SOUNDTRACK: STEREOLAB-Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993).
Stereolab are a bizarre band. They make bubbly electronic music, with all sorts of bleeps and whirls and buzzes. They even describe their music as space age pop. Their album cover art is overexposed or simply silk screened. (This is a hi-fi needle getting dropped on an LP). The back cover looks like it’s a hi-fi test record.
This disc is a bit less electronic than future releases. It’s more guitar drone (appropriate circa 1991, frankly). When the songs start, Latetia Sadler’s voice is angelic and beautiful. Delicate and sweet. And you sort of realize that you don’t quite understand what she’s singing. Because the song is in French! No kidding.
And then you get to “Jenny Ondioline.” It’s 18 minutes of droning guitars and noises. It has several parts (the song actually stops at one point and at another it plays a sample from “Channel Recognition Phasing and Balance.” And if you listen carefully to the lyric, you’ll hear:
I don’t care if the fascists have to win
I don’t care democracy’s being fucked
I don’t care socialism’s full of sin
The immutable system is so corrupt
What is exciting is the triumph as the new nation.
A little later on the disc, on “Crest,” there’s more subversive songwriting.
If there’s been a way to build it
There’ll be a way to destroy it
Things are not all that out of control.
This is all done by those sweet, yet alien-sounding vocals. When she’s not singing in French, Sadler sings in a fascinatingly broken English, emPHAsizing the wrong sylLABes.
Although I think my favorite moment comes in “Golden Ball” when the CD skips like a vinyl record. It’s surreal. Electropop and Marxism: perfect together.
[READ: Week of June 11, 2010] Letters of Insurgents [First Letters]
And so begins Insurgent Summer.
This is the first week of my second Summer Reading Book series. I’d never heard of this book before getting the invitation to read. But when the book was described as 800+ pages of letters between insurgents, well, how could I pass that up?
And that is indeed what you get here: Yarostan (Vochek) has not spoken to Sophia (Nachalo) in twenty years. And he writes to her to her because she had written to him twelve years earlier (when he was in prison). He writes back to bring her up to date on his life and to find out what’s going on with her. (more…)
I’m very late to this show, I know. But then I have an excuse: I don’t like watching TV/movies/etc on my computer. So, even when I watched the awesome Dr Horrible, and the commentary told me all about Felicia Day’s online show, I didn’t investigate.
Because I needed one more reason to put off reading the huge stack of books on my nightstand (Jasper Fforde, I’m coming, I promise). I have decided to join yet another group read of an inordinately large book.
I Just Read About That... 