Wednesday, May. 15, 2013 | 08:46
oscillations in the stereolab
in high school, a friend named sb got me listening to pink floyd beyond the songs the radio played. he got me into marilyn manson (though i probably would have gone there from nine inch nails, at the time he was a much bigger fan of both than i was). his tastes moved into more industrial sounds than i was then prepared to handle.
at some point, though, he swerved into ska, and maybe even jazz. i played him a new marilyn manson and his reaction indicated he was over it. i don't know what changed or what he heard to pull him in that direction. i do remember, though, being somewhere in his car, possibly on a visit to him and c at iu, and him playing stereolab. the music didn't register much at the time, and i'm not sure but it was probably 'emperor tomato ketchup' given the timing. it strikes me now as a far cry from those earlier sounds, be they frontline assembly, marilyn manson, or even pink floyd. it's not even ska. i wonder how such a shift happened.
my first stereolab album, and my first conscious introduction to their sound, was 'dots and loops', probably picked up from bmg when it came out. i wasn't ready for that sound--i was still industrial and rock, spreading my dance wings, only just scraping the surface of jazz and what-have-you. i got it becuase stereolab was one of those bands, like belle and sebastian or the cure, "everyone" said i should like. they were indie darlings, and i wanted to be an indie guy, or at least a diy/punk guy without the piercings and ripped clothes, which was close enough. surely stereolab was where i should go.
'dots and loops' didn't take and i sold it after a year or two. i never played it. the last sentence is true, but i'm not sure about my memory of the rest of it. i don't know if i got the album when it came out, or if it was really my introduction. now that i think of it, i may have picked up 'dots and loops' later, which possibly led to me mis-categorizing it as having come out later. for a while i even thought the album with this green cover was called 'sound-dust', which has a pink cover and which i never owned.
in 1999, stereolab unleashed 'corbra and phases group play voltage in the milky night'. this i got when it came out. this i played and liked. this was music i could get into. by then i'd heard 'bitches brew'. by then i was beginning to test my boundaries with free jazz. by then, the sounds on this album could make sense to me, and to some extent did. that's how i got into stereolab.
so i must have picked up 'dots and loops' later, though probably from bmg, and found it boringly different. it didn't go far enough. it was a tame, sixties-sounding, pop album. it was all the same.
for me, stereolab is one blur of sixties sounds with odd nineties noises and production tweaks. 'cobra and phases group' is the outlier, the step away from the comfortable. it's also the least-liked of their catalog. it's the one people skip.
is that why it's the one i like best?
[possibly, but possibly also because my computer speakers have a fake surroundsound dial that changes the mix of some albums, pulling out parts while hiding others. it doesn't work for everything--often it just obscures vocals--but 'cobra and phases group' benefits immensely from a turn of that dial.]
