Pitchfork

Part of the joy at the heart of any new Stereolab album is unraveling the many vagaries contained within the music. Their records are pleasant at first, but labyrinthine upon inspection. Still, if you ever have the opportunity to have Stereolab co-founder Tim Gane personally explain just what went into the making of one of these things, I'd advise it.

Chemical Chords-- the band's first proper LP since 2004's Margerine Eclipse-- strikes one as rather straightahead (if unusually poppy) if you've heard any Stereolab in this millennium. But after Gane illuminates the lightning-round writing sessions and truly unorthodox recording methods that built the disc, it's impossible to hear it the same way. Indeed, Tim Gane is a craftsman, and, yes, occasionally rather technical in his descriptions of his artistic process. But would you expect anything less from the guy from Stereolab?

Chemical Chords isn't out until August 19 in the U.S. and August 18 worldwide (via Duophonic UHF Disks/4AD), but consider Gane's words crib notes to study in the meantime.

Pitchfork: How did you decide it was time for another album? It's been four years since the last full length, and two since the EP collection Fab Four Suture.

Tim Gane: The last bunch of records were just singles that became an album because the label wanted us to tour, and we thought we could compile those into an album. I was kind of bored of albums. But I did the singles anyway, just to mess about with things. Then I jumped into doing a soundtrack for a film [Marc Fittousi's La Vie d'Artiste]. I wrote quite a lot.

Straight after that, I began to work on the album. I was fresh to do an album, and I felt like I had lots of ideas. I felt it in my throat. I had ideas to just do lots of tracks, put them together, hopefully get the whole thing all together. In fact, it was quite weird. The soundtrack overhung by a long time. I thought that I would have six weeks to two months to prepare stuff for the album, and in fact, I had one week. In the end, it turned out quite well.

Pitchfork: That's quite a constraint. How did it come together?

Gane: The album that's closest to this in the way that I wrote it was [1996's] Emperor Tomato Ketchup. I had changed an idea into something else. Everything came very quick, and a lot of music came together very, very fast. This one was identical, it was even faster, because of what happened with it. I didn't have time to write songs. All I had time to do was prepare some little drum loops, little things like this to enter the studio with.

Myself and the engineer, Joe [Watson], we started with only drums without the drummer, because Andy [Ramsay] couldn't do it. So it's kind of weird. We built all these little drum tracks up and I took them back home-- I'm living in Berlin at the moment. I spent two weeks just writing chords neutrally on the guitar, on the keyboard without any kind of particular rhythm or anything, and then we came back to the studio here and just applied the chords onto all the different rhythms that we built up. I was interested to see how the rhythms changed the chords or what, sometimes speeded them up, doubled them up, cut them by half. I found it was a cross between making your own music and listening to someone else's music.

So we built up about 50 songs of just chords with rhythms, and we then recorded them only on piano and vibes, which are two instruments we haven't really used very much. At that point, we had fifty songs that were just piano and vibes and these kind of crappy drums that me and Joe did. I liked it because it was different. I like to think we're writing something different. Then all the songs became fleshed out.

Pitchfork: It sounds like the process of making this record was more than a bit unorthodox, even for Stereolab. Do you find that you set out with an aim in mind, or does it evolve more organically through the recording process?

Gane: Kind of both. I'm kind of setting up an environment of circumstances where things might happen and then I'm following on the things that happen, and sometimes that might build on or take away from an original idea, but it's something more interesting coming along. I'm always trying to put things outside of my control. I normally try to do that by chance, just throwing in lots of obstacles.

To me, it's a little bit like a game. You can only use this, you can only use that. On this album, we have all the rhythms played, and then we just randomly put chords and the music on the rhythms. So to put two things together which I could never have worked out, it's random in that sense, but when something holds or something kicks in, you go with it. I like this kind of thing.

I'm not what I would call a songwriter. I don't have a central idea. I don't have anything to put across. I'm just trying to find out stuff and then go somewhere else. I don't think really well thought-out songs beginning to end. I'm not capable of doing it. It sounds well-arranged because I put everything through the washing machine 150 times, and what comes out is the product of various distillations until what's left is this thing.

I mean, I like it. I make music that I like the sound of, but then I tend to like kind of melodic music with slightly strange elements. The thing I really wanted to do on this record-- and that we did do, I think-- was make short songs that were more upbeat. Deliberately pick rhythms that were quite fast. Everything else could have gone one way or another, but this element was what I wanted to do.

That does kind of continue a little bit from the singles. I'm kind of against really long songs at the moment, but it might turn around. On this album, when we started the album, we only had one 25-minute song, one 19-and-a half-minute song, which we couldn't have time to finish. It did sound interesting, when we were doing them, but one 18-minute song is like four or five shorter songs.

Pitchfork: It's certainly a shorter record than you've done, both in total and with the particular songs. There's not that eight-minute centerpiece or that 11-minute closer like we sometimes hear from you.

Gane: I didn't want a nine-track album. I kind of find nine-track albums a bit boring now. I think inevitably it sounds like us and it sounds like songs I write. I don't try to hide that. I'm attracted to certain sounds and certain chords. And I'm very fond of using the same people, the same musicians-- we brought in [former Stereolabber/current High Llama] Sean O'Hagan to do arrangements-- and throwing everything together. It is haphazard, in our own haphazard way of doing things, but we kind of concoct a montage that creates the songs, all the elements. It's always a bit curious, We're not really quite sure what's happening, whether it sounds good or whether it sounds too dense or too angular or something.

Pitchfork: What happened after that initial week-long burst of writing?

Gane: We were living all in different places and having to record, sometimes in France, sometimes in Berlin. I had to go to Paris for two months unexpectedly; I worked on it some there. We started tracks, then we don't know what's going to happen with them. We've recorded the drums, we've recorded the chords, we have nothing written on top of the chords. Constantly, I'm just writing the next part across like 50 tracks. It's difficult to always go, "what am I doing?" It just took long because of that. I couldn't stop it. I don't like to contain records of ideas. I think they are what they end up being. It's like a circle. You kind of try to complete the circle.

Pitchfork: Is there any story behind the title, Chemical Chords? I'm quite fond of it-- it's very Stereolab-y-- but it's a strange name to hang on a record that was written on largely acoustic instruments.

Gane: The title came about because I just had an idea putting the words together. The track that's called "Chemical Chords" was the first or second. There were two or three songs that I wrote at the same time as the soundtrack, for possible inclusion on the soundtrack, but it didn't evolve. Two of those are "Chemical Chords" and "Self Portrait with 'Electric Brain'". They're a little bit similar to the soundtrack.

For some reason, I don't know where it came from, but I had the idea of this term Chemical Chords. From right at the beginning of the writing, it was called Chemical Chords, but it was just my rough title. It does sound artificial, but at the same time it sounds like the chords being kind of the center, they're affecting you perhaps. The record is very, very chord-based, I find. Everything springs from the chords, and the chords sound very nice and very strong because they were originally played on vibes and piano. Everything sprung from that.

My next idea was to keep everything kind of a bit shorter, quite dense. My idea was to make pop tracks in a dense style, perhaps something like Motown or the girl group sound. But have ideas coming at random or at tangents. Always keeping it in the pop thing, but dense, short. I think it was the instruments, the piano and vibes that helped. It's got more of a pop base than our most recent records.

I think, in the end, I was really enjoying all the different instruments and so on. I'm looking forward to playing these songs live, because it can be quite 60s punk. I think we're gonna do it more like simple organ, bass guitar; I don't think we're going to have any computers.

Pitchfork: Speaking of which, I know you have a few festival dates on the way, but is there a plan to tour more extensively?

Gane: We were all set to tour right about now, but the record was put back a few months. We will tour when the record comes out. But yeah, we're going to rehearse for some festivals. We have a couple, anyway. We're just going to play four or five new songs and six old songs on these festival dates. Because we don't want to bore people with songs they don't know at festivals, especially in places that we don't visit often, like Greece. We only played there once ten years ago. Norway we played a couple times.

I imagine we'll come to America sometime in September. I think we'll do a five- or six-week tour. It's being booked now. I think it's almost done. I'm excited. We lost one member since the last time we were there, so we're just down to six. I want to keep it kind of a bit more edgy.

Pitchfork: Does it feel as though you're at a place as a band where you can sort of operate at your whims? Make a record when you please, tour a bit or a lot depending on your moods?

Gane: We do tour a lot. We're not shy of touring. It's a bit more difficult to set up something that's fairly short. I don't like rehearsing. I don't rehearse ever for records. The last time was 1994, when we rehearsed for a record. I like playing live. I'm scared of it. I'm a bit weird about people looking at me, but I like the actual energy and vibe of playing. And I think we get better as we play more.

But the financial problem is, it's a bit difficult to tour a lot around Europe. You get paid a lot less, it's a lot more traveling. So we've had to make it work from that point of view. But we don't have a big label that's gonna subsidize things. We have to play England at the least. It's a lot easier for us to do in America where we're more popular, or slightly more popular. It seems to be, in America, we play a lot, and we enjoy it, and we play for quite a few people. But I don't like to go to America for more than 5 weeks.

Pitchfork: Why do you think Stereolab is more popular in America than Europe?

Gane: I don't know. I think it's a kind of blossoming or burgeoning knowledge of European music. But I also think it's very simply that American aren't afraid of the kind of artistic elements in music, like art rock or art pop. That's kind of coincided with a kind of idea of using new elements in pop music that I think began with My Bloody Valentine and maybe Spacemen 3 and carried on from there. I think this really appeals to Americans, like, college kids, people doing art stuff. I notice it when I go back to Chicago, the guys around Tortoise and all that, they're all into all ideas about music, and you can talk to them about it. In England, it's very difficult to do that. I've found Americans more open and more friendly.

Pitchfork: I realize that you've just finished a new album, but do you have plans for any new recordings?

Gane: Well, the album is only half of it, in fact, because I'm at the studio right now mixing another 15 songs. In the end, we just scaled it down to those 31 or 32 songs, but we ran out of time. When the album was originally going to come out, we had to finish it by the end of December. But now it's been put back, so we're mixing other tracks.

The tracks were chosen at random. It will make an interesting kind of sibling or companion to the record. I think we won't release it like a normal record. We're not going to wait until next year, because it's too similar, it's from the same sort of sessions. We might do something like a tour album instead of a regular release. It's not only up to me. Me, I like putting things out.

And I've been asked to do the next soundtrack for the guy who did the one before [Marc Fittousi], but I don't know when that's coming around. I just work all the time. When I say I've been working on this for nine months, I mean, it's almost every day, and even today, we just finished a song an hour ago. You know, the last few tracks I may have to master on a laptop and not in a studio, which isn't what I want to do. It's exhausting to make a record, but when I finish a record, I find I'm always ready to do something else. Ideas just kick in, you don't control them. I'm sure that we'll have to, I'd like to do a tour single at least. If this record doesn't become a tour piece, which I'm interested in, I'll record some singles.

Stereolab:

06-15 Athens, Greece - Synch Festival
07-19 Tonsberg, Norway - Slottsfjell Festival