TRANSIENT RANDOM NOISE-BURSTS WITH ANNOUNCEMENTS SLEEVENOTES
TONE BURST
The working title of Tone Burst was called “Captain Beefheart”, because I was obsessed with the sound and the recording of “Kandy Korn”, both the version on Beefheart’s Mirror Man and the one on Strictly Confidential. I really love the freewheeling energy of the sound and performance and the high intensity of the production. I particularly like the sound of the drums bashing away but tinny in the background, bursting with the energy of a new sun. I really wanted that kind of radiated energy oversaturating the track.
OUR TRINITONE BLAST
This is the first of three tracks on the LP that feature distortion and feedback on the vocals, I’m not sure why we did it but I don’t think we ever did it again that much.
The working title of this one was called “Sweet Jesus” because it was taped over a demo tape by a band called Sweet Jesus. I needed lots of tapes to feed my Foster X-15 4-Track in those days and used whatever was lying around.
PACK YR ROMANTIC MIND
It’s a real shame that we were unable to use the original recorded version of this track as it featured an amazing sounding reed instrument called a Shehnai taken from a track on George Harrison’s Wonderwall LP. It wasn’t really sampled as such but just taken directly off the LP and laid over the track. It worked so beautifully, flowing in and out of the song, but unfortunately we were denied permission to use it from Apple, and had to re-record a similar sounding part ourselves. Sean O’Hagan did a great job in trying to emulate the feel, offering something very different but sympathetic to the original instrument’s effect on the rest of the track. However a little bit of chance and serendipity was lost.
I didn’t hear this original version again until just recently when we took everything off the master tapes. That’s 25 years since I've heard it and it still sounds great and we still can’t use it, not even as a bonus track.
I’M GOING OUT OF MY WAY
At the beginning or end of 3 songs on the LP we used some sounds taken from the Vanguard Label LP Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, by Perrey and Kingsley. These electronic sounds were just meant to go in-between tracks as a kind of bridging part but for copyright reasons or whatever they had to be connected to the song either preceding or following on from it.
That means this song now has six writers including Bert Kaempfert.
GOLDEN BALL
One of three tracks on the LP influenced by the New York sound circa late 70’s/early-mid 80’s, specifically in this case Rhys Chatham and his various ‘just intonation’ guitar groups. I didn’t know about just intonation at the time, I just liked the grumbling one string low note guitar rhythm that anchors the piece "Guitar Trio".
I’ve always liked things that seem both ‘primitive’ and ’sophisticated’ at the same time. Simple elements combining and making complex interactions.
We recorded two versions, the first a studio overdubbed one which we weren’t too sure about and a second version recorded live in the studio. Obviously we needed the energy of a live performance to make it work. This is the version used on the LP.
PAUSE
One of my favourite songs from the early period of the band. Laetitia’s and Mary’s vocals sound wonderful and were recorded with the tape slowed down a little to add a beguiling touch to the singing by speeding up the pitch of the voice, this effect is further enhanced with the addition of an accidentally found sound to the track.
Just before recording the LP I taped something strange off my radio at home. The sound of an eerie childlike robotic voice. Later on I was told it was a spy code broadcast emanating from the Soviet Bloc. However whilst mastering the record, Bo, the mastering engineer, told me it was the East German/GDR fishing forecast in the North Sea. The German number NEUN is enunciated NEU-EN, similar to the use of NINE-R.
JENNY ONDIOLINE
The longest track on the LP and the longest take on the motorik pop type sound we had been recording and releasing up to this point, starting with the first 10¨ record.
It`s the only track we ever did that had a different tuning on the guitar (E,A,E,A,B,E) and again this was the influence of the late 70`s + 80`s NY sound, people like Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca etc.
As always we oriented that towards being more of a pop sound with the groove coming out of the experimental music scene in Germany in the 70`s (variously known as kosmische musik or krautrock). It's that pulse, leaving so much space for other textures, sounds and melodies, that was the primary influence.
ANALOGUE ROCK
Whilst making this track for Duophonic Super 45s we found out we’d been offered a recording contract with Elektra in the States, which came as a huge surprise. What started out as a Duophonic recording ended up coming out on a major label worldwide except in UK.
CREST
This song, originally called Staccato Susan, was inspired by the great clanging minimalist guitar style of the NY group Band Of Susans from the mid/late 80’s onwards. I really loved those clanging chords and so the beginnings of Crest initially came out of that sound. Adding a cyclical rising and falling bass line and little descending melodies we moved it in another direction.
I always liked the little mouse song in Bagpuss and I had that kind of nursery rhyme thing in mind when doing the melody for this song. Finally Andy’s propulsive drumming really rockets this track along and brings all the elements together perfectly.
LOCK-GROOVE LULLABY
I want to thank the great work of the producer/engineer on this record Phil Wright. He was our flatmate at the time and so every day for six weeks we would spend 12-14 frenetic hours at the studio and then go home and carry on the intense deliberations late into the night.
The whole recording process was totally exhausting and seemed so chaotic at times that I always put down the rather lean and edgy sound of the original record to this. It was a bit of a surprise therefore to hear these tracks come straight off the tapes 25 years later sounding nice and full range and with a clarity and detail I thought was missing on the original record. We haven`t lost any of the gritty Farfisa edge, there’s still a lot of midrange on this record, dense layers of it in fact, but the original tapes show there are plenty of low tones too.
If I have one memory of recording this LP it is of Andy walking around the live room of the studio carrying a microphone on a mic stand pointing it at every corner of the room or spot on the wall and Phil the engineer shouting “up a bit, left a bit, down a bit..stop…..no”. All the while I'm blasting the feedback that you can hear on this track out of my guitar amp.
BONUS TRACKS
FRAGMENTS
I don’t know why we taped this at the time, a studio outtake like in the 60’s, of a small section of French Disco.
Stops in the middle, starts again…no idea why.
JENNY ONDIOLINE (7”/EP Alternate Version)
I really wanted to have the single version of Jenny Ondioline on this reissue but we had decided that we would only include previously unreleased tracks.
Luckily we found a first unused mix of this 7” edit / remix with a few small differences which were ironed out on the released version (the second mix)
DRUM - BACKWARDS BASS - ORGAN (JENNY ONDIOLINE BREAKDOWN FULL VERSION)
What it says in the title. The whole of this instrumental edit section recorded for Jenny Ondioline.
ANALOGUE ROCK (UNUSED MIX)
This first mix of Analogue Rock is generally rawer sounding and doesn’t have the effect on the vocals in the second part of the song. I think this works better overall than the LP version.
PAUSE (ORIGINAL MIX)
The first of three mixes of this track recorded for possible inclusion on the LP. This first mix was probably done a week or more before the final mix (Mix 3) was used for the album. There are quite a lot of small differences in sound and arrangement and the overall feel of the track is quite a bit softer.
FRENCH DISCO (Early Version Mix)
Like "Pause" we mixed "French Disco" three times to try and get it right.
The fact that it didn’t end up on the album shows that I didn’t think we had got it right. The 10”/EP Version is Mix 3 and this earlier take is Mix 2, previously unreleased and a bit rougher sounding perhaps.
The reason it didn’t make the LP is because I really loved the original demo and thought it had a certain something, a kind of poignancy, that I don't think we captured on any of these versions.
The original released version on the 10”/EP wouldn’t be there either if we’d had another track to put on instead - I wanted four songs on the EP and we only had two others available so on the spot, in the mastering studio, I suggested that we put this on.
I didn't even bother to change the working title “French Disko”. The demo version is on the bonus disc.
JENNY ONDIOLINE PT 2 BREAKDOWN MIX
Another outtake of material to be edited onto the final mix of "Jenny Ondioline". This time from the second section.
DEMOS
These demos were all recorded onto a Foster X-15 4-Track cassette recorder - mainly using a DI'd Fender Jaguar guitar and a microphone for Laetitia’s vocals. Sometimes I would use a keyboard too but I don’t remember which one. Nothing fancy.
The demos for the bonus disc were mixed onto 1/2" tape by Jeff Fisher using some analogue EQ, compression / limiting and a spring reverb.
The demos were just working material to play to the band at the rehearsals or in the studio to show the rough structure of the song. As they were not meant for public release not much care was taken in the presentation, just something to show the general idea and for myself and Laetitia to get the parts down onto tape so we wouldn’t forget them.
However, having said that, they sometimes really got to the heart of a song and occasionally more so than the final recorded version i.e "French Disco" (in my opinion). The vocals normally sound very relaxed and there is a certain ease about them in the sparse musical setting.
Every so often Mary would come over to the house and record a vocal or two but as the songs were normally knocked out pretty quick, and we didn’t live that close together, Mary doesn’t feature on most of the demos. She does pop up every now and then and it's really nice to hear.
The demos from around Transient are still relatively representative of the final recorded versions being as then we still rehearsed most of the songs before recording them. On later albums the demos and the final recorded versions would take different paths and vary a lot more.
Throughout all the LP’s recorded up to Margarine Eclipse the demos were recorded to cassette tape, bumbling along in exactly the same way. The interpretations, once we had ditched rehearsing before recording, changed enormously.
MASTERING NOTES
This series of re-issues were mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering, Berlin.
As we started the project it became obvious that most of the tapes were showing signs of deterioration and some of the earliest ones were already at an advanced stage of decay and were actively shredding. They would need to be baked. Baking is not done to improve the quality of the sound and can lead to some softening and loss of fine detail but the process was necessary to preserve the contents of the tape long enough to transfer the tracks. Great care was taken during the baking of the tapes and no loss of sound quality was audible to me.
The earliest tapes would not have been able to withstand the stress put on them by a normal tape machine set up, with its high tension mechanism and multi head configuration, plus our 1/2” tapes needed to run at 30 inches per second - this increased tension would have most likely snapped the tape.
As a solution Bo decided to commission a bespoke tape block which consisted of a single playback head and a simple, no tension tape guide. This allowed the tape to be simply held in place as it passed over the single head.
Bo believes in "authentic mastering", this is a mastering style that tries to preserve the inner musicality of the audio. This approach is very important to me as well - Stereolab’s music can often be quite impenetrably dense in the midrange, there is always a lot going on - lots of detail everywhere. We were both very keen to preserve this aspect of the sound and, at the same time, try to improve a little on resolution, spatiality and depth.
MARS AUDIAC QUINTET SLEEVENOTES
THREE-DEE MELODIE
The original idea that I had for the music on MAQ was for every song to have exactly the same three chord guitar shape and movement (actually a single rooted chord with two finger movements on top) and to see how much variation we could get out of that. I actually got as far as five songs on the LP before running out of steam or getting sidetracked onto something else.
The tracks that used this idea are 1, 3, 8, 13 & 14.
WOW AND FLUTTER
I really like the structure of this song - it has a verse and chorus and constantly goes from one to the other. It was supposed to go straight but Laetitia started singing the verse melody halfway through the verse chords and then carried on into the first half of the chorus chords so that the chorus melody started in the second half of the chorus chords and went on into the first half of the next verse again. It keeps this out of sync pattern for the whole song.
I think it was probably a mistake but we thought it sounded much better.
TRANSONA FIVE
Around this time I liked the idea of taking those old blues rock riffs and trying to extend them into numbing trance states to lose the blues rock aspect of it and have it build up and up, taking on a ritualistic intensity.
We also tried this idea out on "Heavy Denim" around the same time, having had the idea of a Status Quo riff going on for 2 hours blurring out into a nothingness void. It’s rather silly really but I was scrabbling around for ideas at the time and I'm happy at least that this song came out of it. This concept, although recorded more electronically, was also the basis of the music we made for the Nurse With Wound / Stereolab collaboration that became "Simple Headphone Mind"
DES ETOILES ELECTRONIQUES
On this LP we started using our Rogue Moog synth in more ways than just electronic sound effects and low end bass notes. The chords to 6 songs (Tracks 4, 7, 9, 10,11 & 14) were recorded on the Moog by layering each note up one at a time until the full chord was reached and playing that all the way through the track, or in the case of track 11 in the chorus only. The sound really sets these tracks apart from the others on the album. It mirrors our first LP, Peng!, in a way, where a whole group of tracks have a very distinctive sound apart from the rest.
This is also the first track on the LP to benefit from the fabulous brass parts written and arranged by Sean O’Hagan. These will have a very big impact on the sound of the LP and on future Stereolab records.
PING PONG
This track was the last song written for the LP and, somewhat uniquely, it was written specifically to fill in a gap that I thought was there on the album. I thought that an out and out pop song would help complete the circle in regards to the sound and running order of the album.
This isn’t the version of "Ping Pong" that was intended to be on the LP. The album was done and "Ping Pong" was selected to be the first single but as was common around this time we had decided to remix the track anew for the 7” and maybe add a thing or two. We thought the new version worked out better and replaced the one originally on the LP. The original version is available on the Oscillons From The Anti-Sun compilation.
ANAMORPHOSE
This track, based on Steve Reich’s idea for elongating organ, is for me, one of the high points of the band in this period. The organ slowly expanding the length of each of its two chords, it’s the device that everything hangs on, the music picking up intensity as the chords slowly get longer.
Around the 4:40" mark where the brass enters under the vocals and intertwines with them and takes over playing out for the rest of the song, is absolutely one of my very favourite things Stereolab have done.
The vocal interplay between Laetitia and Mary is up there with the best they ever did.
THREE LONGERS LATER
MAQ was engineered and mixed by Paul Tipler who was a regular engineer at Blacking Studios at the time. Paul helped us out on the remakes of both "Pack Yr Romantic Mind" and the "French Disco" [7” version] from the Transient Random Noise-Bursts With Announcement recordings. We noticed that they were much fuller sounding than the other tracks we did on the LP and thought we would ask him to work on this LP with us. He did a great job on it and his melodic and pop sensibilities worked wonders on tracks like "Ping Pong"
On tracks like this one Paul was able to open up the sound, giving a warm and colourful feel but retaining the close and intimate nature.
NIHILIST ASSAULT GROUP
Funny name. My very first group, Uncommunity, had a track with the same name about the revolutionary nihilist Sergey Nechayev - I took a book out, about him, from Barking Library. I don’t know why I revised it and added it to this song. It might have something to do with nihilism or the void as this track, for me, is truly the nadir of everything we did around this time - to me it's just the sound of desperation. I think it was supposed to be another side long track as we recorded 6 parts for it in different keys and at different speeds. It could have worked but the problem is the basic music isn’t very good. It makes a point of being pointless.
INTERNATIONAL COLOURING CONTEST
Our friend in the US, Irwin Chusid, introduced us to the work of Lucia Pamela, a wonderful American musician, multi-instrumentalist, raconteuse and adventurer. This inspired Laetitia to write a tribute to her and her colouring book, about a trip to the moon. The music is some of the nicest we ever did, particularly the end section where Mary has a perfect Mary moment.
THE STARS OUR DESTINATION
Another Moog chords and Roland Rhythm 77 drum machine number. Probably my favourite of the bunch.
Andy was investing more and more time into drum machine experimentation - he would develop this quite a bit on future records, adding another dimension to our sound. I suppose some people would call these sounds retro but I would call them poetry. I still have this drum machine in my studio, it still works and I still use it.
TRANSPORTE SANS BOUGER AND L’ENFER DES FORMES
Two old style Lab songs that could probably have fitted on any of our previous records. MAQ for me is really the end of Stereolab Phase 1 - Super 45 10” to MAQ + EP’s. There would be echoes in future recordings of course but after finishing the LP I entered a troubling time personally in regards to what to do next. It was obvious to me that MAQ was an end stage and we couldn’t just carry on knocking this kind of stuff out but the question was what to do next? How could we orientate our music differently but still keep the central fascination with the elements that inspire and make you want to explore. Still, we had the Lollapalooza tour to look forward to and I could forget about the next album for a while.
OUTER ACCELERATOR
MAQ was the last LP where we did any kind of rehearsing beforehand and this was only on four of the tracks as far as i can remember (This song & tracks 1, 3 and the unused pt 1 to track 14 I believe). One of the things we realised around this time was that we had to make a leap into more unknown areas to progress, using the old ‘studio as instrument' concept really became an important component to our realising that. The fact we really didn’t like rehearsing also helped.
From this point on all tracks would be worked out, and worked on, only in the studio and this had an enormous impact on the way the tracks materialised and sounded (Young Lungs originally recorded for Emperor Tomato Ketchup is a rare exception of a track we played live before recording).
I think this track would have worked better if we had held it over and recorded it for a later LP, it would have undoubtedly gone in another direction and here, it sounds, a little bit too in-between worlds, neither one thing or the other.
NEW ORTHOPHONY
The original main part of this song was left off the final LP [it can be found on the Aluminum Tunes [Switched On 3] compilation] and only the second coda section used.
We called this song “2 eggs are mine” instead of “to examine” because of Laetitia’s pronunciation. Even after we told her she still sung it that way, as did Mary, which was great.
FIERY YELLOW
Mine and Sean’s ode to Exotica. More of Sean’s really and just made up on the spot. Although just a kind of goofy track to end the album on it did in its way anticipate some of the sounds and working methods to come.
BONUS TRACKS
ULAN BATOR AND KLANG TONE
Two tracks from a free single that came with the limited edition versions of the album, these tracks can also be found on Refried Ectoplasm [Switched On Volume 2]
Ulan Bator was named by Katharine, our Farfisa player, because it was her favourite track of ours. Which I thought was rather odd.
MELOCHORD SEVENTY-FIVE (ORIGINAL PULSE VERSION)
I had completely forgotten about this original version - we would go back and record it again, a year later, for Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center. I’m not surprised that this track didn’t make the LP but I am surprised that we bothered to re-record it - I must have really heard something in it or been exceptionally hard up for tracks for the Charles Long exhibition.
Both versions are quite different but I would say neither are particularly successful, the track is a bit of a slog and the melodic content is pretty thin.
OUTER ACCELERATOR (ORIGINAL MIX)
An earlier and heavier mix of this track ([more in the old school lab way). The fact that we went back and mixed again at a later date rather reinforces the point that I made in the notes to the LP version. Obviously we wanted something more from it that we weren’t able to get at that time.
In retrospect, this is probably the way we would have played it live at the time and we should have just left it like this.
NIHILIST ASSAULT GROUP PT 6
The previously unreleased part 6 in case you didn’t get enough already. Actually, on its own it like this, it works pretty well with one or two nice touches. It's also quite short, which is nice.
WOW + FLUTTER (7" / EP VERSION ALTERNATIVE MIX)
This is an earlier mix of the single edit of this track. It doesn’t differ that much from the released version, a few things were tweaked along the way for the later mix but I really like this version of the song and think it's far superior to the LP version so I wanted it on the bonus disc…
In some ways I consider this the beginning of the 2nd phase of the Lab, it’s the kind of treatment we should have given "Outer Accelerator", to get it to the next level. It’s definitely the approach that we would take on many of our later records.
Many additional parts and sounds were added to make the track really complete - the LP version sounds like we’re just bashing it out in comparison
DEMOS
The demos were all recorded onto a Foster X-15 4-Track cassette recorder - mainly using a DI'd Fender Jaguar guitar and a microphone for the Laetitia’s vocals. Sometimes I would use a keyboard too but I don’t remember which one. Nothing fancy.
The demos were mixed onto 1/2" tape by Jeff Fisher using some analogue EQ, compression / limiting and a spring reverb.
These demos were just working material to play to the band at the rehearsals or in the studio to show the rough structure of the song. As they were not meant for public release not much care was taken in the presentation, just something to show the general idea and for me and Laetitia to get the parts down on tape so we wouldn’t forget them. However having said that they sometimes really got to the heart of a song and occasionally more so than the final recorded version.
Every so often Mary would come over to the house and record a vocal or two but as the songs were normally knocked out pretty quick, and we didn’t live that close together, Mary doesn’t feature on most of the demos. She does pop up every now and then and that’s really nice to hear.
The demos from around Mars Audiac Quintet are still generally representative of the final recorded versions except for the tracks with Moog chords which are played on guitar here. We still rehearsed some of the songs before recording them but not many. On later albums the demos and the final recorded versions would take different paths and vary quite a bit more.
Throughout all the LP’s recorded up to Margarine Eclipse the demos were recorded to cassette tape, bumbling along in exactly the same way. The interpretations, once we had ditched rehearsing before recording, changed enormously.
MASTERING NOTES
This series of re-issues were mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering, Berlin.
As we started the project it became obvious that most of the tapes were showing signs of deterioration and some of the earliest ones were already at an advanced stage of decay and were actively shredding. They would need to be baked. Baking is not done to improve the quality of the sound and can lead to some softening and loss of fine detail but the process was necessary to preserve the contents of the tape long enough to transfer the tracks. Great care was taken during the baking of the tapes and no loss of sound quality was audible to me.
The earliest tapes would not have been able to withstand the stress put on them by a normal tape machine set up, with its high tension mechanism and multi head configuration, plus our 1/2” tapes needed to run at 30 inches per second - this increased tension would have most likely snapped the tape.
As a solution Bo decided to commission a bespoke tape block which consisted of a single playback head and a simple, no tension tape guide. This allowed the tape to be simply held in place as it passed over the single head.
Bo believes in "authentic mastering", this is a mastering style that tries to preserve the inner musicality of the audio. This approach is very important to me as well - Stereolab’s music can often be quite impenetrably dense in the midrange, there is always a lot going on - lots of detail everywhere. We were both very keen to preserve this aspect of the sound and, at the same time, try to improve a little on resolution, spatiality and depth.
STEREOLAB - SOUND-DUST SLEEVENOTES
DOUBLE ROCKER
The original version of the album as it was at the demo stage was quite a bit different and considerably shorter than it later became on the final recorded version. A number of the songs only contained the first or earlier sections of what they would later become. “Spacemoth” did not have the final upbeat Beach Boys sounding part - as can be heard on the demo version of it here on the bonus disk - and “Double Rocker” did not have the final “groovin’” section that it has now.
The reason for this was that after finishing the demos we had gone on holiday and on arriving back home I listened to the demos again and felt as a group of tracks taken as a whole, they were rather claustrophobic and uniformly “downbeat”, decidedly one paced. I had gone into something so far that I couldn’t see it from a wider perspective and so I made the decision to quickly write new “upbeat” sections and insert them in the original tracks somewhere, usually at the end. It was rather ironic for me then that this album was generally seen at the time as being rather downbeat and “mature”.
GUS THE MYNAH BIRD
NAUGHT MORE TERRIFIC THAN MAN
NOTHING TO DO WITH ME
We were spoilt by the high level of creativity and skills of the musicians guesting on this album, one of the great benefits of recording in Chicago I guess. As well as Rob Mazurek - back again on cornet - and Chad Taylor - masterful drummer and percussionist - both from the Chicago Underground Duo, we had Tim Barnes and Glenn Kotche on Bongos and Crotales + Marimba respectively. Rob, Tim and Glenn can all be heard on the intro of “Gus The Mynah Bird” - the original vinyl only full length version now available on all formats. Overdubbed live over Andy’s drums, it’s not only one of the best passages of music on the album but of this whole period of the band.
Andy had bumped into Glenn in a bar the previous night and Glenn mentioned that he had just bought some Crotales so Andy suggested he bring them down the next day to the studio and play them on the record. He brought his friend Tim Barnes and it turned out to be an excellent idea! The spooky sounding end section was added to the original version as one of the “upbeat” additions I was talking about earlier. I don’t know what happened though as it sounds more like early Tangerine Dream on Mogadon.
Chad Taylor ended up playing one of the drum kits on the rather absurd - both lyrically and musically - “Nothing To Do With Me”. Somewhat of a musical throwback, I wish we had found a better vehicle for Chad’s talents.
SUGGESTION DIABOLIQUE
LES BONS BONS DES RAISONS
I think that “Suggestion Diabolique” is the culmination of everything we were trying to do with this record as a collective. Laetitia and Mary’s vocals have never sounded better together - Mary in particular brings great character to her vocal parts - John’s production is amazing, maybe the best he ever did for us. His studio also sounds wonderful here and all the various sounds and effects integrate themselves so well with everything else going on. Andy’s tape slapback drums add a slightly detached rhythm that pushes the song along like a scuttling crab. The middle part of the track written separate to the rest of the song also integrates itself completely here - not just stuck at the end of the track like on some of the others. The brass arrangement greatly enhances the spectral quality latent in the track. The end is perhaps pushed over the top with its Holst Neptune-isms but the fade out aligns so perfectly with the beginning of the next track that it just seems that’s how it was always meant to be.
“Les Bons Bons Des Raisons” is the last track and mentions my Auntie Sheila, who is a real person and still going strong in her 90s. Entrancing vocals throughout blending with the wonderful harpsichord. I really love harpsichord! Quite stately on this track. Jim does a great job bringing the necessary warmth to the song in his production and Simon Johns’ pulsing bass is excellent and understated as it is throughout the whole album.
I really pay a lot of attention to what will be the final track on any LP - it’s probably the first thing I think about when a record is done - and this is one of the best ones we ever had.
STEREOLAB - MARGERINE ECLIPSE SLEEVENOTES
The making of this LP was dominated by one tragic event: the death of a great friend and band member, Mary Hansen, shortly before we were due to start recording.
It is difficult to have much perspective on the ins and outs of the whole process of actually making the LP and the recording minutiae of individual tracks so I’m going to bypass all that for this album reissue sleevenote and just try to fill in as much as I can on what we thought we were going to do before everything changed, what we thought we were actually doing at the time of the recording and what ended up actually being done.
The original concept for the album was that everything would be recorded live as a band - just like we had done in the earliest years of the group. It was at one of these rehearsals that Martin showed up unexpectedly to tell us of Mary’s passing. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t have a perfect memory of what happened after that except to say that we stopped, packed up and went home. I don’t remember what I was thinking about or what my state of mind was.
Weeks passed before we collectively agreed on continuing to make music as a group and to carry on with this record specifically. Obviously nothing would be the same and the original ideas we had for the recording were dropped.
Running concurrently to the events in London was that the previous summer we had decided to build our own recording studio where we would record the album and all subsequent Stereolab music. We found a suitable property in the Medoc region of France just north of Bordeaux and set about converting it into a nice sized recording studio with living quarters attached. As anyone who has ever watched a documentary about people buying and attempting to convert property in France will attest, all did not go smoothly.
Once we had decided to commence with the recording of Margerine Eclipse we ran into major problems in finishing building the studio. It was mainly down to the super-human effort of LP engineer and producer Fulton Dingley that it ever got finished at all. We had known and worked with Fulton for many years by this point, he was one of the house engineers at Blackwing Studios, and he had first recorded additional material for us on the remixed 7” single version of “Wow And Flutter” in 1994 as well as going on to engineer and mix The First Of The Microbe Hunters mini LP.
One of the origins of the music on Margerine Eclipse lay in recordings we had done for Carlton Television back in 1992 for a series of ‘futuristic’ sounding idents for a new season of programmes they had coming up. These finished recordings are lost and I have never heard them from the day we did them. I don’t know why I went back to the ident demos but I guess that I stumbled over the demos for them at some point during preparations for this album and decided to incorporate them into the rest of the work. The Carlton idents crop up all over the LP (in re-recorded versions of course) as intros, outros and mid sections.
I should add here that all the music (though not all lyrics) for Margerine Eclipse and associated tracks recorded at the same time (available on the bonus disk) was written before Mary’s passing, as was the title of the LP itself which originated from something I saw in Spain on the tour for Sound-Dust. Turning a corner somewhere I saw these huge red letters, two metres high on a supermarket spelling MARGARINE or MARGARINA and it burned itself into my brain. I added the word ECLIPSE shortly after from my notepad of random words. Of course it goes without saying that all Stereolab LP titles - and any song titles that I come up with - are meaningless but I did start to think about Margerine itself, essentially an artificial product, a plastic alchemy and try to figure that out in musical ways. It became an influence, of sorts, I suppose
(it is spelt Margerine and not Margarine because that looks ‘correct ‘ to me but other times I might use US spellings - Aluminum Tunes because once we passed a truck on the road that said “Aluminum Tubes” and I liked the sound of it - Aluminium Tunes doesn’t sound right).
We made a few spontaneous decisions when making the LP on how we should go about recording it after our original concept of doing it ‘live’ in the studio was dropped. I remember standing in the studio the night before we started recording and talking about panning the speakers extreme right-left and having nothing in the middle. This eventually led to the idea of having one version of the song on the left speaker and a second version on the right speaker and the third ‘version’ would be the two combined. I thought this was a spontaneous decision at the time but listening to the Sound-Dust tracks again recently for this reissue series I noticed that we had partially gone down this route before on that record - at least when it comes to drums and rhythms anyway - and that this was more of a continuation, pushing it to see how far we could go. At its most effective on “...Sudden Stars” Andy has the idea to record basic drums on one side and make a delay of these and put them on the other side, he then replaced the delayed drums with a live played version of exactly the same thing. The effect on the music was totally different - a very strange propulsion. These and many other things were tried with a varying degree of success but it felt like the right thing to do under the circumstances. Push ourselves to come up with new ways of working and thinking about music.
BONUS TRACKS
This LP has no demos available to use as bonus tracks as I was not able to find any. I did find some already badly mixed demos but they were of very lo-fi quality and didn’t feature any vocals so hardly any point to use them. In time I might find them and if I do I will mix them and post them up somewhere for anyone who is interested. What we decided to do was include the triple vinyl 7” release Instant 0 In The Universe and the tour 7”/CD Rose, My Rocket Brain!. Some of these are in unedited versions so longer than on original release. Including the bonus disk this reissue contains everything we recorded for during the sessions for Margerine Eclipse. In addition “La Spirale”, the Japanese bonus track is now back in its original place as the middle section for “Hillbilly Motobike” . All tracks on the original Margerine Eclipse double LP are now unedited for this release and so may contain some slightly altered or additional intros and outros here and there.
ARTWORK
I want to thank both Julian House and Andy Hoople (under his various names @ Trouble) for their sleeve designs and artwork over the course of these seven LPs in the reissue series. More than any band photo or live shot these sleeves sum up what the groop were about at this time and are the true visual representation of the music we produced. Thanks again!
EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP SLEEVENOTES
METRONOMIC UNDERGROUND
Originally called Chrome Tubby”, this track was often cited as the main example of the ‘new sound’ of the band that had resulted from working in Chicago with John McEntire. It was, of course, recorded and mixed in London at Blackwing Studios with Paul Tipler a month before we arrived in Chicago. The second track written for Emperor Tomato Ketchup, after the song that became Young Lungs/Old Lungs, it reinforced the earlier song’s move into a more pronounced use of space in the instrumentation and arrangement, and marked a shift from a drone style repetition into one of interconnecting and looping riffs.
This was the beginning in earnest of the ‘arranged in the studio/studio as instrument’ approach that we would adopt from now on. Many tracks on Mars Audiac Quintet were not rehearsed but they tended to be less expansive tracks, not generally in a ‘band’ style. This song was built up from the bottom, bit by bit, and pieced together at the mixing stage to ‘make’ the finished track. As there were no computers or samplers used in recording Emperor Tomato Ketchup it still retains quite a live and spontaneous feel to it. The vocals operate on an invocational level (i think!) being part of and rising out of a general sound mass, passing through the ebb and flow, kind of controlling events and kind of detached from it. The track as a whole seems to operate very much as a statement of intent for the new approach that the groop would take.
CYBELE’S REVERIE
The single from the LP (not forgetting the US promo single “Noise Of Carpet” I suppose). One of the nicest pop songs we ever did I think - quite an intense and emotionally engaging song for us to both play and sing. The song is very notable for Sean O’Hagan’s outstanding string arrangement which adds a massive amount of character to the finished track. It was released as a single in edited form which took away a bit of the power of the build-up sequences I would say, but the slightly draining effect of the song probably wasn’t right for a single anyway.
PERCOLATOR
The recording of this LP was preceded by a period, lasting about a year, of drifting about in a musical landscape that wasn’t inspiring or particularly exciting. With nothing on the horizon everything we tried out seemed to be a dead end. Right at this point we began working on a cover version of a song by NY 60’s group The Godz. Listening to their track and thinking about how to do a cover of a song that was pretty much a free improvisation, I heard four notes go by that stuck in my mind for some reason. Listening back to them again I decided to loop them and keep on repeating them, building them up into a kind of hypnotic pulse that lurched every time it came back around. Andy laid down the drums that accented the feeling further (it was 7/8 time in fact that gave the ‘lurch’). It was at that point when the rhythm went down that I had an insight into how to crack open something new in the music. Repetition in the build-up of small melodic cells, from bass riffs to melodies that could co-exist together, flowing in and around each other until the track became a mass of activity and the final song could be sculpted out of it.
LES YPER-SOUND
The first song on the LP to be recorded in Chicago at Idful Studios with John McEntire. We had finished the final mixes of the songs recorded in London and I was feeling deflated by the whole process. It was a really hard slog and by the end of it I couldn’t connect to the tracks we had done so far. Listening to the mixes on the last day in the studio I thought that a lot of things were still missing.
We were back in the same London studio a couple of days later to start recording Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center, a completely different record intended for use with Charles Long’s art exhibition. Personally speaking, recording that record lightened my mood considerably as it was good fun from start to finish and everybody enjoyed making it. It really put us back in the mood and four days after finishing Charles Long record we finally arrived in the USto work on the second half of Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
It was a great idea to record with John in Chicago and we were excited to be in a new environment and working with the new friends we had made. The whole thing about working with John at Idful was to be about exploring any and every kind of sonic possibility we wanted to. This turned out to be the blueprint for all of our subsequent recordings with John, but it was on this LP where we really started to investigate the treatments made possible by electronic devices of all kinds - electronic rhythms and pulses, filtering, vocoding, electronic effects, synth chords and riffs. Although we had always been influenced by electronic music and used synthesizers quite a bit this was a whole new thing for us. On “Les Yper-Sound” I didn’t want to have a straight rhythm guitar sound, as heard on the demo, I wanted something more mechanical and robotic. John ended up gating/shaping the guitar chords with a hi-hat pattern and then filtering it though a synthesizer. Wonderful… and in time!
SPARK PLUG
Back to London for the short poppy track “Spark Plug”. Characterised and enlivened by the charming and wonderful singing of Mary & Laetitia, it’s the vocals that really make this song work. In a slightly different form it could have been on the previous LP but the interlocking riffs, cells and pulses of the overall sound world of Emperor Tomato Ketchup has exerted its influence, albeit pushed into a very confected pop form.
OLV 26
An earlier attempt at this rather basic electronic rifferama in early Kraftwerk style became part of the “Simple Headphone Mind” recording with Nurse With Wound. I feel now that we should have probably left it at that and not try to redo it again here. It’s sound harkens back to an earlier period and doesn’t really fit with either the sound of the rest of the LP or the preoccupations that we had about sound at the time. Laetitia carries the song along wonderfully and the electronic groove end section is great but I just wish it was more like that for the whole of it.
THE NOISE OF CARPET
Talking of earlier styles, every Stereolab album to date seemed to have a track like this on it and this is Emperor Tomato Ketchup’s version of that track. I could say it was a live favourite but I don’t think it ever was. I promised a friend of the Zambonis/Philistines Jr. that whatever the next single would be (it hadn’t been written as yet), it would be called “The Noise Of Carpet”. It was indeed a kind of single in the US, albeit a promo, so I considered that I’d kept my promise. Why it ever was a single is another question.
At the time I thought that Emperor Tomato Ketchup was much more of a break from previous Stereolab records than it actually seems now. In fact all the records immediately before or after any given LP are much more intertwined than I remember them being. On this particular record the new sound ideas we had seem to be heavily featured on a few core tracks but is only a colour and style influence on some others. On this track any residue of this influence has completely passed it by.
TOMORROW IS ALREADY HERE
One of my favourite tracks on Emperor Tomato Ketchup with beautiful vocals from Mary opening the song. That’s me and John playing the guitars live sat across from each other on the studio floor. Not really for a cosmic hippy vibe more that we had to watch each other for timing (or probably me watch him for timing I should say). One of us is going out of time towards the end though anyway. Great marimba line from John too and some superb understated electronics as well in the bit where the two chords mesh/collide.
EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP
Another track where we sped up the vocals by slowing the tape down. This was also done on the demo which normally meant the vocal melody was too high to sing. Instead of changing the key of the song (which in general I never liked doing for some reason, something to do with the interactions of harmonies - notes and harmonics never sounding right in new setting) to suit the vocal range we again slowed the tape down because we liked the effect of speeding up the vocals. This is a track that would have turned out totally different if we had recorded it in London.
MONSTRE SACRE
Simple song. Sad song.
MOTOROLLER SCALATRON
Another Lab song named after a keyboard instrument. Could be a whole album of them. Andy’s great drumming propels this song, really bouncing it along. Me and Morgie hang on for the ride with only two chords to play through the whole song and all its changes. As on “Crest” it’s the bass and vocals that make all the changes. This was Duncan’s last record with us and I think it is his best one, his playing is great and adds a lot of character to the sound of the tracks. Morgane had only learnt the organ just before joining the band and this was her first record with us (give or take some limited 7” or something) and she just jumped right in. It was fine for me and Morgie, the days before the complicated chords arrived.
SLOW FAST HAZEL
Loved this track when we did the demo on the Fostex cassette recorder, I really thought it was going to be something great but it never really happened for this song. Somehow the parts don’t gel or they don’t enhance each other, even with my best “Orang Outan” impression guitar solo. This is one track I wished we had done in Chicago instead of London. Probably just too many songs to do in London and no time for re-thinking it. I like the really high vocal bits though.
ANONYMOUS COLLECTIVE
Final song on the LP and final song recorded at Idful, Chicago. We had a great time there. I always thought the LP kind of petered out with this track at the end but listening to it again now it has a wonderful hypnotic vibe that transports you to the other side and gently takes your hand and escorts you out of the building. It holds its tension pretty well with the vocals flowing around your head, phasing in and out, contracting and expanding…
BONUS TRACKS
FREESTYLE DUMPLING/PERCOLATOR (Original Mix Version)
“Freestyle Dumpling” was recorded in London for Emperor Tomato Ketchup but didn’t make the LP. It was released a couple of years later as one side of a 7” single available with the Japanese boxset edition of Aluminum Tunes, where it was incorrectly titled as “Freestyle Dumping”. It features the fine playing of Ray Dickaty on alto sax. I invited Ray to come down to Blackwing Studios during the early stages of recording the album to add saxophone on a number of tracks, but on the final LP Ray only appears at the very end of “Percolator”. This had nothing to do with Ray’s playing but everything to do with me not knowing what I wanted and where I wanted to go.
After two weeks of recording we had about ten tracks or so of just drums with bass and alto sax playing exactly the same thing laid over the top of it. It was an experiment to shake things up but it didn’t really work. I sat there listening and not knowing what I thought of it all. Paul the engineer wasn’t very happy with it and it did seem to be a dead end when I had hoped this process would open up new possibilities. While feeling rather lost at that point, Sean arrived to hear the work in progress. I started playing him the stuff and Sean thought it was great as a way to go and could hear all sorts of possibilities. We started working on ideas for “Percolator” and Sean wrote the descending line for Wurlitzer and strings right there. That really broke the impasse and opened up all the tracks again. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Ray’s sax got edged out of the final mixes for the LP. I want to thank him because without his contribution we wouldn’t have had the record that we ended up with. “Percolator (Original Mix Version)” dates from a week or two before the final LP version,is a bit longer and has a different arrangement,and there’s a bit more of Ray’s sax at the end.
THE NOISE OF CARPET (ORIGINAL MIX)
Earlier and more abrasive version of the song which had the working title “Broken Face”. I think it sounds better than the LP version in a way. More simple and direct.
OLD LUNGS
Although not a previously unreleased track (it appeared on an ATP festival LP) I wanted it included here because it was the first track written for Emperor Tomato Ketchup and acted as a kind of catalyst for the whole thing. It was the blueprint for some songs in particular, and set down the path for the overall feel and sound identity of the LP as a whole. It was written a couple of months ahead of most of the other tracks on the album and we had already played it live on a short tour with Yo La Tengo in the UK. On the tour it sounded so different to the rest of the songs and every night it was the best track that we played. After the tour I was very happy to get back home and start writing more stuff in this direction. Mostly the overriding influence at this early stage of writing the LP was the music of Sun Ra and in particular the simple and playful little riffs that formed the bedrock of many of his musical explorations. However on “Old Lungs” the influence was much closer to home in the band Tortoise with whom we had played with many times by that point. I don’t know if the prospect of working with John influenced me to go in that direction and I don’t know if I even knew we would work with John at that time. What influenced me the most was their use of space in the sound, not filling everything up with banks of strumming guitar chords. In fact I don’t think the guitar plays any chords at all on Old Lungs. It built up into a frenzy when we played it live but unfortunately it didn’t translate to the recording studio and this version was deemed a flop. We tried a second version (“Young Lungs”), playing it live in the studio but that also didn’t make the LP. In the period between the tour and recording the LP something got lost and we weren’t able to get it back again.
MASTERING NOTES
This series of re-issues were mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering, Berlin.
As we started the project it became obvious that most of the tapes were showing signs of deterioration and some of the earliest ones were already at an advanced stage of decay and were actively shredding. They would need to be baked. Baking is not done to improve the quality of the sound and can lead to some softening and loss of fine detail but the process was necessary to preserve the contents of the tape long enough to transfer the tracks. Great care was taken during the baking of the tapes and no loss of sound quality was audible to me.
The earliest tapes would not have been able to withstand the stress put on them by a normal tape machine set up, with its high tension mechanism and multi head configuration, plus our 1/2” tapes needed to run at 30 inches per second - this increased tension would have most likely snapped the tape.
As a solution Bo decided to commission a bespoke tape block which consisted of a single playback head and a simple, no tension tape guide. This allowed the tape to be simply held in place as it passed over the single head.
Bo believes in "authentic mastering", this is a mastering style that tries to preserve the inner musicality of the audio. This approach is very important to me as well - Stereolab’s music can often be quite impenetrably dense in the midrange, there is always a lot going on - lots of detail everywhere. We were both very keen to preserve this aspect of the sound and, at the same time, try to improve a little on resolution, spatiality and depth.
DEMOS
The demos were all recorded onto a Foster X-15 4-Track cassette recorder - mainly using a DI'd Fender Jaguar guitar and a microphone for the Laetitia’s vocals. Sometimes I would use a keyboard too but I don’t remember which one. Nothing fancy.
The demos were mixed onto 1/2" tape by Jeff Fisher using some analogue EQ, compression / limiting and a spring reverb.
These demos were just working material to play to the band at the rehearsals or in the studio to show the rough structure of the song. As they were not meant for public release not much care was taken in the presentation, just something to show the general idea and for me and Laetitia to get the parts down on tape so we wouldn’t forget them. However having said that they sometimes really got to the heart of a song and occasionally more so than the final recorded version.
Every so often Mary would come over to the house and record a vocal or two but as the songs were normally knocked out pretty quick, and we didn’t live that close together, Mary doesn’t feature on most of the demos. She does pop up every now and then and that’s really nice to hear.
The demos from around Emperor Tomato Ketchup are still generally representative of the final recorded versions except for the tracks with Moog chords which are played on guitar here. We still rehearsed some of the songs before recording them but not many. On later albums the demos and the final recorded versions would take different paths and vary quite a bit more.
Throughout all the LP’s recorded up to Margerine Eclipse the demos were recorded to cassette tape, bumbling along in exactly the same way. The interpretations, once we had ditched rehearsing before recording, changed enormously.
DOTS AND LOOPS SLEEVENOTES
BRAKHAGE
Dots And Loops was very influenced by the world of experimental animation film and experimental cinema in general. The name of the LP comes from two films by Norman McLaren: “Dots” and “Loops”, and the first song “Brakhage” is named after the American avant-garde film-maker Stan Brakhage. The main reason I wanted to call the song that was that I thought that “Brakhage” was a very interesting sounding word and I really pictured it as being the first track of the LP, whatever track it would have been. Although I am a huge fan of his films, if he had been called Stan Smith I probably wouldn’t have used the name. The use of the title Dots And Loops was also in reference to the way that we recorded the LP; for the first time we used digital audio in the recording and editing process via Pro Tools, and this greatly facilitated us recording in little segments and loops. I’ll talk about this in a bit more detail in the notes for the next song but suffice to say that “Brakhage” would probably have never sounded the way it did recording in the traditional tape-only way we used on previous LPs. This track features great stuff from Doug and John from Tortoise, playing extra bass guitar and second drum kit respectively.
MISS MODULAR
This is one of the tracks on the LP that shows the greatest influence of the new computer-based recording system. When we arrived in Chicago for the first part of recording the LP we went to Idful Studios again and moved into the Tortoise “Ranch”, as we called it, on W. Division for our accommodation. Later on John McEntire and Casey Rice would set up a recording studio there that would be the first Soma Studio. We were unaware before we actually got to Idful that they had installed Pro Tools in the studio since the last time we were there but they had also retained their 24 track tape machine. We began recording in the traditional way, straight to tape, but at the end of the second day of recording drums Andy and John went back to the Ranch that night and decided it wasn’t working, they came to the conclusion that it would be better to change things completely and record the drums in loops. A small drum kit was set up in the booth and a very large sized kit in the big room and this is what we used for the rest of the LP. We recorded the drums to 24 track tape, dumped that onto two Tascam DA88 hard disc recorders for back-up, and then recorded them into Pro Tools. It did make a big change for sure - digital audio recording seemed like a child’s toy, making lots of little loops of the bass, guitar and the drum parts, not having to play everything through from beginning to end, plopping things in where you wanted them and moving things around to see how it sounded. We loved it! As we no longer rehearsed and had no particularly set ideas about how we wanted things to sound beforehand it gave us unprecedented control over so many aspects of the music, not just the editing possibilities but also the sound. We managed to add a wonderful glistening sheen to the basic drums, bass and acoustic guitar backing track to “Miss Modular”, they seem glued together and the whole track seems to be in a state of artificially derived delirament. The wonderful brass arrangements by Sean O’Hagan and Andy Robinson are dripping and melting as they pass through electronic treatments and Mary’s Spaghetti Western guitar twang’s clicking and buzzing background noise sounds hyperreal foregrounded like that. The best thing though is Richie Harrison’s bass which pulses magically through the song holding everything together.
THE FLOWER CALLED NOWHERE
Like the three LP’s around it - Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night and Sound-Dust - Dots And Loops was recorded by two different producer/engineers and split into two distinct parts. In the case of Dots And Loops the first part was recorded in Chicago with John McEntire and the second part recorded in Düsseldorf with Jan Werner and Andi Toma of Mouse On Mars. This song was recorded with Jan and Andi and remains one of my absolute favourite Stereolab tracks. I was very interested to find a chord that would evoke the feeling I got when listening to the music of Polish jazz musician and film composer Krzysztof Komeda. I eventually found a chord that I liked, probably by accident, and with it I wrote the music for this song. We also tried to capture some of that mid/late 60’s European exploitation film music vibe with the rolling harpsichords, trap drums, ethereal vocals and other colourful sounds. As an extra feature one of us (probably Andi Toma when I talked about the sound I wanted with him) thought to put the Gothic choral chant as featured in Roman Polanski’s film Fearless Vampire Killers in the track, so off we went to the local video store to see if they had it in stock. Amazingly enough they did, and we were able to duplicate it more or less. It’s weird to think that if the local video store hadn’t have that film in stock at exactly that point in time then this track would have been totally different. I know it’s not a famous song or anything but there is a touch of the everyday cosmic about it, in my head at least. Xavier “Fischfinger“ Fischer was someone Andi knew who could play the piano we wanted on this track and he did it fantastically well and got it down straight away, quite amazing to watch him do it. At the end I had to pay him some money on the spot but we hadn’t talked about how much it was going to be so, being very bad at this kind of thing, I offered him something but Andi looked at me sternly and shook his head so I realised I’d better double it and then everything was fine.
DIAGONALS
This track starts off with Andy’s drums being processed through a Bode frequency shifter and probably remains my favourite ever Stereolab intro. Sounds like the audio equivalent of that strange camera technique where the person appears to be coming down a corridor toward you and moving back away from you at the same time. The Stanley Kubrick of effects. John’s wonderful marimba comes in over it and then added over that is the excellent brass sounds of Sean and Andy Robinson. A great combination! The song gets into a nice groove with the EMS vocoded guitar locked into the drums and plenty of fizzy effects on the vocals, which sound great as always.
PRISONER OF MARS
There are always one or two tracks that I don’t really like that much on any given album and this is that track on this album. I don’t know why I’m not really into it as there are some excellent sounds and really great singing, very rich, but the whole thing just sounds way too slinky and smooooooth!
There is some acoustic guitar on this LP, which is a rarity, on “Miss Modular” it sounds great but on this song it really irritates me to listen to it now. On the other hand there are some wonderful electronic sounds from Jan going on that give a great soundtrack-y feel. Maybe the reason I don’t like this song is that the original demo version was a pretty fast headlong rush based around the bass riff and when slowed down like this it takes on a completely different characteristic and loses propulsion. Unfortunately the demo has been lost so we can’t stick it on the bonus disc to see if I’m talking crap.
RAINBO CONVERSATION
There was a bar in Chicago that we all went to called the Rainbo, some of the Tortoise guys worked there and other friends that we got to know. John would later set up his Soma Studios right next to it but at this time Soma existed at the Tortoise Ranch, some blocks away, where we mixed most of the tracks for Dots that we recorded in Chicago. All I remember about that is that it was incredibly hot in there, even in early June when we mixed the LP. They had these huge refrigerators they put the guitar amps in and I could see why (actually it was to dampen the noise and not to keep them cool) but it was like Cool Hand Luke in there. This track re-uses the same chord(s) that underpins “The Flower Called Nowhere” except now in a kind Michel Legrand/Francis Lai/Panorama theme way with those two chord pounding pianos.
REFRACTIONS IN THE PLASTIC PULSE
Long track consisting of four distinct parts that was perhaps the furthest we had gone in electronically treating and modifying one of our songs. I think that use of digital editing in the recording studio can explain away some of the sound of this LP which is sonically less haywire than the previous mostly analogue only LPs (except Peng! which was mostly recorded onto DAT). This slight dampening down of the frequencies resulted in a smoothing out of the sound that was slightly detrimental to one or two tracks (I’m thinking of “Prisoner of Mars” again) but on this song the effect was only positive. This track is sonically marvellous and is like an adventure in a strange and new landscape to me, much of it thanks to John’s inventive electronics and a starring role for the EMS Vocoder 2000. Although very long (but not a drone or minimalist) I think it holds up very well across it’s length and captivated me again a bit when hearing it for the first time in years whilst remastering the tapes. Some of the best and most beautiful singing to be found on any Stereolab song, great strings from Sean and Marcos Holdaway and wonderful bass again from Richie. Morgie adds some really nice touches and Sean was really in his element helping arrange this song. Probably the high point of this LP.
PARSEC
Slightly controversial at the time with some fans as it features a bit of a drum and bass feel...kind of. One thing that really impressed me working with John McEntire as a producer was that he always wanted to enable us to make the music we wanted ourselves and never tried to take over when things weren’t working, which would be the easiest thing for a producer to do, especially one who is as musically proficient as John is. When we had problems in the beginning recording the drums, John and Andy sat down together and worked out what to do between them and tried it out. It brought the best out of everyone. Sometimes we needed a lot of help with a song that didn’t seem to be going anywhere and John was always ready to make his studio a great place to experiment in. This song got the full treatment and recording it was quite fascinating but listening to it now I’m not that sure the basic song was really up to it.
TICKER-TAPE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
This track very nearly didn’t make it onto the LP. We had to leave Chicago before we had mixed this song and so John mixed it without us. We were booked in to master the LP at Abbey Road a couple of days after we got back and John had to get the track mixed and the tape sent over to Abbey Road before mastering date. When we got to Abbey Road there was no tape and no news of when it would arrive. We had to get started and it wasn’t until we got to mastering “Parsec” (eighth track in) that the door opened and someone brought in the tape package. We loaded it on the machine and mastered it without hearing it at all and so here it resides as track 9 (tracks had to be edited together and in order on the master tape). Of course it sounded great! A quite subtle and complex mix, highly treated (everything is being put through something) but holding together beautifully. Absolutely one of my favourite “sounds” we ever got. A particularly great brass arrangement tops it all off.
CONTRONATURA
Recording in Düsseldorf was a real blast! All the band lived and worked in the MOM Studio “Academy of St. Martin in the Street” (also known as St. Martin Tonstudio) and every morning the studio engineer Max Stamm would come in, make us breakfast and bring the newspapers which were always filled with stories about the misbehavior of Irish superstars (in Germany) The Kelly Family. It was a great place. Jan would come in every day from nearby Köln and then we would start work. On this track, which gestated over a two week period (most of the tracks gestated over time here), he would gradually add layers to his “insect horns” as I called them (sounds produced from his sample/filter keyboard) and load them onto Emagic Notator. This is how he built up the strange jungle of sounds heard on this track. I really loved this sound! Andy really wanted to be influenced in the sounds he got and the way he played by the people we would work with but I’m not sure that Andi was hoping to record a “real” drummer. Anyway it ended up with this hybrid mix of drums and squelch that starts abstractly before heading into a heavy space beat. An exotic concoction of electronic percussion, drum machine solo and real drum kit make this a mighty sound.
BONUS TRACKS
DIAGONALS BODE DRUMS / CONTRANATURA PT. 2 INSTRUMENTAL / BRAKHAGE INSTRUMENTAL / THE FLOWER CALLED NOWHERE INSTRUMENTAL / BONUS BEATS / DIAGONALS INSTRUMENTAL
As there are no previously unreleased outtakes from this album we have managed to dig up (at the last minute) a selection of previously unreleased (and unheard) instrumentals of some of the tracks from the LP. We found a box of DATs and this was what was on it. The great “Bode Drums” in all its glory (a L-R mix and not the centred mix on the LP), lots of instrumentals and Andy’s “Bonus Beats”, which is him tinkering about with a drum machine for the first time.
DEMOS
The demos were all recorded onto a Foster X-15 4-Track cassette recorder - mainly using a DI'd Fender Jaguar guitar and a microphone for the Laetitia’s vocals. Sometimes I would use a keyboard too but I don’t remember which one. Nothing fancy.
The demos were mixed onto 1/2" tape by Jeff Fisher using some analogue EQ, compression / limiting and a spring reverb.
These demos were just working material to play to the band at the rehearsals or in the studio to show the rough structure of the song. As they were not meant for public release not much care was taken in the presentation, just something to show the general idea and for me and Laetitia to get the parts down on tape so we wouldn’t forget them. However having said that they sometimes really got to the heart of a song and occasionally more so than the final recorded version.
Every so often Mary would come over to the house and record a vocal or two but as the songs were normally knocked out pretty quick, and we didn’t live that close together, Mary doesn’t feature on most of the demos. She does pop up every now and then and that’s really nice to hear.
Around this time we still rehearsed some of the songs before recording them but not many. On albums like Dots & Loops the demos and the final recorded versions would take different paths and vary quite a bit more.
Throughout all the LP’s recorded up to MargErine Eclipse the demos were recorded to cassette tape, bumbling along in exactly the same way. The interpretations, once we had ditched rehearsing before recording, changed enormously.
MASTERING NOTES
This series of re-issues were mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering, Berlin.
As we started the project it became obvious that most of the tapes were showing signs of deterioration and some of the earliest ones were already at an advanced stage of decay and were actively shredding. They would need to be baked. Baking is not done to improve the quality of the sound and can lead to some softening and loss of fine detail but the process was necessary to preserve the contents of the tape long enough to transfer the tracks. Great care was taken during the baking of the tapes and no loss of sound quality was audible to me.
The earliest tapes would not have been able to withstand the stress put on them by a normal tape machine set up, with its high tension mechanism and multi head configuration, plus our 1/2” tapes needed to run at 30 inches per second - this increased tension would have most likely snapped the tape.
As a solution Bo decided to commission a bespoke tape block which consisted of a single playback head and a simple, no tension tape guide. This allowed the tape to be simply held in place as it passed over the single head.
Bo believes in "authentic mastering", this is a mastering style that tries to preserve the inner musicality of the audio. This approach is very important to me as well - Stereolab’s music can often be quite impenetrably dense in the midrange, there is always a lot going on - lots of detail everywhere. We were both very keen to preserve this aspect of the sound and, at the same time, try to improve a little on resolution, spatiality and depth.
COBRA AND PHASES GROUP PLAY VOLTAGE IN THE MILKY NIGHT SLEEVENOTES
FUSES
One of the aspects that determined how we would go about recording Cobra was our reaction to the sound of the previous LP Dots And Loops. As on Dots we decided to carry on using a combination of hard disk recording and 24 track tape, we decided not to use a click track but record Cobra in free time as on our earlier records.
This decision had a big influence on the way the LP sounded, lending the music a freer, looser feel but still allowing us the same amount of control of editing and arrangement possibilities.
On the other hand the synth-bass on “Fuses” took over two weeks to record, spending an hour a day placing hundreds of randomly selected notes, one by one by hand, to get the effect we wanted.
There are double drums played by Andy and John and the studio dog (a big one) can be heard barking at the end of the drum take. The original demo name for this song was “Roland Kirk Rhythm” but I don’t remember to what rhythm I was referring to.
PEOPLE DO IT ALL THE TIME
Because Laetitia had given birth to our son Alex, a few months before recording started on Cobra, we decided that we would record the album closer to home this time. Blackwing, our usual recording studio in London was not available and so Andy suggested a studio in Brixton he had heard about called Wolf Studios. We went down there and met the owner Dominique who showed us around. The studio was quite small and located in a terraced house - the front room had the mixing desk and a back room behind it housed the live room. It had an Amek Angela desk, similar to the one we had been used to using in Blackwing, and a Studer 24 track tape machine, so we decided to book it to record the LP. Along the way we had to make a few changes to the studio and bring in quite a bit of new equipment to make it work for us but in the end we settled into it and got going.
This song featured the first use of our recently acquired Farfisa electric harpsichord. We purchased it for £50 from Loot and it was a mainstay in the studio for us for the next ten years. I’ve still got it but now the tuning has deteriorated to the extent that it’s barely playable. The last time it was used was on the Deerhunter track “Duplex Planet” but it’s now gone into retirement. Apparently there was only fifty ever made so maybe it could find it’s final home in a keyboard museum or something. Anyway it sounds brilliant here and dominates this beautifully sung piece of 60’s style melancholy wistful pop.
THE FREE DESIGN
Like the previous two LPs, Cobra was a recording split between two different producers, John McEntire and Jim O’Rourke, but this time instead of using different locations they both came to London and used the same studio. John started things off and most of the first few days were spent rearranging the studio and buying certain pieces of equipment that we needed to get the sound we wanted. “The Free Design” is the first track on the LP recorded by Jim and his way of working results in quite a different sound from John’s, even though we recorded at the same studio with the same equipment. This track has a stand out brass arrangement (and great flutes!) from Sean but it was Jim’s off the cuff idea to get the brass section to play “Dancing Queen” at the end of the song that’s stuck in people’s minds. The interplay between the two brass themes at the end is one of the best moments on the LP. Contrary to what people might have thought the title of the song came from the lyrics and not the 60’s Canadian band. Of course, it was a happenstance that I was quick to see the humorous side of.
BLIPS, DRIPS & STRIPS
OP HOP DETONATION
I put these tracks together because they have certain notable features in common I think. They both sound similar, were inspired by music with exotic rhythms and time signatures such as the music by percussionist Emil Richards and they both have names derived from avant-garde/experimental films which I probably took from my favourite ever book: Amos Vogel’s Film As A Subversive Art.
They were also both produced by John and feature the great bass playing of our, then, newest member Simon Johns. I first met Simon when Duophonic Super 45s put out a single by Colm O’ Ciosoig’s band Clearspot but when we got to Porky’s to master it Simon was there instead and as it turned out it was pretty much his band in fact. I asked who played the great bass lines on it and he owned up to that. Good to know I thought.
The two sections of “Blips,Drips & Strips” were recorded a week apart and bolted together during the mix. As these tracks were recorded in free time and without reference to each other before recording it’s pretty lucky that they fit so well. If you listen carefully you’ll hear that one of the sections is a few BPM slower.
The Emil Richards influence comes out in the pretty amazing vibraphone part played by John which I think really makes this song.
ITALIAN SHOES/CONTINUUM
THE SPIRACLES
One and a half tracks recorded with Jim which I think really show off the great production ideas he had going on at the time. Lots of lovely effects on the vocals on “Italian Shoes” and a somewhat Nurse With Wound influenced transition into “Continuum” make this one of the most treated tracks we ever recorded.
“The Spiracles” shows another side of Jim’s work with his great string arrangements and allowing the general fragility of the song to shine through. Stereolab tracks tended to be quite dense normally but Jim crafted a sound which hung in the air with an unusual transparency. This let the vocals really blossom in the mix.
Another aspect of these two songs that makes them notable for me was that I put down a steady click with my guitar onto cassette tape and recorded a chord and then left a gap and recorded another chord and left another gap and so on. I then put a capo on the guitar randomly and had to find another chord that would fit and sound interesting, then I changed the capo again, randomly, when I got to the next gap etc. I continued in this manner until I’d finished the entire sequence. In this way I wanted to break the conditioning of familiar changes. I thought it worked well but I never did it again.
The “Continuum” part was recorded earlier in the year at Blackwing as the B-side of a possible single “The Super-It” which didn’t happen (The A Side was later released as a tour 7”). I really liked the rhythm and so wanted it on Cobra even if it had to be bolted on.
INFINITY GIRL
Rob Mazurek from Chicago Underground played the cornet on this track and about four of the others that were produced by John. His playing is great throughout and he was totally into electronically treating his playing as he was doing it (check out “Fuses” for some great cornet synth interaction). The cornet really adds another dimension to the tracks that incorporate it and he is always a real pleasure to work with. The tone he gets on this track totally makes it, lifting the song to another level. Great vocals on this too with classic Mary backing vocals. The backing vocal melody has been used in a few Stereolab songs over the years first starting with “You Used To Call Me Sadness”.
PUNCTURE IN THE RADAX PERMUTATION
This was Mary’s song to sing and she sings it beautifully. Mary tended to sing the higher line and Laetitia the lower one as that was what suited their voices best. At least half the songs Stereolab recorded never had a lead vocal and a backing, just two or more lines that were divided up between them. Since Emperor Tomato Ketchup many songs consisted of interlocking melody parts that were sometimes sung or sometimes played on an instrument, it was never really defined. It’s amazing that they got these lines to work so well as sung parts, but they were used to it and over the years became very skilled at personalising them with their voices.
There’s a lot going on in this track, Sean’s great piano playing and brass arrangement, Jim’s string arrangements but I think the standout instruments have to be the vibes and marimba, which were wonderfully played by Dominic Murcot of the High Llamas. It just drives the second half of the song along and is the central and dominating feature of it. Kind of a pop systems music.
VELVET WATER
I love the Terry Riley style, randomly delayed organ at the beginning of this song. I wish we would have kept that going for longer or somehow incorporated it into the main body of the song but as it is it’s just the intro here. Don’t have much to say about the rest, everyone does their best stuff and it’s sung beautifully but I just think the original song isn’t up to it, from a musical point of view. It all comes off as sounding rather too conventional I have to say.
BLUE MILK
The side long track for this LP (our last one I think). Originally about 30 minutes long it was edited down to around 18 minutes by Jim in our basement surrounded by a sea of discarded tape around his ankles. Jim would only edit by tape and the feel of the edit in and out point was paramount. It was all done by ear and what sounded the most emotional and affecting. It was a beautiful piece of work that he did.
The original CD version was further edited down to around 12 minutes or so due to running time related issues. On this new version the original longer vinyl edit is used for all formats.
CALEIDOSCOPIC GAZE
THE EMERGENCY KISSES
When we arrived at the studio they had a stand up piano there. I was very interested in trying tack piano on this recording so we set about pressing drawing pins into every note hammer of the piano. It can be heard all over the album but I think it is best exemplified on this track.
In addition to that we had another brand new instrument for us on this track - a musical saw, played by Kev Hopper. It works brilliantly well in the first section, weaving in and out of the other instruments. I couldn’t think of anything more perfect for that part. We went on to release an album of Kev and his musical saw on Duophonic and the sound is simply sublime. We got lucky with the wide range of guest players on this LP, each added greatly to the overall sound and each of their contributions are very special.
This track was also one of the first to feature our new EMS Vocoder 2000, although we had used one on Dots And Loops as John had one in his studio.
“The Emergency Kisses” also features Dominic in another fabulous marimba performance as well. Jim’s strings on this track are also really great and work so well with the electric harpsichord.
STROBO ACCELERATION
We were on tour in America when the LP came out and we were faxed a review of the album in the NME. Written by Johnny Cigarettes, it got 0/10 under the headline GANE OVER. Well I’m still around.
COME AND PLAY IN THE MILKY NIGHT
For me this is one of the top two or three tracks we ever did and it came about because Andy sent me a track to listen to that had an interesting rhythm which he thought would be new and different for us to try and write a song to. It was Howie B‘s “On The Way” and the rhythm was interesting but far too complex for me to do anything with. What I noticed though was the little bass riff that kept going around. After a while it stuck in my mind and I started to play something like it on the guitar, moving it up and down the frets and within a few minutes I’d added some chords and put a melody on and it seemed such a nice little wonderful loopy tune and kind of sad. Turned out to be perfect for the end of the LP with its wistful flutey Mellotron sounds evaporating into the atmosphere.
BONUS TRACKS
GALAXIDION
The bonus track on the original Japanese pressing of the CD. Sounds good but I think the demo is better.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE Pt. 2
This was an alternative mix we did for a possible single. I think we should have put this on the LP instead of something else. Another out and out pop song could have been fitted well on the album. We probably thought that we couldn’t separate the two parts but I don’t know why now.
BACKWARDS SHUG
An interesting experiment in playing a song backwards, breaking down the mix and adding a few choice FX. Better than the forwards version…
CONTINUUM (UNRELEASED ORIGINAL VERSION)
This is the version we mixed earlier in the year at Blackwing, the LP version we mixed again at some point later on, some differences of emphasis.
CONTINUUM VOCODERED
“Continuum” put through the EMS Vocoder with the drums from “The Super-It” or something like that. It’s hard to tell. All these tracks were recorded for another possible single that would eventually come out in a different format.
DEMOS
The demos were all recorded onto a Foster X-15 4-Track cassette recorder - mainly using a DI'd Fender Jaguar guitar and a microphone for the Laetitia’s vocals. Sometimes I would use a keyboard too but I don’t remember which one. Nothing fancy.
The demos were mixed onto 1/2" tape by Jeff Fisher using some analogue EQ, compression / limiting and a spring reverb.
These demos were just working material to play to the band at the rehearsals or in the studio to show the rough structure of the song. As they were not meant for public release not much care was taken in the presentation, just something to show the general idea and for me and Laetitia to get the parts down on tape so we wouldn’t forget them. However having said that they sometimes really got to the heart of a song and occasionally more so than the final recorded version.
Every so often Mary would come over to the house and record a vocal or two but as the songs were normally knocked out pretty quick, and we didn’t live that close together, Mary doesn’t feature on most of the demos. She does pop up every now and then and that’s really nice to hear.
Around this time we still rehearsed some of the songs before recording them but not many. On albums like Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Moilky Night, the demos and the final recorded versions would take different paths and vary quite a bit more.
Throughout all the LP’s recorded up to Margarine Eclipse the demos were recorded to cassette tape, bumbling along in exactly the same way. The interpretations, once we had ditched rehearsing before recording, changed enormously.
MASTERING NOTES
This series of re-issues were mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering, Berlin.
As we started the project it became obvious that most of the tapes were showing signs of deterioration and some of the earliest ones were already at an advanced stage of decay and were actively shredding. They would need to be baked. Baking is not done to improve the quality of the sound and can lead to some softening and loss of fine detail but the process was necessary to preserve the contents of the tape long enough to transfer the tracks. Great care was taken during the baking of the tapes and no loss of sound quality was audible to me.
The earliest tapes would not have been able to withstand the stress put on them by a normal tape machine set up, with its high tension mechanism and multi head configuration, plus our 1/2” tapes needed to run at 30 inches per second - this increased tension would have most likely snapped the tape.
As a solution Bo decided to commission a bespoke tape block which consisted of a single playback head and a simple, no tension tape guide. This allowed the tape to be simply held in place as it passed over the single head.
Bo believes in "authentic mastering", this is a mastering style that tries to preserve the inner musicality of the audio. This approach is very important to me as well - Stereolab’s music can often be quite impenetrably dense in the midrange, there is always a lot going on - lots of detail everywhere. We were both very keen to preserve this aspect of the sound and, at the same time, try to improve a little on resolution, spatiality and depth.
