The Experimental Audacity of Stereolab's Dots And Loops Was Too Much For Pop Music To Handle
The landmark album from the pioneering pop auteurs has been celebrated by nearly everyone one but the 90s consumerists it tried to save
Tristan Young @talltristan
The early 90s were dubbed- briefly and erroneously, but with a misplaced sense of certitude- as the end of history. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the colonial wars re-litigating the ghosts of the last century seemingly concluded, many professional think-tank loiterers were convinced all of the ideological struggles that animated the world’s conflicts were over. Things would henceforth just be normal and blissfully benign. This was of course an arrogant and ignorant mixture of homeostatic and Anglo-normative thinking on the part of western leaders. Conflict raged across Eastern Europe, South America, and the Middle East throughout the decade and after. The rise of religious terrorism of the early 2000s was just around the corner, and that would soon give way to our modern, more secular and domestic varieties. Furthermore social and cultural issues ranging from institutional racism, to poverty, to minority rights were further inflamed and exacerbated. To say that we had reached the end of history was inexcusable in its naivety.
On the other hand, try telling that to pop music. For much of the decade, as the multiphasic interpretations of what pop music was coalesced around the boy/girl band or Britney Spears-esque dynamic (not to level any unwarranted derision at her, merely that she was the apotheosis of this trend in the 90s), the genre became more and more a superlative engine for edgy frivolity and niceties. The cultural or political substance of pop was drained as the vectors for its expressions were shed in the name of condensing what was once a wildly expansive genre into a narrow and binary definition. Pop music started to sound the same, and then like not much at all, beyond the same verse/hook combo. For those that came of age in the 90s, it was easy to misunderstand the vast and unruly spectrum that popular music previously operated on, and would again one day.
That spectrum still existed, and groups still occupied its more delphic provinces; it’s just that those that did, received less and less attention. Groups and artists that aimed to utilize pop music to its fullest potential were still out there, extrapolating on the personal and holistic qualities that defined or maligned our lives- but breaking into ubiquitous rotation on radio or TV was usually out of reach. Rarely, an artist or group that rendered pop through a more experimental or thematic lens could come close to breaking through to mainstream appeal and jolt the pop landscape out of its languid and privileged ecosystem. In 1997 that group was Stereolab, with their album Dots And Loops. Despite the innocent, almost remedial sounding name of the album, it was a complex overlay of amendable sub genres and sharp political thinking. The project of Tim Gaine and Lætitia Sadier was a group in a state of constant metamorphosis and paradigm shifts, always searching for a different approach to pop, a different approach to rhetoric, and a different approach to how these things intersect. With Dots and Loops they found an intersection that communicated more clearly, more broadly, suggesting assimilation into the boundaries of modern pop. More importantly however, it was an album that highlighted the unorthodox role pop music still had to play outside of vacuous escapism, bending the more marketable tenants of the genre to their cerebral will, rather than succumbing to them.
To say that Stereolab didn’t always sound the way they do in Dots And Loops is a bit of a reductive statement, as they have rarely ever sounded the same across releases. Ranging from spaced out easy listening vibes to granular guitar grunge, charting the evolution of Stereolab can be convoluted and non linear. One through line that can be traced through their music even before the group’s inception is their disaffected political leanings. Dating back to the mid 80s England Tim Gaine was in a hard left and vehemently anti-Thatcher band called McCarthy. There’s no confirmation if the name is a reference to the duplicitous and opportunistically hysterical communist demonizer Joseph McCarthy, but the shoe would fit. Lætitia Sadier meanwhile was across the English Channel in Paris where she had become increasingly disillusioned by the local rock scene. She migrated over to England in 88 to see how things were developing there and met Gaine. After the two became romantically involved they combined their talents, seemingly disparate though they may have been, into a new project that they would call Stereolab. The idea was the group would be an experimental space to see what kind of sounds worked not only in tandem with others, but as conduits for various social and political messaging.
While it’s debatable to what extent their music could be considered nominally radio friendly, they were mostly anathema to the notion at all by the release of their first LP Peng! in 1992. With their subsequent EP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music and the later full length Emperor Tomato Ketchup in 1996, they dropped the angular and static agitations in favour for more inviting but no less experimental avenues of pop music. These shifts in sound were not to be interpreted as course corrections to address errant productions, but rather the result of Gaine and Sadier’s perpetual efforts to see what could be smoothly and naturally pieced together in terms of instrument and influence. As music production slowly migrated from the traditional studio and into the computer via post production Gaine was able to take a life time of tangential musical interests, amassed through endless hours digging through the back corners of local record shops, and repurpose them into a focused and targeted collection of musical statements that Sadier would help refine.
Stereolab with friends in 1994
What makes Stereolab, and Dots And Loops specifically, so successful in such endeavours- at least in terms of historical significance if not commercially speaking- is that this intrepid pop experimentalism was not meant for pure indulgence or to assuage one’s melodic curiosity. Rather the function of making a multiplex composite of different forms of approachable pop was to affix a similarly diverse subset of ideological statements and observations to insinuate just how fiercely political pop music could still be. Dots And Loops draws from counter culture ideological narratives of the day and integrates them with the vestigial branches of political theories dating back to the height of the cold war. In fact, despite the blissfully breezy and untoward nature of the album, lyrically speaking it is often an incisive critique of modern affairs or an abstract articulation of the group’s opprobrium and fears.
Gaine and Sadier had adjacent, if not quite overlapping, political inclinations. Gaine’s public and musical background was, like many, a response to the social antipathy and sloganeering of conservative discourse still in its come down phase from years of opportunistic wars. Sadier’s influences were more specifically rooted, and from those roots her lyrics and messaging took shape in the album. Dots And Loops is largely influenced by Situationalist Theory, which was essentially a modernized take on economic liberal Marxism. Prominent in the 1950s-70s, Situationalist Theory combines hard political theory with more abstract movements that manifested in art such as Surrealism and Dadaism. It was meant to be holistic and aggregate critique of 20th century market capitalism. Proselytizers of the theory iterated that as capitalism had changed so much over the decades, so too did Marxist writings need to be updated in a commensurate fashion. One of the central points was basically to assert that whatever positive effects came from capitalism (technological advancements, quality of life improvements), were far outweighed by its negative effects (exploitation, slavery, pollution, inequality).
Situationalist Theory also had a penchant for the dramatic and theatrical, which is perhaps why Sadier found it such a worthwhile concept to extrapolate from and interpret into music. A key point of the theory deals with what is ominously referred to as the spectacle. It refers to the sovereign power that market capitalism exerts over all subservient branches of government along with every aspect of our personal lives. Like a malignant and sentient force, the spectacle uses consumerism to completely subsume our reality; our only understandings of our lives are manifested through its creations. This creates an acute sense of anxiety within artists like Sadier as the dimensions of life defined solely through consumerism severely limits the capabilities and reach of art as a whole. She brings life to this anxiety through the extended metaphor in the daisy age anthem The Flower Called Nowhere. One of the few tracks on the album that tells a story akin to something like a morality play, Sadier sings about docked ships in a harbour, afraid to sail out into unknown waters in what is symbolic of how constrained and unadventurous capitalism has made us. Amid a lofty assortment of soft harpsichord and charmingly cinematic progression she laments, “is it true that none of them will ever break free and sail?” For a somewhat broad analogy, Sadier manages to get quite specific, associating the bureaucratic everyday drudgery of life with what is weighing them down, “surely they must be loaded with more than simple matter”. In an impressive rhetorical slight of hand, she also conveys just how substanceless it all is as she considers, “giving a smile, weightless, like a body that would vacate its own light”. Amid the relaxed and reflective tones of the track, you can hear her anxiety permeating just a touch.
Sadier said that Dots And Loops was envisioned as a survey of her various fears articulated though the aforementioned political lens. Opening track Brakhage, named after the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage is the most direct invective bemoaning how we are conditioned to need and desire so many material things to feel fulfilled. “We need so damn many things to keep our dazed lives going”, she critiques over a lively and peppy series of looped sequencers and vocal layers. Miss Modular specifically alludes to the spectacle within Situationalist Theory, “A spectacle that rhymes, that arouses on the eyes a flash, a discovery, an idea that can play tricks”. She equates this trickery to the idea trompe-l’oeil, a term for an illusion to hide the fakeness of its subject, which seems like an apt descriptor for the context. Sadier directs her umbrage at the bourgeoisie upper class foot soldiers of market capitalism in Diagonals, mocking their frivolity and escapism. The tracks Rainbo Conversation and Contronatura act as a compendium, diving into what, if anything is to be done about this whole mess. In the former Sadier argues that if a revolution will ever be at hand, it has to start with a conversation with yourself. She sings about needing “someone intoxicating and strong”, while also suggesting that eventually she will learn that person is herself. In the later the idea forms more into a dialogue between friends- what exactly is to be revolted against? The system, as it is often lazily and anonymously described? Our own natural instincts? How does one wage that kind of war, and is such confusion being weaponized against us?
Unsurprisingly, part of the reason Stereolab only skirted along the boundaries of mainstream appeal as opposed to breaking clear through, is at the time no one really wanted the answers to these questions. Not within the anaemic discourse of pop media at least. Essentially they picked this fight in the wrong decade. In the 90s the economies of the world were mostly booming, yet to be disrupted or have to reconcile with the disruptive nature of an increasingly connected electronic global network. It was a time of relative economic prosperity where the dot com bust hadn’t happened yet. Like the misplaced confidence behind a label like ‘the end of history’ many saw this time as a vindication of market capitalism. No one wanted to hear about Situationalist Theory or how consumerism was choking the potential out of various forms of art. This coincided with an extended period of time where pop music was at its most frustratingly apolitical and apathetic to anything beyond maximalist sensationalism.
Gaine and Sadier seemed cognizant of these realties by often going out of their way to produce something that couldn’t possibly be market friendly. The sprawling 4 part epic Refractions in The Plastic Pulse, beyond an honestly pretty on the nose title, serves as the antithesis of these market and media conditions both thematically and sonically. Casually spread across over 17 minutes it slowly morphs from laid-back elevator/lounge vibes to quirky samba jazz fusions to looped, aerated electronica to messy layers of glitchy and digital industrial tones. It’s a lot and yet it’s hard to map it coherently, which seems thematically linked to how the song endeavours to explain how exactly we interact with this thing they call the spectacle. “It’s an endless action without trophy and without glory/ a bottomless creation without profit nor victory”. The condemnation is clear here, stating that capitalism turns us into all consuming, omnivorous creatures, never content nor satisfied with what we have.
You could listen to Dots And Loops and possibly never extract any of this from it however. This is not to cast derision on any hypothetical listener or to the determent of the album, rather to highlight how wild it is that Dots And Loops sounds the way it does. With its staunch and piercing political frustrations, one may infer a rattling staccato of punk vitriol. Instead the album is a rich and sublime synthesis of, well a lot of things really. Euro city pop, 60s lounge music, neo jazz and funk, bossa nova, daisy age prog rock, and vintage electronic gear all merge together to represent the past and potential future of pop music’s trajectory. Gaine and Sadier’s intimate familiarity with all of these sub genres ensures seamless integration of them all. This is not an album that highlights the divergent and convergent points to create something strikingly bold, rather it all blends into something very cohesive, unfussy, and non-cluttered. It’s not a dazzling mixture of stark colures, rather a composite of many pleasant ones. This helps gel the discordant Refractions In the Plastic Pulse together, making the elongated transitions natural, even inevitable. It’s densely layered but not distinctly articulated, instead the delineations and fault lines begin to fade leaving behind more of a pronounced intent than instrumental specificity.
While the tempo of Dots And Loops gets up there at times, this is a laid back album, again providing an interesting contrast to its lyrical subject matter. Rainbo Conversation proceeds with a Latin samba inspired casual, spritely stroll and Brakhage forms its beat through the light hearted ease of cautiously popping xylophones. The snappy acoustic guitar in Miss Modular glides with a carefree bossa nova style syncopation that hides its acute notation, instead compelling a unique body rhythm out of it. Diagonals is an inviting mixture of cozy and pleasant horns, backed up with syrupy jam guitars. Prisoners Of Mars recalls the quaint obscurity of a library record, background music that would never reveal itself to be so distinctly pleasant unless you thought to specifically pay attention. This is 70s shag carpet lounge room vibes. This is a gaudy tropical cocktail overlooking the valley while everyone is dressed in faded pastels vibe. Ticker-tape Of The Unconscious tapes into this sedate surrealism to great effect, while also adding a hint of mystery and intrigue.
Much of the work here is also accentuated, beyond its genre focused melodic styling, by more ephemeral and intangible qualities. Appropriating the contrarian sentiments of hippie culture is a noteworthy component of the album as such a movement was anathematized from the rule of consumerism in the 70s when it was ascendant. The Flower Called Nowhere has a florid, blossoming prosperity to it, with a nonchalant detached tone running through the whole thing. Its calming and whimsical, intentionally hoaky but no less hypnotic for it. Contronatura likewise indulges in its mystic and fairy-tale like world building and prophesizing. The spritely and quirky brass in Miss Modular gives it a nursery rhyme style sense of playfulness and innocence. The calming ebbs and flows of Sadier’s voice in Rainbo Conversation could obscure the more proletarian fears of the song, hiding it behind a sequence that is generously harmonic and angelic. The fluttering wind instruments in Brakhage imbue the song with a natural and jovial spirit, despite the detrimental material design of Sadier’s story in it. The ambient squishy weirdness that overtakes nearly two minutes of Contronatura pushes the boundaries of what even constitutes a song, but is oddly relaxing.
Such adventures into daisy age easy listening can dissolve the hooks of certain songs and leave the whole thing a bit amorphous, but Sadier’s pleasantly pastoral vocals inexorably tie everything together into something that still has engaging momentum. She is playful and nurturing in Miss Modular, forming the ebbs and flows of a melody with her own lyrical timing. Her instrumental function is paramount in the vivid and kinetic Parsec as her vocal role switches from lyrical to humming along a key melodic competent, and she does it all with grace and style. She fills many different roles depending on the album’s shape shifting needs; a seductive lounge room singer in Prisoners of Mars or impressively driving upwards along an ascending scale up to falsetto in Refractions In The Plastic Pulse. Her silken and streamlined inflections in Diagonals add a frictionless dimension to the song helping it glide along despite its more angular instrumental components.
Lætitia Sadier with bandmates in 1996, Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns
Sadier’s vocals are often at their most exciting when paired with Gaines intuitive layering and looping throughout the album. The weaving lattice of the same lines intertwining together in slight variations throughout Brakhage intimates a calm and unintimidating roller coaster, but the thrill remains. Sadier’s vocals take on a spectral, yet benevolent timbre in The Flower Called Nowhere as her echoes start to overlap her own key phrases to wonderful effect. It’s moments like this that reveal Dots and Loops is no mere analogue for simple, more congenial times. The technical and engineering wizardry of Gaine’s production is exceptional. Beyond simply citing his myriad influences, Gaines mixes and loops all of the different musical markers into a remarkable collage of samples creating something truly avant garde. The lackadaisical curiosities with soft electronica in Refractions In The Plastic Pulse are instructive here- it recalls a lighter side of something like Boards of Canada. So to is the retro futurism of the agitated drum sequencers in Parsec that segue into quirky game show beats. The slightly mechanical tones in the percussion in Diagonals are smartly accentuated with muted echoes to soften the edges making the rattling nature of it much more pleasant than it could have been. It yields flowery psychedelic wonderment through modern articulation, the perfect intersection of unorthodox and approachable. You can clearly sense the homage to an entire culture of crate digging and its attendant nostalgia. Parsing through the old analogue oddities from around the world and finding melodic through points by virtue of the nascent wonders of the digital age.
It’s these merits that also provide some intriguing complications to Dots And Loops. To what extent is the album itself a product of the advancements brought about by capitalism, and more importantly, to what extent do Gaine and Sadier wish to explicitly highlight this dissonance? Sadier decries our reliance on things and products to enrich our lives in Brakhage, yet her messaging is so striking due to the looping and layering only possible through an array of sequencers, recording devices, and tools for editing and mastering. The final moments of Contronatura that close out the album are even more illuminating. After several minutes of a nebula of unstructured sounds the song crystalizes into a firmly sequenced and melodic climax with a confidently bouncing bass line. Just as she proclaims, “this is the future of the illusion, aggressive culture of despotism”, Dots And Loops becomes its most pop friendly and approachable; the one part of the album you could actually dance to. How is that not itself an expressed endorsement of commercial pop? To add further existential weight to what is ostensibly a light hearted affair, her final spoken words are, “living fantasy of the immortal/the reality of the animal”. Is the never ending subjection of the spectacle in fact wholly synchronous and complementary to our human nature? Is the world designed this way because we instinctually want it this way? What could have been an unrelenting blow to the exigencies of market capitalism suddenly becomes something much more complicated in its outro.
To say that Stereolab provided a blue print for how to ask and answer these question is something of an over simplification, in part because of how complicated that blue print would be. To understand our relationship with the spectacle of market capitalism beyond the binaries of admiring or hating it, and pairing such rhetoric with an entirely antithetical soundscape is ambitious to say the least. Too ambitious for the charts and airwaves of 90s pop certainly. But just as Gaines and Sadier pieced together generations of influences into something more than the sum of its parts, so to would Dots And Loops slowly be decoded by a new generational gestalt of artists ranging from Animal Collective to YACHT. Dots And Loops showed how to meaningfully engage with the times in a thematically resonant way, even if you did so wholly from the perspective of your own world; eventually the boundaries can come down.