Win Stereolab ‘Not Music’ – New Album In Vinyl!!!
aaamusic | On 18, Nov 2010
AAAmusic is giving away 4 vinyl copies of the new Stereolab album ‘Not Music’!!!
For your chance to win simply email win@aaamusic.co.uk – subject line ‘Stereolab’ with your name and address by Sunday 28th November at 1pm.
UK residents entries only
Over the Summer of 2007 Stereolab reconvened at Instant Zero, their studio in Bordeaux to record 32 luminous new songs which would become two distinct albums – 2008’s Chemical Chords and their new release, Not Music.
The recordings began when Tim Gane started messing with “a series of about seventy tiny drum loops” on top of improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone. “Building them up from there – later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up – a totally new way of doing songs for us…”
Not Music is Stereolab’s twelfth album and is released during the band’s self-imposed hiatus from recording and touring. The album will be released via Stereolab’s own imprint Duophonic UHF Disks
Over twenty prolific years of qualitatively consistent output, Stereolab have accrued a vast, peerless cache of work, hallmarked by a unique, carefully evolving but instantly recognizable sonic signature. In addition to a dozen glittering LPs, their back catalogue is littered with fan-pleasing gems: limited editions, one-off collaborations, split singles et al. In the process they’ve galvanised an extensive, staunchly loyal international fanbase; become a byword for playful, stylish excellence; struck a blow for the feminisation of rock and booked a permanent seat at experimental pop’s high table.
All of which is not bad for a group who eschew many of the established calling cards of rock ‘careerism’ in favour of dedication to a singular, picturesque muse. To all intents and purposes, Stereolab continue to inhabit some hermetic parallel universe forever redolent with the innocent-yet-glamorous promise of space age futurism and timeless radical chic; their essential fluorescence blissfully unsullied by the dreary spreadsheet certainties of the modern music industry.
Theirs is a rich, overflowing palette, readily able to blur the gulf between Os Mutantes and the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra; merge Krzysztof Komeda with the Velvet Underground, Francoise Hardy with Neu! and Burt Bacharach with Esquivel. A super-deluxe blend, in other words, with ingredients plucked assiduously from pop’s coolest outposts: 50’s lounge pop, Rive Gauche chanson, Brazilian tropicalia, North American art rock, East European film music, Krautrock. hi-fi test recordings, library music and more. Somehow they distil these apparently incongruent components into an ageless exotica that is all their own.
STEREOLAB: Laetitia Sadier – Vocals / Andy Ramsay – Drums And Drum Machines, Electronics / Simon Johns – Bass / Joe Watson – Keyboards, Vibes, Electronics Occ. Drums / Tim Gane – Guitars, Bass & Occ.Drums / Joe Walters – French Horn / Sean O’Hagan – String and Brass Arrangements
