Comeback – Stereolab: Against the “good old time”

Tim Meier: Stereolab are back on the plate and stage. And we were there.

Marlon Grohn: Return is wrong. Stereolab was already on the stage in 2019 and then in 2022.

Meier: Do we really want to get in with this music editors jargon?

Grohn: Why not? The new plate continues exactly stereolab’s work in the form and content, as if it were never gone or the times they relate. And at the same time, the texts are still politically up to date.

Meier: The epochs you address have passed. Since “Chemical Chords”, its last album in 2008, the world has not changed the better, the wide range of culture à la Viva two, “Spex” or Diedrich Diederichsen’s Anarcho-Bolsheviker Derridaism in plate reviews without reference to the record-all of this is away. While we got older and thought that we were living forever in the 90s, Stereolab tried to save ourselves into our zero and ten years. But then we didn’t pay attention for a moment and this cosmos was gone and with it ourselves.

Grohn: He becomes alive again at the concerts and plates. Quasi emotional “self -dynic doping” (Diederichsen) with music. Now we stand here, in front of the stage, with hundreds of people, many younger than us, and ask us: How do they all know stereolab from?

Meier: 90’s are back, min young, you can see everywhere. Whether youth or Edeka, everyone is trying to revive the “best decade”. Of course, ironic, of course even more depoliticized than the time itself was. And of all things at Stereolab, this does not get caught: her new album “Instant Holograms on Metal Film” shows that although milieus disappear or change, but not the art that has been produced by them. It is not about singing a “good old” time, but pointing out a state that enabled more opportunities for the rebellion. Stereolab’s references to the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, after which a song is named, Rosa Luxembourg (“Socialism ou Barbarie” is called an album of her singer Lætitia sadier) and the Résistance (in her old hit “French disco”).

Grohn: But in interviews they also said that they don’t actually have much to do with Marxism.

Meier: I think it is part of the band strategy that you say something like that. It doesn’t matter how deep artists are in the matter treated at the level of such works of art. The aesthetic conveying of theoretical hint is more important than the “authentic” competence in the source of the reference.

Grohn: Stereolab’s music sounds quite socialist, even away from the lyrics. They look very relaxed, but incredibly confident. And also combative.

Meier: This is a mystery to me anyway, how you can do it again and again. I don’t know of a band that plays this, which plays sad and cheerful, even encouraging songs, with such a provocative naturalness. It is almost a bit outrageous: cozy sounds, sometimes such a harmlessly rippling Dreampop melody-and then the text like “Melody is a wound”: “The goal is to manipulate/ heavy hands to intimidate/ snuff out the very idea of ​​clarity/ strangle your longing for truth and trust/ choke, Wisdom Sapience and prudence. “

Grohn: I believed that after this whole pop intellectual bubble burst, it should have an impact on how to talk about music. But nothing there, chance. The political left said after 1990: the utopia is in the bucket, let us think that again with socialism. However, the pop discourse, it seems, did not want to learn or process anything from the downfall of “Spex” etc. While Stereolab is a possibility in the subject of this pop criticism, in which music find itself.

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Meier: It seems to me that with the offer that the stereolab of the pop reception makes, it is like with the works of art in the museum: the actually interesting is no longer the picture itself, but the life of the artist, his person, his relationship with others, the connection from which he thinks he has to make exactly these art. Even in the museum it is no longer the pictures themselves that are interesting for criticism, but the space in between, the people, how they look at the works, who they are, what they say, what they want. Just like we are talking about this conversation on the occasion of the new album.

Grohn: Ultimately, pop music has always been “only” a means, a tool that will be able to “more” and a “further”: the musicians offer the template, but you have to live it yourself. Art always shows that it is not enough to only receive it -the work is only ready if you go to the concerts yourself, sing along and dance.

Meier: Would you say stereolab would have created the last work of art, as Malewitsch supposedly did it or Duchamp?

Grohn: Boris Groys says that in the “last work of art” only “the hidden, invisible, undisclosed rhythm of life can be pointed out exclusively by means of writing”. This actually fits stereolab if you replace writing with music. Pop must begin to become his own self -contained work so that his own criticism also make the criticism of the reviewer superfluous.

Meier: Only when stereolab really created the absolute, the last work of art, then we are not allowed to talk about it. Otherwise the work would no longer be absolutely.

Grohn: But we just sang and cheered at the concert. Isn’t that considered the end of the work? We are almost in the factory, the printed criticism would no longer be necessary.

Meier: We are part of the work – we also have to convey, in the form of a meeting, otherwise stereolab’s art will not reach the world.

Stereolab: »Instant Holograms on Metal Film«(‎ Duophonic Uhf/ Warp/ Rough Trade)