LM Artist Poll No. 74 · STEREOLAB · Results Thread

great song. I think MAQ might be my favorite Lab album, just such a great balance of their early and later sounds

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Faust's "Munic B" is basically horn + motorik, but I wouldn't say they sound much like this ("Rainy Day Sunshine" is the one Lab seems to prefer)

Xp. Annoying repetitional singing on this. This is horrible. How many times does she repeat the sentence? 50 times, 60 times or more? That is so awful and unimaginative. Makes me think of a spastic who can only utter one phrase. Sorry. I am totally flabbergasted how anybody can vote for this minimalistic nothingness in view of the rich catalog of stereolab songs

haha it's another one where all the vocals are background vocals! I don't know, think of it like a Philip Glass piece

Hahahaha Mars Audiac Quintet is hit or miss for me. It's their most homogenic album I think... For example I really, really like when the horns enter but I also think the song could be cut in half and I wouldn't mind.

But glass is awful as well. Always the same shtick. The emperor without clothes.

Last track of the day! An old one too, turn up the speakers:

http://i.imgur.com/bTatmtY.jpg
36. Harmonium 5 votes, 140 points. 2 first place votes.
From: Harmonium / Farfisa 7” (1992)
https://youtu.be/-MQOrXRCQBg

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I'm actually surprised you can think that and still like Stereolab. I hear bits of Music in 12 Parts all over their discography

Aaaaaaaaargh. About 30 places too low!

So, yeah, my #1. REALLY glad I switched to a ranked ballot now.

That's more like it. A nice tune to end the day. And we turn and we turn and we turn. Till the end of time.

I saw phil glass live in the 80s. Don't remember what it was. Anyway it all sounds the same. And i think it was the first time i had this impression of immaculate, sterile, fascistic beauty in music. I haven't listened to him since. And it did not harm.

Never really got Anamorphose

Well, I guess it isn't surprising you like early stuff more. It seems like the early Stereolab favored minimalism a la Velvet Underground, Neu, LaMonte Young, where later Lab sub'd for Glass melodies, Reich percussion

Are there any bands that made the kraut-motorik thing with a horn ensemble prior to this one?

https://youtu.be/CmgFBSmoLmc

oh great, another poll where we have to listen to alex in mainhattan complain after every other result, and talk endlessly about how these tracks that lots of people love are so horrible and worthless

Anamorphose was my #16, fantastic cyclic Glass-worship

Are there any bands that made the kraut-motorik thing with a horn ensemble prior to this one?

https://youtu.be/CmgFBSmoLmc

― Check Yr Scrobbles (Moodles)

Oh wow! That's is actually spot on.

LOLOLOLOL. Nifty.

Cut "Anamorphose" in half? It's the opposite -- it should be 15 minutes long.

I don't understand the criticism about it being repetitive. Of course it's repetitive, that's the point. And it builds beautifully to the horn parts at the end.

You can imagine most of the tracks on MAQ getting extended by another 3-4 minutes, there's no necessity in cutting off "Transona Five" or "Three Dee Melodie", so I'm not sure why they "chose" "Anamorphose" to be the long one.

"Metronomic Underground" is more repetitive than anything on MAQ, but I don't think it'll be criticized for that.

Xp. I'll stop complaining. It doesn't lead anywhere, i know. Great poll, Moka. Thanks for all the effort put in this.
And the thing about neu! and vu as influences in the beginning and glass and reich later on might be true. I actually like reich, drumming is a personal fave..

wau that supremes track!

President Carter loves repetition. Chairman Mao, he dug repetition...

Cut "Anamorphose" in half? It's the opposite -- it should be 15 minutes long.

I don't understand the criticism about it being repetitive. Of course it's repetitive, that's the point. And it builds beautifully to the horn parts at the end.

You can imagine most of the tracks on MAQ getting extended by another 3-4 minutes, there's no necessity in cutting off "Transona Five" or "Three Dee Melodie", so I'm not sure why they "chose" "Anamorphose" to be the long one.

"Metronomic Underground" is more repetitive than anything on MAQ, but I don't think it'll be criticized for that.

― NoTimeBeforeTime

you could edit it but I wouldn't.

I was the #1 vote for Anamorphose... the groop at their peak imho which dovetailed with my peak fandom of the band as well.

Somewhat shocked that it barely made the top 40, but then again this is ILM.

l n'y a rien de,
De plus vrai que,
De plus vrai que le,
Plus vrai que le souffle,
Il n'y a rien de,
Plus vrai que le souffle.

my #8

Poll has made me want to buy Stereolab vinyl but the reissues are very expensive! I have Peng! and D&L, was thinking about buying Transient and Sound Dust next... I don't know if the switched on comps have ever been printed in vinyl... would buy Refried in a heartbeat.

Only 4 other people had the good sense to vote for "Harmonium," and only myself and Nag! put it at #1. Shame on y'all.

Refried 2LP is available from Drag City. Shouldn't be too expensive.

I'll look into it, if there is one band in my mind that deserves to do the whole vinyl collector fetishism, it's this one.

It's funny. Kent and I are acquainted outside of ILX, but we rarely to seem to agree on anything in these polls. This time an off-thread outrageathon over "Harmonium" has commenced. :)

Only 4 other people had the good sense to vote for "Harmonium," and only myself and Nag! put it at #1. Shame on y'all.

It made my long list!

I was walking to work today and listening to Transient, which I don't do too often, and listening to Golden Ball I started to think: wow, this evil mess is actually really good! It was never what I looked to them for, but they could totally execute it.

When I checked back into the poll the results seemed practically random: Anamorphose, Laisser-faire, Check and Double Check? All those songs that blended together around my favorites? Which is glorious - there are like a million ways to love the Lab! I won't quite understand if Klang Tone or something makes the top ten but I'm really enjoying hearing these things anew through other ears.

whole show from '94 here, and pretty great sound too. These guys were as tight live as on the records, and luckily I got to see them before Mary died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw5bZWFM9BM

nice!

I saw them for the first time 6 days before that Danbury show at The Middle East in Cambridge, MA

Yes, I've seen that Danbury '94 show, it's the best live document of early-ish Stereolab I've seen on youtube.

I also saw them on that tour, eight days before the Danbury show, opening for the Fall in Toronto.

Posted this thread on the stereolab.co.uk forum and apparently a couple of readers are wondering why Margerine Eclipse isn't in the top 10 albums. I voted for two tracks but had no idea it had a fanbase. Only one of you included it in his albums list in 3rd or 4th place iirc.

Unrelated: not a single one of you voted for Whisper Pitch and you're missing out on one of their best latter songs.

Which albums do the "Margerine Eclipse" boosters not rate highly? The early stuff I guess?

Margerine Eclipse might be the least familiar of their LPs for me. Though it's mostly fun, and I had "La Demeure" on my shortlist until a late cull. Somewhere in the ILX archives is a regrettable thread I started shortly before its release in which I asked whether we even needed any more Stereolab recordings at that point. Doomed before I even heard a note!

I think Nov '94 was the best Stereolab show I saw - Sheffield Leadmill (Laika and David McAlmont supporting! Not together, sadly). I guess I saw them... six times, maybe, between '92 and '04.

No, I've checked the web and I went to nine shows...

Oct '92 Boardwalk, Manchester
Oct '93 Garage, London
Nov '94 Leadmill, Sheffield (Laika, McAlmont)
Jun '95 Lomax, Liverpool (Yo La Tengo)
Sep '95 Riverside, Newcastle (Tortoise, Mouse on Mars)
Mar '96 Forum, London (Tortoise, Broadcast)
Nov '99 Heaven, London
Apr '00 ATP, Camber Sands
Apr '04 9:30 Club, Washington DC

!!! The web suggests that my equivalent, er, list is:

1998-02-03, Prince of Wales, Melbourne

I have an old VHS of a live gig filmed from the side of the stage, you can easily imagine you are on stage with them, playing bass maybe.

At one point, band member asks Tim what's next, tim replies "Harmonium Percolater" or some such, band member goes "ah, which one's that?" and Tim goes, "you know, langalanga dungung nerrrr"

(Quotes from memory, probably not exact)

Posted this thread on the stereolab.co.uk forum and apparently a couple of readers are wondering why Margerine Eclipse isn't in the top 10 albums. I voted for two tracks but had no idea it had a fanbase. Only one of you included it in his albums list in 3rd or 4th place iirc.

I listened to Sound-Dust and Margerine Eclipse back-to-back a while ago and remember being struck by how joyous the former was and how deflated the latter, despite some lovely material. I had liked Margerine a lot upon release, when I still had little sense of who was in the band and what Mary Hansen's passing meant for them (despite Sadier singing "goodbye, Mary") — I'd been a fan since '98 but still didn't really know who the group were (had never seen them). The relative anonymity of the band members ("Anonymous Collective," no group photos in the album artwork) seemed key to their utopianism; yet in another sense Stereolab weirdly didn't seem like "people." The separation between the knowingly allusive track titles (which, like a lot of us, I often don't remember) and emotionally/politically direct lyrics (which I often do) performs some of this displacement, too — the "meaning" seemed to be in the gap between the two things, but in a way the meaning was the gap itself. I wonder if insisting on this gap became difficult to sustain over time. More recently, reading interviews where Laetitia Sadier has talked about the band's "industrial" production methods (recording a huge number of tracks very quickly, basically), which she seemed to find increasingly dehumanizing, was rather poignant. I actually love Chemical Chords (my #2 album), whose making she described as particularly difficult, but where I hear this sense of looking out in longing over the horizon on the title track, and seeing the end of something on the closing track. Not sure if they knew it was the end (at least for a while) when they were making it, but it feels that way.

Only one of you included it in his albums list in 3rd or 4th place iirc.

from the opposite pov - I like margerine eclipse fine but it feels very unambitious after their previous string of albums. post-sound dust it really does feel like they're just doing beep-bloop stereolab.

I was at the Forum and Heaven shows that Michael attended too! Probably saw them about a dozen times altogether. Most exotic location was, erm, probably Eindhoven.

Actually, it was a different '96 show. Got confused by the reference to Broadcast. Think I saw them in Kilburn with Broadcast supporting (and Squarepusher?), around the time Fluorescences EP was released.

from the opposite pov - I like margerine eclipse fine but it feels very unambitious after their previous string of albums. post-sound dust it really does feel like they're just doing beep-bloop stereolab

OTM. "Chemical Chords" is much of the same, but catchier. They were mostly running in place in the last few years of their career.

I think there are lots of great individual songs in there, but yeah, overall there was just less joy in what they were doing after Mary passed