I’ve seen them enough times throughout the 90s that I’ve had to think about how many times I’ve seen them to actually give a definitive answer.

I think I’m now at number seven. Because the morning of, an old friend texted me to tell me he’d bought me a ticket for my birthday and had chosen not to surprise me for months. So we went, and I’m glad and it was so much better than I was anticipating—I had stopped seeing them around 2001 because I felt they just weren’t a live band anymore.

Something that stuck out for me in their set was the song, “Motoroller Scalatron”, from the Emperor Tomato Ketchup LP.

I hadn’t looked at the setlist prior, and although I’d been getting texts from friends in other cities telling me I’d love the set, it never dawned on me to look because I never thought I was going to go. I didn’t expect to hear that song.

III.

On the drive home after the show, I couldn’t get past my joy that they played it. The crowd had been a mix of old people like me, and young people not like me. Surprisingly I was the most visibly excited person around me during that song. After, I was thinking about there being two different fanbases, almost—kind of how there’s two different periods of Stereolab (even though it’s very much the same band). And my friend and I talked about that over cigarettes and beers. He got into them in the later, more expansive period—I had played him Dots and Loops, the album that is like their declaration of the future. I had been an early zealot upon hearing them, then seeing them, in 1993, when the were pushing their motorik-heavy Farfisa rock. My friend and I have had conversations about this schism. He has less relationship with the earlier material, and I have less with the later. I have still never listened to the albums they released after Margerine Eclipse. And I had a personal photograph of singer Laetitia Sadier in a frame on my nightstand for almost ten years.

Is this like The Reformation?

IV.

But back to that setlist.

Hearing “Motoroller Scalatron” had me thinking about Stereolab songs I have been going back to over the past few years, songs that weren’t necessarily the obvious ones. Their output is incredibly large, evidenced by the number of compilations of non-album tracks and tour singles. If I wanted to make someone a Stereolab mixtape—and I have made plenty—there is so much to choose from. I’ve never made the same mix twice.

For a few days after their show here, my friend and I sent songs back and forth, discussing their different band lineups during the 90s and how their sound shifted alongside their collaborators—like John McEntire and Sean O’Hagan, of the bands Tortoise and High Llamas. And so I had to make a mix that answered all my silly little thoughts about one of my favourite bands of all time. My goal here was to look at the period I love the most: Stereolab Phase I. I love how you can hear a sound forming and becoming a wave, before it crests¹, draws back into itself and emerges anew. But I wanted to look at that exciting decade through some of their B-sides, for lack of a better way to put it. Kind of like a Stereolab mix the zealots could appreciate too. I also wanted to show how they really were like a Lab, by including “Les Yper Sound” (a song they’d play live on the Later with Jools Holland, so not exactly obscure) along with the more experimental reworking “Les Yper-Yper Sound”. It’s that willingness to explore that makes me such a fan of the band. I hope you enjoy this. It’s about two hours long.

V.

This is also an art blog now. I’m currently retooling the Sermons! catalog of playlists. For this mix cover, I wanted to do something that visually accomplished what I felt Stereolab was doing during this period, and I tried to build a letter system from three basic shapes: circle, triangle, and square. Including the various experiments was an attempt to show how the idea progressed, something I think this playlist does with their sound. Only after I was finished did I see Vasilis Marmatakis’s poster for the film Bugonia. Oh well, I stand by what I made.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

1. Possibly my favourite Stereolab song, actually, the lyrics of which are the most hopeful and defiant of their whole catalog, a duality that defines their early career for me and what spoke to me so loudly:

If there’s been a way to build it / There’ll be a way to destroy it / Things are not all that out of control