ROYAL TRUX
Twin Infinitives
Melody Maker, November 9th 1991

By Simon Reynolds

Something wiggy this way comes… Royal Trux are Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty, the latter a refugee from Pussy Galore. There's some continuity between PG and Trux, but to apply the concept of "trash aesthetic" to Twin Infinitives would be to dignify it, imply a degree of coherence that isn't there. This isn't trash, it's garbled garbage, a spewed slew of cultural detritus that barely holds together as music. Sounds good to me.

If there are precedents, they're the early lo-fi Cabaret Voltaire (when the Cabs would cover Sixties garage psych group The Seeds, who made a career out of one riff) or the paraplegic rockabilly of Panther Burns. Broken blues or garage punk riffs jut out of a miasma of hissing, ultra-cheapo drum machine. On "Jet Pet", a contorted, funky wah-way riff recalls the Cabs' "Nag Nag", while the voice is mangled by a "futuristic" effect that's simultaneously naff and disturbing, like the purple rinse they used to put on T.Rex on Top of the Pops. In "Jim Versus the Vomit Creature", the gibbering hoodoo punkadelia of the Hombres is submerged under a million miles of reverb and treated hi-hat.

Elsewhere on this double album, Royal Trux regress even further, unleashing the sort of clamour made by a classroom of six-year-olds each given a simple instrument by their music teacher. "Chances Are the Comets In Our Future" is a hive of bedlam that sounds like jazz-less incompetents trying to mimic Sun Ra. Elsewhere, they sound like what would have happened if Elvis's Sun Sessions ever reached the Clangers' s planet. "Osiris" recalls Faust or Loop, a black inferno of techy guitars. The side-long "(Edge of the) Ape Oven" is less murky than the rest of the album; it's a "musaic" of incongruous, incompatible textures -- phased harmonia, shortwave radiation, fitful piano, dribbled half-wit vocals, deformed, disfigured guitar--that recalls Can's weirdest tracks on Unlimited Edition.

The more I listen to Twin Infinitives, the more I get gripped by the perverse logic that connects the apparently random spillage. This is the direction Amerindie noise should have taken after Daydream Nation and Hairway to Steven: everywhichway. Dance this mess around.




ROYAL TRUX, interview
Melody Maker, June 19th 1993

by Simon Reynolds

Royal Trux are the kings of fucked up shit. At once primitive and futuristic, low-down and far-out, Royal Trux are currently unrivalled as exponents of the avant-garage mess-thetic.

Having boggled to their unearthly records, it's hard to imagine Royal Trux as creatures of flesh-and-blood. But here they are, sitting opposite me in a cafe on St Marks Place, the Main Street of New York's bohemian East Village. Neil Hagerty
(guitar/voice/weirdstuff) looks disarmingly ordinary; his partner Jennifer Herrema (voice/otherstuff) looks more the part, with her extravagant blonde coiffure, sunglasses pushed right down to the tip of her nose, kooky rings, and mouth that hangs open when she's not talking. Together, they exude a strange, appealing aura-blend of space cadet and down-to-earth.

Royal Trux formed in 1985, while Hagerty was still playing guitar in Pussy Galore. Personally, I never much cared for PG's conceptual primitivism, their drive to distil rockabilly, garage punk and hardcore down to its teen-delinquent essence: fuck you!/let's get ripped/kick out the jams! But there's a lot of crossover over between PG and Trux. Hagerty played a instigating role in PG's obliterative cover of ALL of the Stones' Exile On Main Street. This feat of homage/vandalism pretty much set the tone for Trux's crush collision of classic rock cliches and freeform freak-out.

Hagerty and Herrema started Royal Trux to find "something not trendy, something we felt we could do forever". They felt that the New York downtown noize scene in 1986/87 was going nowhere. Trux's untitled 1988 debut (recently reissued by Drag City) sounds like an attempt to scrape back all the layers of rock history and critical knowledge, and recover the primal, thoughtless urgency of rock'n'roll. The result is hoodoo-voodoo garage punk and rockabilly more ghoulish than The Cramps' wildest dreams. Cadaverous blues riffs twitch and jive amidst spacey keyboard noodlings midway between Sun Ra's Disco 3000 and ? And The Mysterians' "96 Tears".

But Royal Trux really started to get attention with the follow-up, 1990's Twin Infinitives, an addled sprawl of inspired self-indulgence and lo-fi experimentalism that defies description. Comparisons with Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica or Can's Tago Mago apply only in so far that this formidably, forbiddingly unhinged record seems to have slipped free of the physical laws that govern terrestial music. In a sense, the album was recorded on another planet, in that it was the product of a combination of
"hermetic isolation" and systematic derangement of the senses. The album was recorded, over an extended period, in San Francisco, after the first of many Trux migrations ("the Tuaregs of rock'n'roll" is how Neil describes their nomadism). Here, the couple quickly made a number of enemies. "A lot of people were offended by us - we were pretty wild, when we weren't working on music we were just running
around, acting like assholes, and totally into getting fucked up."

At first, Hagerty and Herrema worked with a wannabe session guitarist and rudimentary drummer, playing endless versions of the same four-song set (Velvet Underground's "Cool It Down", The Godz' 'Radar Eyes", Gram Parsons' "Wheels", Louis Armstrong's "Oh Lizzy"). After six months, the musicians split, and Trux started fucking around with the rehearsal tapes, cutting and splicing, looping and
reversing them. They hit upon the idea of writing "basic, classic songs and combining them with totally random and unconscious music". By this point, with their isolation from society deepening and substance-intake soaring, Royal Trux had gotten pretty estranged from reality. They started writing songs based on books they were reading by Philip K. Dick and Thomas Disch, "real complicated science fiction, which we'd try to compress into three minute rock operas".

"Neil was trying to reach VALIS," recalls Jennifer, referring to Philip K. Dick's idea of a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. "Our windows had been smashed out, and we ran an aluminum foil antenna out the window attached to an FM receiver."

Neil: "We were into anything that was connected with that paranoia-is-really-enlightenment thing. Our idea was that the less conscious thought we put into the music, the more the random electronic gizmo element would take over."

Jennifer: "But underneath all the weird shit, we still had our roots, the music we loved at school like AC-DC, Led Zep, Stones. We still judged everything in terms of whether it was lame or rocking. Even the weirdest noises, we'd think: 'shit, this scrungy noise is lame, it's like the last Led Zep record!'"

And so songs like "Edge Of The Ape Oven" compact together kosmik sound-debris and crass rock riffs. Royal Trux pivots around the collision of The Cliche and the
Anti-Cliche (the hitherto unheard and unimaginable noise). Like other visionaries - Suicide, Faust, Fall - they combine minimalism and maximalism, repetition and randomness.

Given free use of a giant warehouse studio, the pair spent nine months recording Twin Infinitives, using a stack of cheesy effect pedals, a disintegrating guitar, a clapped out Moog synth, and other thrift-store instruments. The result is one of the most groggily disorientating records ever oozed, so crammed with nuanced delirium it'd take a lifetime to fathom. Amazingly, it garnered rave reviews,
although Jennifer remains sceptical: "I wanted to have X-Ray spex and see who really liked it enough to actually listen to it". Royal Trux became a touchstone of uncompromising avant-garage-ism for those dismayed by the shift towards the mainstream made by the likes of Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers.

Shortly thereafter, Royal Trux embarked on a calamitous tour of the Mid-West, documented on the video "What Is Royal Trux?". The pair pushed the confrontational nature of their thang to the point of physical altercations with audience members.

"One guy threw a beer at us, and Jennifer lept into the audience and smashed a mug over him", remembers Neil. "We could have been completely destroyed by this guy, we were so physically weakened." They'd travelled by train, in order to give themselves time to get psyched for the tour, but instead consumed their entire supply of drugs. "A lot of the weirdness of that tour was really biological," recalls Jennifer, dimly. "Weird sensations going through your body. Onstage, we were in altered states".

That seems to be a big part of Trux's music, communicating these uncanny physical sensations. Twin Infinitives make me imagine the effects of really trashy, low-level drugs - solvents, cough medicines, veterinary anaesthetics, poisonous plants.

Neil: "At the time, we were into this little head trip about non-mitigated communication between nervous systems. Like telepathy."

After Twin and the tour, a long gap ensued before Royal Trux recorded their third album (also untitled). Released late last year in the States, it's the first Trux album to get a proper UK release. It's far more accessible and stripped down than Twin Infinitives.

"We wanted to take what we learned from the second album but put back the obvious elements of rock'n'roll," explains Hagerty. "We weren't consciously trying to reach out to people, but we weren't trying to push them away, either". The result is still pretty eerie: imagine the druggiest dregs of Exile On Main Streetboiled down into this pitch-black, treacley goo.

The Exile analogy isn't purely textural: the album took two full years between conception and completion, because the pair had slipped into the mire of junkiedom. They finally banged it out quickly in early '92, after they'd quit drugs but were "still in that disorientated state". That the album is haunted by heroin is
abundantly clear from songs like "Junkie Nurse" and the hideously voluptuous imagery of "Blood Flowers", a metaphor for the pattern made by blood spurting out [into the syringe chamber] as the needle enters the vein.

Neil: "It wasn't a pose, y'know. It was our reality, although we were also aware of being part of a grand tradition. But that life brings out a lot of strange conflicts. Opium is still beyond the pale of our culture. Dope is also a good metaphor for control and escape."

So what is the, erm, appeal?

Jennifer: "Biologically, our bodies produce endorphins, painkillers. Heroin is an endorphin and it's much stronger than the natural ones. Everything becomes so much more appealing, life seems so less hard. In normal life, there's starts and stops, but on heroin everything seems to roll along. But although it abolishes anxiety, it
creates new anxieties: a whole new set of stops and starts."

Eventually, Hagerty and Herrema got fed up with the ups-and-downs, the exorbitant and manifold costs. "We'd reached the end of the line, started dealing a bit," admits Neil. "And you see people who are older, been doing it for years and it's not gotten any better, and you start to think. I went into a rehab and this counsellor told me 'you've been on drugs since you were a kid and you don't know what it's like to do things straight. If you could see the world when you're clean, it's like a new drug'".

The counsellor was 'pushing' reality and Hagerty took the bait. So is the third album a sort of 'goodbye to all that'?

Jennifer: "I'd like it to be so, but it just doesn't go away. It still lingers, probably always will." And heroin still affects their decisions: they'd like to return to New York, but daren't 'cos smack is purer and cheaper there than their current base, Washington DC.

The third album is just great, but the one you have to hear is Cats and Dogs, set for UK release in couple of months. Trux's most conventionally beautiful and undeniable record, Cats and Dogs is less jarring than its predecessors, more of a gorgeous dream-time blur. Stones raunch vaporised into a billowing fug of bluesy fumes, it'll have you swooning from a contact high. Recorded in a Virginian country home, with a proper band, it's at once organic and
disembodied, raw and spectral: a consummation/condensation of everything Trux learned doing the first three records.

The standout track, "Turn Of The Century", starts like the bottleneck blues on the soundtrack to "Performance", then crumples and wilts into dust-hazy ghost-town of sound. This and other songs like "Skywood Greenback Mantra" and "Up His Sleeve" have a dissipative, mirage-like quality not heard since Daydream Nation. But there's also one return to the avant-gardism of Twin Infinitives, with "Driving In That Car (With The Eagle On The Hood)", a clammy, creepy cenotaph of sound that fills your head with rippling, shimmering murk. With its junkshop synth and dub-like spatiality, "Driving" is a product of Trux's love of electronic music (Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire) and the trance-mantra tradition (Terry
Riley). Neil even used to be pals with techno whizz-kid Moby: there's so many more strings to this band than a Stones fetish.

When I ask what the song's about, though, I'm none the wiser.

"The title was something Jennifer used to chant onstage when she forgot the words," says Neil. "Finally we turned it into a song. It evokes for us some kind of movie Nazi driving around in a low-rider, with a big eagle on the hood. He's cruising downtown, and he's baaad!"

I haven't a fucking clue what they're on about (and out of kindness, I've spared you their baffling explication of "Turn Of The Century"). But that's what great about Royal Trux: they may be straight now, but they're still floating free way beyond terra firma, still broadcasting on a wavelength that barely translates into common
sense. Tune in and turn on to these drop-outs.


ROYAL TRUX
Cats and Dogs
Rolling Stone, September 2nd 1993

by Simon Reynolds

Demi-gods of the lo-fi underground, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux have released a slew of weird records since 1988. Most infamously unfathomable is the double platter Twin Infinitives, which ranks as one of the most out-there avant-garage albums of the past decade. Cats and Dogs is Royal Trux's fourth, and most accessible, LP so far, but it's still pretty disorientating. At its groggy best, it's the missing link between The Stones' Exile On Main Street and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. The Stones fetish dates back to Hagerty's first band, Pussy Galore, who once covered ALL of "Exile" in an extravagant act of homage/desecration.

Two words provide a handle on Trux. The first is junk: they're fond of using thrift-store instruments (decrepit, outmoded synths, cheesy guitar effects) and the pair used to be heroin addicts. The second word is dissipation. Hagerty and Herrema's voices sound drained, ghoulish, as though the years of druggy excess have left them ghosts of their former selves. Hagerty's guitarwork accentuates the wasted vibe--it seems to drift and dissipate like narcotic fumes. Tracks like "Friends" and "Skywood Greenback Mantra" slip back and forth between grinding, low-down raunch and woozy blues. Hagerty's elegantly sloppy solos ripple like heat-haze on the horizon.

Two songs stand out as Trux pinnacles. "Turn Of The Century" is a shimmering mirage of bottleneck blues, echoey piano and multitracked vocals gabbling spectral imprecations--a real ghost-town of sound. Cryptic and crypt-like, "Driving In That Car (With The Eagle On The Hood")" is a slight return to the experimentalism of Twin Infinitives. With its hypnotic trance-beat and clammy, cadaverous synths, the track recalls Suicide at its most sinister.

The futurism of "Driving" aside, Cats and Dogs offers traditionalism bent out of shape, so that it's less a case of Black Crowes-style homage and more like, say, The Stones from an alternate universe. Haunting, baffling stuff, and highly recommended.



ROYAL TRUX, interview
Mojo, March 1995

By Simon Reynolds


Rewind to 1990. Tiny US label Drag City releases Royal Trux's Twin Infinitives: four sides of garbled avant-garde weirdness, recorded on junk shop instruments under the influence of Phillip K. Dick's paranoiac sci-fi and what sounds like the entire pharmacopoeia of brain-frying chemicals. Oft compared to Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Can's Tago Mago and The Clangers, Twin Infinitives makes Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema the kool kings of lo-fi.

Fast forward to the present. Major label Virgin unleashes Royal Trux's Thank You, 39 minutes of low-down Sticky-Fingered raunch'n'roll, recorded live'n'smokin' by Neil Young producer David Briggs. Thank You looks set to propel Trux into the Black Crowes retro-boogie arena league.

"Wh'appen?" you cry.

Well, in between Twin Infinitives and Thank You, Trux released two brilliant albums (the haggard junkie-blues of Royal Trux; the avant-raunch of Cats And Dogs), expanded from odd couple to five-piece combo, and slowly got fed up with being the kind of hipster's choice that garners rave namedrops and minimal sales. So just how committed are they to reaching out to 'the people'? In the statement which accompanied advance tapes of Thank You, Hagerty actually invokes no less than Grand Funk Railroad as an ideal: a band loathed by critics but loved by America's rock heartland.

"It's just the fantasy of a certain attitude which that band had," drawls Hagerty. "Like when they titled one album Good Singin', Good Playin'. When I was a kid, my friend's older brother had 'cool' LPs in their collection, but Grand Funk and that brand of generic mid-Western rock band was their main source of musical nutrition."

The 'funk' in Grand Funk also seems to relate to where the Trux are at now. With it's sultry percussion and supple, rhythm-guitar-driven grooves, Thank You harks back to the early '70s when rock was still dance music, played from the hips.

"Our music used to be a head thing, now it's more physical. Most rock today is like a church service, everyone sitting down, but we like the idea of people dancing, in a total-release, dervish way."

Thank You resurrects the era when bands 'jammed' and pursued vital intangibles like 'feel' and 'vibe'. It was David Briggs who persuaded Trux to do it live. "We recorded almost all the album in a couple of days, with just a few overdubs and the odd fixed vocal," Briggs says. "I approached the album as if it was a gig, with stage-lighting, a full PA, letting the sound into the room. It was an exciting way to make a record."

So will the album turn Trux into stadium-rock stars? Maybe, maybe not. They're still an eccentric band, to say the least. Even when you can decipher Jennifer's elegantly wasted growl, the sci-fi-meets-dirty-realism lyrics are fairly unfathomable. Even after Hagerty's exegesis of "Sewer Of Mars", I'm none the wiser.

"It's about someone who's the lowest of the low, y'know. He's a sort of psychic scam artist. I got the idea when this guy invited us back to his house 'cos he had all this codeine. I saw this cane up against the door, that used to belong to the guy's dead wife. And I got up and kicked the cane over. The guy was really gratetful, he said I'd freed him of the psychic burden of his wife's cane..."

Perhaps those arenas will have to wait after all.



ROYAL TRUX, Thank You (Virgin)
LAUGHING HYENAS, Hard Times (Touch & Go)
Spin, 1995

by Simon Reynolds

Where could US underground rock 'go', after Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation reached the outer-limits of 'reinvention of the guitar'? Why, back to 'the source', of course--black R&B (and the late '60s/early 70s white appropriations thereof), in a quest to relearn the lost fundamentals of 'groove' and 'feel'. Hence the backwards journey taken by a new breed of blues fundamentalists like The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Come and Mule (formed, coincidentally, by two refugees from Laughing Hyenas). I can only marvel at the timelag syndrome that bedevils Amerindie's relationship with black music: unlike British bands, US rockers only seem comfortable venerating African-American pop when it's dead and buried, e.g. Big Chief vis-a-vis early Funkadelic. Doubtless, we'll have to wait twenty years before the US underground wakes up to the booty-coercing futurism of SWV, Craig Mack and Underground Resistance.

Just to make sure we know exactly where they're coming from, Laughing Hyenas namecheck Howling Wolf and John Lee Hooker in interviews, and insert the word 'blues' into not one but TWO songs on their new LP--'Hard Time Blues', with
its risible "I bin down since I could crawl" line, and the maudlin, country-inflected "Home of the Blues". The Hyenas used to be a noise-core outfit, whose sole distinguishing feature was the flamethrower vocals of John Brannon (who used
to sear ears in the ultra-taut hardcore unit Negative Approach). Despite their blues affectations, the Hyenas purvey what used to be called 'high-octane rock'n'roll', firmly rooted in the late '60s sound of their native Detroit; Brennon now sounds like Iggy if he'd been fixated on Jagger rather than Jim Morrison.

While the band can't swing for toffee, they do rumble effectively. But Brannon's slurred roar ('take me fo' a ride', 'reach out yo' han'', ad nauseam) has less to do with Robert Johnson than with The Stooges of "I'm Sick Of You" and "Not Right". If heavily-amplified, fuzzed-to-fuck self-pity is your particular cup of poison, drink deep. Me, I'll take my blooze bastardisation from those who take Ozzy rather than Muddy as blues-print, i.e. Alice In Chains (who could really make something of Hyena titles like 'Slump' and 'Each Dawn I Die').

Like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (that other offshoot of garage-skronk pioneers Pussy Galore), Royal Trux have at least earned the right to go atavistic. Having proved they can push the envelope (with the drug-damaged lo-fi chaos theorems of Twin Infinitives and the Exile on Main Street filtered through Daydream Nation of Cats and Dogs), it's only fair that Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema should be allowed to contract their raunch'n'roll to fit the contours of Black Crowes-style retro. On their major label debut Thank You, Trux retain the supple boogie glide of "Thorn In My Pride", the baleful thrust of "Remedy", but purge the hokey Humble Pie over-emoting that makes Crowes stick in craw. Thank You is Sticky-Fingeredto the max, its sinewy riffs, grinding bass and seething percussion harking back to 'Can't You Hear Me Knockin'?". What sets Trux leages above and beyond Laughing Hyenas is that they funk, in that fierce white-boy fashion that early '70s rock had down pat, but which punk extinguished when it replaced syncopation with thud-thud-thud.

Song-wise, Royal Trux don't really write tunes so much as riffs; Hagerty & Herrema's elegantly wasted unison drawl functions as a vocal equivalent to rhythm guitar, just another twist'n'tug factor in the all-important groove. Herrema's haggard croon (you can practically hear the nodes forming on her distressed larynx) is at its vicious best on "You're Gonna Lose"--offset by Hagerty's gloating backing
chorus, she expectorates the venomous put-downs, and proves herself one of the best "bad" singers since Alice Cooper circa "Elected". Overall, though, what with lyrics that are as incomprehensibly Philip K. Dick-like as ever, Thank You isn't about songs and singing, but grooves and guitar. The album was produced by David Briggs (who worked on many of Neil Young's '70s albums), and appropriately Hagerty's short solo on "Map Of The City" has a jalapeno-sting redolent of
'Southern Man'. Generally, Hagerty avoids the gaseous, mirage-like soloing that made Cats and Dogs such a gloriously narcotic haze, and concentrates on a rhythm/lead hybrid that's tres Keef.

Best comes last with the aformentioned 'You're Gonna Lose' and the snakehipped, sultry 'Shadow of the Wasp'. The highest praise you can offer Thank You is that it's like time travel. While this ultimately underlines the inadequacy of the Amerindie state-of-art (basically antiquarianism, or at best, lo-fi's retro-eclecticism), it also indicates that Royal Trux have made a muthafunkin' fine record.

BON JOVI / DIO / METALLICA / ANTHRAX / W.A.S.P.
'Monsters of Rock', Castle Donington
Melody Maker, August 29th 1987

By Simon Reynolds

For this festival-virgin, Donington was a brutal deflowering; as futile and squalid as I could have hoped for. I always used to enjoy the music press's ritual encounters with the unbudgeable stagnation of heavy metal: they don't happen so frequently these days, partly because the papers realized how pointless these confrontations were, partly because because of a certain critical rehabilitation of metal. Listening to HM records at home, it's possible to isolate, salvage and enjoy elements of power, aggression, noise. But in the festival-context, where you encounter the totality of the subculture, you're overwhelmed by the sheer size and span of its dumbness; as a critic with dreams and schemes you're chastened by the realization that the word 'rock' means totally different things for different people. For these people, it's a celebration of the lowliest aspects of existence, vaguely in the name of breaking free and being yourself and letting loose inhibitions. Festivals are a chance for these people to live out their version of rock'n'roll with a thoroughness that's just not feasible in everyday life.

A crucial element is mud -- for how else can you wallow? The preceding week was a sweltering blaze, but the weather's not about to let the side down, and Saturday obliges us with a downpour. Within minutes of arrival, I'm soaked to the skin. The soil around here is rich in clay; eerie maroon puddles abound, while the Exits and Entrances degenerate into treacherous slopes the colour of a working man's caff cup of char. A bloke loses his balance and toboggans thirty foot of quagmire on his belly. A plucky paraplegic headbanger tries to negotiate the slope in his wheelchair. Girls's bare legs are streaked with red slime; high heels sink hopelessly into the mud. Others have come prepared, wearing binliner souwesters, or huddling completely enshrouded in giant sheets of transparent PVC. Troll-like figures squat on leather jacket oases. A 15-year-old bloy lies prostrate, comatose, his dank stringy hair mingling with the murdered grass; a few inches from his lips, a small pizza-shape of vomit. Unconscious before even the second group have come on.

If most people here seem experienced (as festival-goers), in another sense Donington is a vast celebration of virginity (or at least chronic sex starvation) camouflaged. The crowd is a huge sea of gormlessness. There's a dearth of fanciable men. People are either chubby-chopped or hatchet-faced, blubbery or scrawny. Common syndromes include the unsuccessful moustache; the Viking look; blokes with receding hairlines who nonetheless endeavour to grow long, straggly locks. The women tend to be buxom wenches or Sam Fox clones; there's a lot of electric blue make-up about. Everyone looks as though they're from Saxon peasant stock--coarse fair hair; rude ruddy health or underfed sallow. Everyone looks oafish.

W.A.S.P., then, is probably more a case of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant than We Are (Active) Sexual Perverts. "Any of you rock heads come here looking for PUSSY???!" bellows Blackie Lawless, and there's a massive roar of assent -- desperate, brave-face, wishful thinking. Lawless leads chants of 'Fuck Like A Beast', then 'I Wanna Be Somebody' -- both hopeless, never-to-be-requited cri de coeurs. Then some "theatre": Blackie wheels on a gallows from which a semi-naked girl is chained by her wrists, flailing ineffectually. Blackie looks to the crowd, that familiar wide-eyed gape at the depths of his own depravity, the extent of his daring. He draws out a scimitar, looks round again as if to say "Shall I?". Dumpy traitors to the sex smirk along with their boyfriends at the naughtiness of it all. Blackie slits the girl's throat, drinks deep and turns to face us quenched, drooling gore; glazed eyes appeal to us to share his disbelief at the enormity of his own evil.



W.A.S.P. are staggeringly bad at what they do churning out a leaden, thudding sound that no amount of climactic guitar-smashing can redeem. ANTHRAX are superb. The irony of a group of anti-nuke pacifists who've named themselves after one of the most ghastly weapons of biological warfare, should be obvious. Like hardcore punk, which they closely resemble, there's an unacknowledged fetishisation of the very violence and oppression they denounce. Anthrax get high on the extremity of the language of war and apocalypse. It's as though only imagery that sensationalist is fit to accompany their music, which is located not far from the point where the exponential curve of velocity/noise hits vertical. Anthrax aren't about uninhibited wildness or release; they take the rhythm-as-manacle idea to its logical limit -- rock as supremely regimented, mechanized carnage. When Charlie Benate pedals the floor tom and bass drum it's like an abbatoir slipping gears and locking into a perpetual cycle of mutilation.



They're great fun. Scott Ian -- manically stomping around the stage - is one of the charismatic metal guitarists. They play "God Save the Queen", getting the HM audience to sing "no fewcha"; it's stronger than the Pistols version, but lacks the edge. Anthrax play a blinder, but get less applause than W.A.S.P., perhaps because they're "sexless". They're driven by a pure, almost hygienic fascination with speed and violence.

METALLICA are like Anthrax only heavier and harder. That might be good on record, but tonight at least it only means they're gruelling; a dismal slog. Their death machine grinds remorselessly, with none of Anthrax's kinetic grace. "Seek and Destroy" and "Master of Puppets" attain a certain pleasing level of punishment, riffs like meat-cleavers. The singer's inter-song banter involves appending the word "fucken" to every noun or verb.



Where Anthrax and Metallica are clearly units, Bon Jovi and Dio take their names from their "charismatic" frontmen. The bands are servile, relegated to a backing role. Both Ronnie James Dio and Jon Bon Jovi are as much totalitarians of passion as Mick Hucknall or Terence Trent D'Arby, histrionic and over-expressive. DIO are melodic metal, that's to say they traffic in melodramatic, structured songs rather than chanted hooks (in Anthrax's case, flechettes). Someone once described this kind of glam metal as tart rock: pretty, hygienic guitar, purple lyrics, operatic singing, poncing preening frontmen. I'm fascinated by this sub-culture where it's actually a sign of manliness to have flowing Silvikrin locks. Tart metal seems to be a kind of male soft porn which functions for the delectation of both the girlies and (covertly) the boy fans.

One last wander before Bon Jovi. There have been many appeals to rock'n'roll solidarity tonight ("We Are Rock'n'Roll Children", etc), but in practice it doesn't extend more than a few rows ahead of you. People are quite happy to sling one gallon canisters of liquid thirty yards through the air in order to deal someone a blow to the back of the head, in the process dousing everyone beneath the missile's trajectory with a comet's tail of beer, or worse, still-warm piss. As anticipation of the headliners grows, the bottles and canisters teem like spermatozoa in the night air. It's cold: people are lighting bonfires, standing in bedraggled, post-apocalyptic clinches. There are massive queues for the food stalls (vile greasy grub that is breaking out furiously all over people's faces) or toilets (the bowls are smashed, so most people urinate in copses or into empty beer bottles). I pass a Samaritans stall, and consider making a brief distraught visit. Cholera breaks out on the right flank of the crowd. It occurs to me that the Americans don't have events like this: true, they've got a stadium circuit, but perhaps only the British would put up with the torpor, the lousy facilities, would actually pay to stand up for over ten hours solid.

BON JOVI cocktease the audience. After a very long delay, giant vidscreens cut to… Bon Jovi's dressing room! Bon Jovi making their way through the backstage maze! A superb baiting of the breath. And then amid a fanfare of fireworks and dry ice… Bon Jovi descend a Ginger Rogers' staircase…

I enjoy everything about Bon Jovi tonight except their music. In this sodden, beleaguered context, the lasers, the slick bombast, the no-expense-spared showmanship were as welcome as Hollywood razzamatazz in the Depression. Everything must have been rehearsed with military precision, every pout, preen and strut, because it was video-taped, quick-cut and blown-up on the vidscreens as it happened. MTV was inflated to the dimensions of a circus. I enjoyed, so help me, Jon Bon Jovi prancing about on the top of the lighting gantry, enjoyed their guitarist's solo (it blended most pleasingly into the giant, ziggurat riffs of Zep's "Dazed and Confused"). But the music isn't heavy metal, it's harmony rock, all rococo synth and soul-rich singing (euucch!). The tunes are trite, as trite and appallingly sentimental as the philosophical and emotional repertoire of the band. The titles tell the whole, stunted story: "You Give Love a Bad Name" (the Bitch who "promised me heaven/gave me hell"), "Wild In the Street", "Tokyo Rose", "Together Forever" (a ballad about friendship as syrupy as anything by Lionel Richie).

Bon Jovi constantly refer to "rock'n'roll" but there's nothing here that fits my definition of rock - no sense of provocation, no idea of change or movement, no impossibilist reproach to the world and its limits. The fantasies here are perfectly feasible -- it's possible to live a monied playboy life of rocking out and screwing foxy chicks, it's just very very unlikely that any of their fans ever will. Bon Jovi aren't rock'n'roll, they are showbiz, and showbiz is all about the idea that the world is as it can only be. Metal bands may call their music "heavy metal" but really they deal in light entertainment: their job is take people's minds off things. Tonight, Bon Jovi did a damn good job of taking my mind off my wet feet and incipient hypothermia.

STEREOLAB
The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music
Spin, 1993

by Simon Reynolds

Stereolab is one of the more intriguing groups to emerge from Britain's now-kaput dreampop scene. And this mini-LP is the group's most artful gambit yet. The title and packaging is a sly parody-homage to the "exotica" genre of the '50s, when tropical-scented, easy-listening albums by Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, etc, were designed so that the modern bachelor could (a) show off the stereophonic range of his state-of-the-art hi-fi, and (b) get his date "in the mood" before making his move. It's a good joke, and a logical evolution for dreampop, since My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive et al. always made for a consummate seduction soundtrack.

Stereolab knows its musical history (it titled a recent single "John Cage Bubblegum") and on this album it explores the secret links between trance rock, ambient and Muzak. The result could be dubbed "kitschadelic": at once tacky and celestial, synthetic and sublime. On the opener, "Avant Garde M.O.R.", Laetitita Saider's serene and listeless vocals (midway between Nico and Astrud Gilberto) float through a fragrant mist of acoustic guitars, marimbas, and mood synths. "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Mellow)" could be the sort of jaunty, piped music you'd hear in a carpet store, but instead of being below the threshold of audibility, it's at full volume, so that its weirdness is in-your-face. The sequel, "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Foamy)" sounds like a Muzak vent that's fallen into a swimming pool.

The pace picks up on Side Two (New Wave), with "We're Not Adult Orientated". At first, the song's reedy Farfisa and staccato beat really do sound Noo Wave, but the track develops into something that's less like the Cars and more like the motorik style of the German band Neu!, a brimming, tingling, exultant onrush of sound that simulates the sensation of gliding down the Autobahn.

At times, Stereolab's parody of blandness is very nearly merely bland. But at its best, Stereolab is making the Muzak of the spheres.



STEREOLAB, interview
Melody Maker, July 16th 1994

By Simon Reynolds

The improbable magic of Stereolab resides in the partnership (romantic and professional) of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier. Gane is the boffin in the sound laboratory, tinkering away to create mutant hybrids like ‘avant-garde MOR’ and ‘ambient boogie’, gene-splicing Popol Vuh chords to a Canned Heat bass line. Sadier is the dulcet-toned chanteuse who sings about how capitalism is "not eternal, imperishable", like she’s the missing link between Francoise Hardy and Ulrike Meinhof. Improbably, Sterolab’s Marxist muzak and motorik mantras have become extremely popular.

Stereolab proclaimed their easy-listening fetish in the title of the first of their two LPs of ’93, Space Age Bachelor Pad Music. Subsequently, books like Research’s Incredibly Strange Music and Elevator Music have begun the rehabilitation of this stuff into the canon of ‘cool’ music. It’s suddenly very trendy indeed to collect Fifties and Sixties exotica, stereo-testing albums, moog records et al: all the stuff Tim has been exploring for over a decade. Does this dismay him?

"My only problem with Incredibly Strange Music," says Tim, "was that it seemed to be trying to attract people for trashy, quirky, kitsch reasons. They concentrated too much on the idea that ‘This is the wackiest music you’re ever gonna hear’. But I think it’s really good music, really extreme if you take it out of its context as background music. It did a lot of avant-garde things earlier than other more artistically serious forms of music did; it made shockingly original connections and juxtapositions of styles. A lot of the reason why it’s popular now is simply that it’s very modern music."

^^^^^^^^^^^

Tim first got into bachelor pad music when he was a fan of Throbbing Gristle, who had cited Martin Denny’s exotica as an influence on their "muzak for death factories". Now he knows the field inside out, and as I’d hoped, regales me with a succession of wonderfully bizarre tracks by legends like Perrey & Kingsley and Dick Hyman, my favourites being a moog version of James Brown’s ‘Give It Up Turn It Loose’, that sounds like Aphex, and what sounds like The Clangers playing ‘Louie Louie’ in the style of The Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’. It’s easy to see how you could get obsessed, especially as the sleeves and graphics and pseudo-scientific liner notes are such a gas.

Often the artwork depicts a bespectacled, grave-looking composer standing in front of an early synthesizer, a huge bank of dials, switches and meters. Similar ‘This is the future’ iconography appeared on the sleeves of Krautrockers like Cluster and Harmonia, and musique concrete composers like Pierre Henry. All this lends credence to Stereolab’s exploration of the hidden links between muzak, trance rock and avant-garde minimalism. The sleeve to their new single, ‘Ping Pong’, completes the chain; it’s another primitive synthesizer, warped through a psychedelic fish-eye lens.

"My big attraction to this music was that it was about the future. Cos it was done in the Fifties and Sixties, the idea of the future was quite crass – but also full of optimism and infinite possibilities. And that’s different from now, where the future isn’t about infinite possibilities at all."

What’s so delightful about Stereolab is the way they connect this disregarded, ultra-square background music with the ultra-hip canon of underground rock: the Velvets, The Modern Lovers, Faust, Neu!, Suicide. Of all the mantric dronologists, Neu! are the key source for the ‘Lab’s sound; they have that same sense of bursting but restrained optimism, a feeling of cruising steadily into a golden future. Stereolab use the motorik beat perfected by Kraftwerk and Neu!, an unsyncopated, uninflected pulse-rhythm.

"That metronomic beat is very important, and it’s really disliked by drummers cos it’s boring to play. It’s very strict and yet it’s wild, too. The travelling thing... I’ve always liked that state of going somewhere, the anticipation."

Is that sense of eyes-on-the-horizon, calm euphoria related to the politics in Laetitia’s lyrics, like ‘Wow And Flutter’, with its joyous certainty that capitalism is "not eternal, imperishable, oh yes it will fall"?

"I often think that what Tim and I do is completely polarised," says Laetitia. "Tim does something very simple musically, one chord with a twist, and then I write this really complex lyric. But both the words and the music are trying to look ahead, to progress, so yes, I think we have the same aim."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Stereolab's new single ‘Ping Pong’, is the classic sugared pill: irresistibly perky French Sixties pop with ba-ba-ba-ba-ba harmonies, coating some heavy-duty Marxist analysis. The chorus "Huger slump/Greater War/And then shallower recovery", is all about capitalism’s recurrent, structurally in-built crises.

Laetitia: "I had a discussion with a friend, and he was saying, ‘Capitalism is all right, cos recovery is in-built. There’s a slump then a war and then you have to rebuild everything and that stimulates a recovery.’ And he thought that was all right! I thought that was perfectly shocking!"

‘Ping Pong’ is Stereolab at their most exquisitely oxymoronic – subversive MOR – but it does make me wonder if the band are engaged in a rather rarefied and esoteric project. Is it really likely that they can enlighten anyone via such oblique strategies?

Laetitia: "It’s not that I want to change people’s minds... But I personally have been changed by Malcolm’s lyrics," – the latter being the lyricist in McCarthy, Tim’s previous group – "radically changed. Before, I just didn’t think about my environment or who was pulling the strings. So I’m hoping that if I can open one person’s eyes, then that’s enough."

"It’s very important to adopt a very critical point of view, both with music and with what you say in lyrics," adds Tim. "With us, it’s to do with finding out about stuff, pushing yourself a bit. I don’t know how important what we do is in a world perspective, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t do it."

"I was going to say something like ‘We are the world’," continues Laetitia. "But, y’know, everything you do is one little tiny thing better, or tiny little thing worse, in the world."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And so we talk about the pitfalls of politics in pop, about violent revolution (Laetitia believes that bloodshed is necessary), about Situationism and how the idealism of the late Sixties curdled into terrorism (literal, with the Baader-Meinhof, and cultural, with punk). Stereolab’s ‘contribution to the struggle’ may be subtle to the point of imperceptibility, at least by traditional combat rock standards, but at least they don’t simplify politics into slogans and low-com-denom platitudes. Instead their role is to complexify, puzzle, intrigue. Let’s call them eso-terrorists: their arcane games with music history, the abstruse, deathly dry wit of their song titles, are all an attempt to get the listener thinking, to foster a critical environment around the band rather than the poorly grounded solidarity and consensus that surrounds most political interventions in pop.

Although they hate to be contextualised, if the ‘Lab fit anywhere, it’s with the lo-fi – their current faves include Trumans Water, Smog, Sebadoh, LaBradford, Pram and Flying Saucer Attack. Tim prefers to use ancient, artificial-sounding drum machines as used by Cluster or Sly Stone, where there’s "no programming, you just press the ‘cha cha’ button... I like to use more archaic things and force them into NOW, as opposed to using instruments which give a ‘now’ sound, but it’s harder to do something original".

All this connects to Stereolab’s minimal-is-maximal aesthetic. Their prolific outpouring of EPs and LPs (the new one, the awesome Mars Audiace Quintet, follows ‘Ping Pong’ shortly) make up a seamless body of work which sounds "always the same, always different". Mining a narrow seam of sound, the ‘Lab unearth endless treasure.

"I don’t want to be eclectic, it’s about getting the fullest and deepest out of one area," concludes Tim. "Cos that restriction actually gives you more freedom."


CHARLES LONG & STEREOLAB: THE AMORPHOUS BODY STUDY CENTER
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
director's cut ArtForum, May, 1995

By Simon Reynolds

Within minutes of taking a seat at "Bubblegum Station", the centrepiece of this collaboration between sculptor Charles Long and UK soundscapers Stereolab, I enjoy a little epiphany. "Bubblegum" is an enormous mound of plasticine that the viewer is invited to mold and mark. I'm hacking off some pink stuff using one of the scalpels helpfully provided, and this guy gingerly sits at the next stool and starts grinning shyly at me. I take off the headphones (through which Stereolab's specially commissioned soundtrack is piped) and the guy asks: "Are you the artist?". I should have said 'yes', of course--since the very point of "Bubblegum Station" is to erase the distinction between creator and consumer--but instead I politely explain that we're all allowed to participate in a work-in-process. So the guy fiddles with a nodule of plasticine, then seems to get embarassed and slopes off to look at the other exhibits.

Separating the irretrievably adult from those still in touch with the inner child, "Bubblegum Station" is definitely the hit of The Amorphous Body Study Center. The plasticine mass is pocked and protuberant with residues of collective creativity--coral fronds and tendrils, etched hieroglyphs, and a few figurative offerings (a dice with nines on each side, a shark, a motorcar). There are pink blobs under each stool, too (Long's original inspiration for the piece was the bubblegum deposited under desks by bored schoolkids), and somebody has wittily sculpted one lump into an udder.



Stereolab designed each composition (there's one per installation) to sound right whenever you happen to put on the 'phones. In this case, "Melochord Seventy-Five" is a typical slice of Stereolab mantra-rock, based around a blithe three-note melody and a minimal chord-sequence for guitars heavily phased to sound as pinkly inorganic as the plasticine: imagine a sort of Velcro Underground. With their repetition-aesthetic accentuated by the fact that each track is on repeat-play, Stereolab abolish time, encouraging you to become totally absorbed in the polymorphous pleasure of palpating the pink plasma. This was big fun.

"Bubblegum Station" is also the piece which most substantiates the rather lofty concept behind The Amorphous Body Study Center. Long's desire is to focus awareness on, and reaffirm the status of, the body, which he believes is threatened with obsolescence by the advent of an information-based culture. Certainly, there are technology-driven historical forces (the on-line revolution, CD-ROM, the explosion of cable, virtual reality) that are devolving the human body into what Arthur Kroker calls "geek flesh", i.e. blobs of atrophied muscle'n'sinew jacked into the cyberdelic domain, whose only form of exertion is clicking the mouse. But there's an equally powerful counter-trend working towards a unprecedented intensification of bodily awareness and the exploitation of physicality as a resource, involving a plethora of therapies, regimes and rituals (the mania for fitness and working out with weights; body-piercing and tattooing; the unstoppable rise of dance music, etc).

Long reckons that "the biological body is ignored politically and exploited economically with its vulnerability now being its major characteristic'; his "Study Center" is designed as a therapeutic haven, a space in which simple physical pleasures can be rediscovered. Hence "Buloop Buloop", in which viewers sit around a water-drinking installation and sip life-giving H2O from paper cups while contemplating Long's glossy, undulant objects. This would actually be quite pleasant if the seats--the metal, easy-wipe kind you might find in a kindergarten--weren't so uncomfortable. Still Stereolab's "Pop Quiz"--a locked groove of Muzak-of-the-spheres, all heart-pang strings and caressing feminine harmonies over a lurching, waltz-like beat--soothes away the aches.


On its critically acclaimed albums like The Groop Played 'Space Age Batchelor Pad Music' , Transient Random- Noise Bursts With Announcements and Mars Audiac Quintet, Stereolab--a London-based outfit whose core is the creative/romantic partnership of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier--have explored the secret links between between ultra- square '50s/'60s easy-listening (Martin Denny, Esquivel, Perrey & Kingsley et al) and ultra-hip underground rock (Velvet Underground and their Krautrock successors Faust and Neu!, etc). Stereolab effortlessly blend neo-psychedelia (the metronomic throb of the 'motorik' beat, one-chord guitar-drones) with mood-music (dulcet girl-pop vocals, Moog- synth gurgles). It's an aesthetic I call 'kitschadelia", based in a fascination with yesteryear's quaint notions of the "far out"; a half ironic, half genuinely poignant nostalgia for the days when people thought the future would be fabulous (vacations on the moon, your robot-butler bringing your fried egg and bacon every morning--in pill form, naturally). Like kindred spirits Pram and LaBradford, Stereolab like to use outmoded, artificial-sounding proto-synthesisers such as the Moog, the theremin and the Ondioline. Long's sculptures like "3 To 1 In Groovy Green" share this kitschadelic quality, their outre hues evocative of '60s man-made fabrics, their globular shapes redolent of the squiggles of oil inside a lava-lamp.



"Good Separation In Soft Blue" [above] is Long's most kitschadelic creation. It looks like something from the set of "Barbarella": five white cushions surrounding a Miro-esque blob of pale blue, which seems to have extruded a smaller version of itself on the end of a long thin tendril. Through the headphones waft "Space Moment", possibly Stereolab's sublimest slice of avant-garde MOR yet. Call it 'systems muzak', an imaginary collaboration between Steve Reich and Mantovani: a locked-groove of spangly sounds and a roundelay of fragrant Francophone sibilance braided out of the phrases "de la deliquescence" and "la cohesion socialise". Like Long's sculptures, Stereolab's quirky surfaces often conceal polemical purposes (the band's 1994 single "Ping Pong", for instance, framed a Marxist critique of capitalism's cycles of slump and recovery in deliciously, frothy girl-pop redolent of '60s Gallic chanteuse Francoise Hardy), but both are more successful on the textural as opposed to textual level-- captivating the ear and eye with zany loveliness.



More pix from the exhibition here


STEREOLAB
Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Melody Maker, 1996

by Simon Reynolds

On cold paper, the idea of Stereolab does not read so very appealing: Krautrock obsessive droning out neo-Neu! monotony, gussied up with Radio 2 strings and Francophone harmonies, and topped with his lover's Living Marxism style analysis of the economic substructure. So why does the reality of Stereolab sound so betwitching, so uncontrived, so sheerly and strangely and sublimely pop? Beats me.

As it happens, Emperor Tomato Ketchup marks a significant break with the Neu! meets Gallic E-Z listening formula that has sustained Stereolab so well over the seven (Jesus, is it really that many? Yes) preceding albums. The motorik beat, the Sean O' Hagan string arrangements, the dulcet harmonies of Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen, are still present. What's new, though, is that much of "Emperor" is almost funky. Apparently, Tim Gane wrote most of the songs starting from basslines, as opposed to two-note guitar chords (his previous modus operandi), and he's been listening closely to the riffs and percussion ideas of Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band circa Fly. And so Emperor was conceived as an exercise in swing, almost a big band thang. On top of this, touring with post-rock groove collectives like Pram and Tortoise has surely rubbed off on Stereolab. In fact, approximately half the album was recorded in Chicago with Tortosie's John McEntire at the mixing desk.

The new space and polyrhythmic tension that has infused Stereolab's sound is immediately apparent from the opening "Metronomic Underground", a succulent,
lazy-funk matrix of analog synth-squelches, itchy-guitar riffs, percolating Rhodes organ, bubblicious bass and multiple vocal harmony parts, with every element dovetailing so neatly, so in-the-pocket, that listening is like taking a Zen crash course in breathing correctly. Indeed, there's a mantra-like vibe to the the main lyric--"crazy, brutal, a torpedo"--a self-description which Laetitia intones like she's trying to calm herself down, keep a lid on her inner fire. Also on the funky tip are "Percolator", which percolates (there's no other word) with a frilly bassline and jazzy time-signatures, and the wonderfully frisky "Les Hyper Sound", absolutely rrrrrrollin' with some serious B-line presha, crisp snares, and a perky nursery-rhyme vocal that rips the piss out of sectarianism in pop music.

In more trad 'Lab vein, "Cybele's Reverie" is string-swept, Francophone bizness--simple luvverly. "OLV 26" is like early Kraftwerk meets late Spacemen 3 via Suicide, featuring authentically crap clapped-out drum machine and glue-on-fingers synth. "The Noise of Carpet" is a Buzzcocksy sprint that lays into a layabout friend, a chronic fatalist who has an excess of what the Marxist Gramsci called "pessimism of the intellect", but lacks its essential, counter-active opposite, "optimism of the will". Sadier bemoans the fact that someone so smart is no use to the Struggle.

After Side One, you're thinking this may very well be Stereolab's best record yet. The second side is patchier, kicking off with a brace of undistinguished mid-tempo hypno-grooves, but it also has the most startling stylistic departures. "Monstre Sacre" is a gorgeously lugubrious ballad about Sadier's dead mother and the importance of reconciliation and mutual forgiveness. "Motoroller Scalator" chugs along with an almost Wilson Pickett-like locomotion, while Laetitia asks rhetorically: "What's society built on?". (The answers are 1/ "bluff" 2/ "trust" 3/ "words"). "Slow Fast Hazel" verges on Al Green downhome funky-soul balladry, with its heartstring-tugging violins and wah-wah guitar trickling down like God's silvery tears. Finally, "Anonymous Collective" strips it down to drum and bass: no, not DJ Hype, but an awesomely baleful, slow-simmering dirge-funk redolent of Can circa Tago Mago, over which Laetitia recites her Marxist mantra: "you and me/are molded by some things/way beyond our acknowledgement".

Reconciling cold intellect and sugary sentiment, avant-rock and pure pop, Stereolab are an inspirational one-off; trying to pull off the same miracle would be pointless and redundant (although this isn't dissuading an emergent wave of Stereolab clones from having a go). If you haven't succumbed to this band's charms yet, dilly-dally no longer. Emperor Tomato Ketchup is the sound of a band in its prime.



STEREOLAB , interview
director's cut, Rolling Stone, 1996

by Simon Reynolds

Over six years, eight albums and countless singles, Stereolab has built up one of the most seductive and stimulating discographies in modern music. Effortlessly reconciling avant-garde oddness with pop pleasantness, hypno-groove intensity and ravishing melody, esoteric ideas and easy charm, this London band has won a devoted cult following in Britain. Its fifth album, 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet, actually went Top 20, despite being released via the band's own indie label, Duophonic. And in America, Stereolab remains a favourite with hipsters, despite the fact that its records come out via major label Elektra.

A six-piece with a fluctuating line-up, Stereolab's core is the romantic/creative partnership of guitarist/songwriter Tim Gane and singer/lyricist Laetitia Sadier. Sipping Guinness in the bar of London's National Film Theatre, the couple exude a married-in-all-but-name vibe: they share Laetitia's rolled-up cigarettes and disagree with each others opinions in a gently chiding way.

Sadier grew up in the suburbs of Paris, the daughter of tank-manufacturing father and a mother who was a frustrated singer. She attended Nanterre, the same college as late '60s radical student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, but left early in disgust when she realised that '80s students were more interested in "getting good marks" than discussing Marx. After a spell as a "bilingual assistant--basically a secretary", she met Gane, who was playing in her favourite band, the left-wing English indiepopsters McCarthy. They fell in love, and a year later she moved to London.

Gane grew up in East London, and is what you might call a 'career musician'--if only because, in his career class at high school, when the students had to write letters to potential employees, he sent applications to the post-punk label Industrial and to venerable trance-rock band The Fall. That group's leader Mark E. Smith summed up The Fall's credo in the chorus: "repetition in the music and we're never gonna lose it". That lyric is a good entry point into the Stereolab aesthetic. Gane is a fervent believer in a bunch of M-words: minimalism, the mesmeric power of mantra-like monotony. Like Can's Holger Czukay, he believes that restriction is the mother of invention,

When Stereolab formed in 1990, the breakthrough occurred, says Tim, with two discoveries. "First, I changed the way I played guitar very slightly. I worked out this chord that only had two notes in it, instead of three or four. And as soon as I had that chord, the songs just came, it became super-easy to work out loads of lovely melodies to go with it. The simpler the root-source of the chords, the more notes fit with it. The second thing was picking up a Farfisa keyboard for sixty dollars, the kind of organ used by the '60s garage punks, and by Suicide later. It's only really good for playing two notes drones.I came up with this chord and found the Farfisa all within one week, and it seemed like destiny. Stereolab was born".

Rock's less-is-more, minimal-is-maximal tradition began with Velvet Underground (who drew on the avant-drone ideas of New York contemporaries like La Monte Young), and was carried on by the Modern Lovers and above all by the 'Krautrock' bands of the early '70s. Of these, Neu! is a particularly crucial influence on Stereolab. In many ways Germany's neo-psychedelic/proto-punk equivalent to Television, Neu! invented a sound known as 'motorik', based around chiming guitars and a chugging, metronomic beat that simulated the sensation of gliding serenely down the autobahn.

"Loads of bands we encounter in America are really into Neu!," says Gane. "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way. And the music was very rhythmic--the longer tracks are far closer to the nature of techno than guitar rock."

If Stereolab is cruising down the freeway, the band travels down the middle-of-the-road. For the other big aesthetic input is Gane's fascination and fondness for muzak, Moog albums, exotica and stereo-testing records. Stereolab's name is actually borrowed from a long defunct '50s label which specialised in albums designed to show off the newly-invented stereophonic majesty of the hi-fi (percussion leaping zanily from speaker to speaker, etc). In 1993 the band pre-empted the Juan Garcia Esquivel revival by titling a mini-LP ... And The Groop Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music. Slightly dismayed by the current vogue for 'hip easy listening', Gane says he's "not into the kitsch element, I'm more into the futuristic side--the way orchestral big band music was crossed in the '60s with early electronic music. Stuff that was originally done for cynical, commercial reasons often resulted in some very strange combinations and juxtapositions of sounds. That's something that you can't really recreate--it never sounds as good when it's revived."

Although Stereolab has dabbled with string arrangments and lite-jazz time signatures, the M.O.R. influence mainly comes through in the vocal melodies, which are decidedly non-rock'n'roll. Sadier and Australian-born backing singer Mary Hansen harmonise in honeyed tones that recall Nico and the kind of '60s French chanteuses, like Francoise Hardy, that Laetitia was exposed to in her youth. Despite her dreamy, dulcet tones, Sadier rarely sings about affairs of the heart, though. More often than not, she's pondering philosphical quandaries, grappling with the contradictions of capitalism and the class system, sometimes even anticipating violent revolution. Which brings us to another M-word: Marxism.

"From the start, my lyrical vision was 'don't talk about yourself'," says Sadier, who simmers with a quiet intensity (on the new album she describes herself as "crazy, butal, a torpedo"). "Thank God, it's changed a bit since then, but there was a vision of trying to write about the collective side of reality". And so on 1994's "Ping Pong", Sadier sang about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump-and-recovery over irresistibly perky, frothy M.O.R. And on the new album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, she lashes fashionable cynicism and political passivity on "The Noise of Carpet" and "Spark Plug", and probes the economic substructure of everyday life in "Anonymous Collective": "you and me/are molded by some things/Way beyond/Our acknowledgment".

Emperor Tomato Ketchup is probably Stereolab's best record yet. Certainly, it's the first to break decisively with the Neu!/motorik mold that's shaped most of the band's output so far. Parts of it are almost funky. "I wrote about 70 percent of the songs from basslines, rather than guitar chords, which was a different approach," says Gane. "But more than funk, I was into the idea of swing, in that big band sense. The first track, 'Metronomic Underground', originally consisted of about about seven riffs that I wanted to lock together like a big band. I was also obsessed with the riffs and rhythms of Sun Ra, Don Cherry and the Plastic Ono Band circa 'Fly'". Another influence cited by Tim is contemporary 'post-rock', "bands we play with like Pram and Tortoise." In fact, roughly half the album was recorded in Chicago with Tortoise's John McEntire producing and contributing percussive ideas.

Stereolab is admirably fearless about appearing arty. In the last two years, the band teamed up with sculptor Charles Long for a project called The Amorphous Body Study Center: the 'Lab wrote music that was piped through headphones into the ears of New York gallery-goers as they contemplated Long's gaily-colored, kitschadelic objects. And the band has collaborated with avant-garde sound-collagist Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, resulting in the Crumb Duck EP, one track of which can be found on last year's Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2), a CD collection of the band's innumerable limited-edition, vinyl-only singles. But for all Gane & Sadier's lofty and sometimes arcane interests, Stereolab's truest instincts are pop.

"If you listen to 'Good Vibrations' by the Beach Boys," says Tim, "that's a wonderful melodic song, but it's also a very strange and odd selection of sounds and bits stapled together. It's far odder than what people today imagine you're able to get away with in a pop single. You can get away with weird stuff in the dance music area, but with guitar pop, it's like the rule book is written, and everyone is sticking to it. But we want to push things."

"Subversion isn't doing something totally new that no one listens to," says Laetitia. "It's taking a bit of the old and putting something underneath it that goes against all that's been done before."