Over their 19-year career, Tim Gane was arguably the closest thing Stereolab had to a creative director, providing the initial spark for nearly all their compositions, along with singer and co-writer Laetitia Sadier. Stereolab are one of the rare exceptions that have made the studio-as-instrument model work. Collaborators along the way included John McEntire [Tape Op #23], Jim O'Rourke [#16], Mouse on Mars [#46] and Sean O'Hagan. We talked to Tim Gane in his Berlin home to ask about the process of invention and collaboration.

<em>[This article was printed in a very condensed form in print issue #98 of Tape Op.]</em>

[ listen-link ]

When we scheduled this interview, you told me you were going to "write it down on your blackboard."

Yes. [laughs] I've always used a blackboard — an actual board with chalk. I keep it right in the middle of the kitchen so I can't miss it. My approach in the studio is similar in certain ways. Very basic and very elementary.

Before you started Stereolab you were making some pretty aggressive noise music.

When I was 15 some friends and I had a band called Unkommuniti. We did what was called "power electronics" back then. The sound was sort of a cross between Whitehouse or Nurse with Wound. It was improvisational, mostly synths and feedback. At the time those bands were creating the most exciting music I'd heard, and Unkommuniti was my teenage way of reproducing it.

Your next band, McCarthy, had some renown on a very different track. How did that come about?

McCarthy was a group of four people, of which I was only one. I didn't make the music like I did in Stereolab. [Singer] Malcolm [Eden] and [bass player] John [Williamson]'s tastes were geared more towards pop. For me, McCarthy was an adventure into pop, because I didn't know much about that kind of music. For me it was very eye-opening to explore the pop music of our time; as well as what had come before.

Were you working on that chaotic, textural noise stuff at the time?

There was a period in the beginning where it crossed over and I was doing both groups simultaneously, but that stopped after about a year. The early McCarthy sound was more abstract and included electronics. But gradually it morphed, until we were playing these very quick, sharp pop songs. That went on until the end of '89 when Malcolm decided to stop. That was fine, because I wanted to get back to doing the music I was hearing in my mind. I knew it wouldn't have been possible with the members of McCarthy. They had their own thing, so their tastes wouldn't stretch to include it.

Using minimal chords was our way of creating a base for exploration in melodies. If you have a chord that's only two notes, the choices you have to draw on for the melody is huge. But if you're writing chords with six notes, you're already kind of painted in. When I heard Neu! I'd listen to the beat and think, "Yeah, just do that. No drum rolls. No cymbals. Just keep it simple, do that all the way through." It sounded more strange and exciting to do that then to add in lots of fills. I remember having some disagreements with our bass player at the time; he kept wanting to put in runs and fills and I'd say, "No, don't do that! That just makes it sound really ordinary." It sounded really unordinary when we just stuck to the same thing, let the changes appear gradually, and let those changes appear in the melody on top. The first records were very much a process of simplifying the bottom end of the sound, to make the top end sort of go up into the sky a bit. Of course bands like Neu! and Faust and so on were very important. And then the New York guys, like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca were also making one note songs, but were making it interesting.

Stereolab is very different from either of those projects. Did you suddenly become drawn to a new set of influences?

Well, in the early and mid-'80s I was a big fan of Krautrock music — like Faust, Neu! and Can. There was a great shop where I lived in L.A. called Recommended Records. They had The Residents and everything! When McCarthy split I was exhausted. I'd been in two bands, and I didn't want to do "just another band." I felt there had to be a reason. It was about a year before I began to think of something that was new to my ears. I started going back and listening to some of this old stuff that moved me. In a sense I was looking for a way of combining the experimental with the commercial. I wanted to do something new and different with music. The idea was a combination of naïve pop melodies melded with very simple rock minimalism. When we started, that early stuff did sound quite different. It played to the proficiencies of the band, which was not very "musical," in a sense. None of us were great musicians, especially in the beginning, so it wasn't a technical thing. Our innovation was to strip everything back.

Where did the love of the Farfisa organ come from?

In the beginning, the Farfisa was the creator of the basic Stereolab sound. Eventually we stopped using it as much, because it's so identifiable. But it's got this natural distortion that's just... heavy. It covers up a lot of things! That's probably why it sounded so good. [laughs] It added a color and dimension to the band that we were looking for [at the time]. Bass, guitar and drums sounded reedy on their own. I tend to have that reaction to things, "Stop! That's it! This is the right sound." We had bought a Farfisa Bravo in the beginning, which was the cheapest Farfisa going. We got it at a charity shop. We got it home and started to play with it and realized the sound was great. But it's so primitive that if you played anything more than a major chord, the harmonics would begin to break up. For me what sounded good were two-note chords. That Farfisa didn't do anything else, so it dictated the sound. That guitar and the Farfisa chords were basically the sound of all those early Stereolab records.

On those early records everything has a very dense texture. The arrangements started to open up after the first couple of albums. 

I think the reason the sound changed is because we were gradually rehearsing less and less, and our writing and recording process got closer and closer together. In the early days I would write the songs and bring them to the band. We'd rehearse them, play them and try to make them feel big and exciting. But by the time of Mars Audiac Quintet the ideas I'd bring in were so minimal that they were barely there. All the songs were pretty much constructed in the studio and that had a big effect on the sound. That's how it changed from the sound of a live band in the studio, to an experiment in juxtaposition of sounds.

Snapped around the mid-90s, during sessions for either Mars Audiac or Emperor Tomato Ketchup LPs. Taken at Blackwing Studios in London.

I think that becomes apparent on the fourth album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

Well, the main trigger for us was that after Mars Audiac Quintet I had one year where I couldn't write. From '94 into '95 — it was a bad year. I think I wrote two songs. I couldn't go on anymore with the sound that we had. Then, something happened. We were asked to do a cover version of a song, "ABC," by The Godz for a compilation album [Godz is Not a Put-On]. In the middle of the song there was this two-second little bass riff and I thought, "Maybe I can grab onto that." That's pretty much where I got into the idea of grabbing onto loops of these accidental sounds. I had a way to get out of the problem I'd had. It's similar to the minimalist layering we were doing as a band. It's still a very simple approach but, instead of writing in a linear way, it's more circular. By the combination of simple loops, you're building up this complex sound.

What effect did that have on your work in the studio?

This is what gave me the idea to get the sound we used on Emperor Tomato Ketchup. It was written quickly because I was so inspired by the idea of getting the band playing loops. We were excited by a few people who seemed to be taking a similar approach, like Sun Ra and Tortoise. We also wanted to work with John [McEntire of Tortoise]. So half of the tracks we recorded with John and half we did at Blackwing Studios, which was our normal studio at that time. John had a massive influence on the sound, and for me it was a new, very exciting period. Going away to somewhere like Chicago to record with these new ideas in your head — it was fantastic to work with him. And that sound gradually developed across the next albums.

But you weren't using computers yet?

Well, the new thing with the next album, Dots and Loops, was that it was the first time we ever used the computer in the studio. There are no samples on that record; it's all us playing those loops, live as a band, together, in real time. On Dots and Loops we started using samples on the computer; but they're still samples of us playing. We had six weeks to record, and after two weeks we were done with pretty much everything. We thought, "Man this is crazy," because it went so fast. But then we had to edit everything. We realized in the studio that with a computer, you can record quite fast in small groups. But then you have to edit it, and loop it. So that was another two weeks. The sound of the computer massively influenced the sound of that record. It changed the way that we wrote songs and everything. The way it can divide a loop makes you hear things in a different way. It was a great discovery, for us and for John. But after the album came out I didn't want to do it that way again. To me, an LP can suffer from too much looping or artificial playing. So when it came to do the next record, we went back to creating loops that we could play live as a band, without sampling ourselves on the computer. If you play a loop as a band in real time, it's different from looping a performance with technology. There's a swing, or a feel, to it, which for me is more exciting than looping one performance.

When we recorded Transient Random Noise-Bursts, it was like the Apocalypse Now of recording. It was 18 hours a day in Blackwing, which was a new studio to us. The guy who was engineering it lived in the same house as us, so we had six weeks of nothing but this album. About halfway through mixing, we were all getting a bit frazzled. At one point, it was the weirdest thing: we just couldn't get any level on the drums. We'd push the faders full up, and try a million things, but they were still so quiet. We called in the guy that runs the studio to ask what was going on. He said, "Well, that's strange. Let me eradicate some obvious things. Obviously you've cleaned the tape heads on the 2-inch, right?" And the engineer kind of went, "Oh... um.... what!?" [laughs] So we'd been there four or five weeks and they'd never been cleaned! There was a few millimeters thick of tape residue on the heads. So we cleaned it off, and played the track, and the drums came back so loud that they blew the tweeters out on the speakers! So the sound of 80% of the drums on the album was the sound of millimeters of tape rust on the tape heads, and us doing whatever we could to work with the sound. Andy though it was really funny because people would always tell him, “Oh man, I especially love the drum sound you got on Transient Random Noise Bursts.” That kind of things is very indicative of the character and the sound of the group. People really like that element. Even if you're thinking "But, no! It was a mistake," you don't always want to say that. It's so nice to think that everything was intended. But in fact, it's nicer that there are these wrong turns that come out well.

Can you tell us about how you met John McEntire and Jim O'Rourke? They left a big mark on the sound in the same way that Joe Watson would help shape your later records.

When we're recording an album with John or Jim, it's more a matter of collaborating than them simply being producers. They both made music I liked. I was familiar with Jim's name even from the electronic days. He's a few years younger than me, so he was entering the electronic music field and releasing cassettes around the same time I was getting out of it. I had a couple of his records already when Stereolab played in Chicago around '93. He was playing in a support band with Jim O'Rourke! John had his Farfisa and his synths; Jim was playing a Farfisa Duo Compact. So we had the pleasure of having three Farfisas on stage at one point! We got to talking about gear at first. The first Tortoise album had come out, and a new Jim O'Rourke record had recently been released as well. We made a connection and stayed friends. It wasn't until a couple of years later that we worked with them; John first and then with Jim. Jim is basically, well, unique. He's got a way of approaching things, which is very unusual and interesting. He grabs onto the music and changes it. 

Can you tell us about how creating the arrangements works?

When we go into the studio, the songs are written in a very basic way. They're an essence of what they will become later. My thing is to allow any and all changes that are possible, while keeping my eye on the essence of the piece of music. But, apart from that basic spirit of the song, everything is free to be moved around, changed and added to. Guys like John and Jim are the perfect people to expand on, or experiment with, the songs I would bring in. We'd shift them, shape them and follow the path of whatever seemed exciting. At some point it's all hands on deck, and it becomes about following new trails. You go chasing off in one direction and sometimes you'll get something that sounds great. Other times it's a dead end, with nothing there. It's a question of responding to what someone else has responded to, in a chain. I might start a track with a rhythm on guitar, and Andy [Ramsay, drums, Tape Op #75 UK] could change it around and bring something entirely new to the table that I would have never thought of. And then I have to respond to that. It brings all sorts of new ideas. When a track is sounding good, it's helpful to listen to it as if it was recorded by somebody else. You know, you respond to it like you're hearing this great track you've always loved, but for the first time. That's the biggest thing I got from John and Jim. They were bringing their own ideas, and they were coming from some place totally different. It was thrilling.

I remember reading a guide to recording once and they said, "You must have your song arranged. All your instruments must be organized before you get to your mix." And that's exactly the opposite of what we've done. Everything is happening all at once before the mix! It's a mess.

With all of these additions, how do you keep your eye on what's most important in the track?

Well, that's the challenge: to encourage all these ideas, but make sure it doesn't lose that initial spark it once had. Everything else can be changed around. But I'm interested in keeping this thing underneath it going.

What are the most essential parts of a track for you?

It tends to be a feeling, really. I like a certain natural sense of opposition in a song. Maybe it's an exuberant track that has an underlying air of melancholy. That might be the essence of a song. I'm very attracted to certain chords. I don't really know chords per se, but I can build them up on the guitar by listening. I can hear the possibilities in a chord. I'll grab onto a voicing or a certain order of notes, and sometimes that's what the song is about. John or Jim might explain theoretically why one chord is the same as another, and that we can substitute them, but to me they're not. That's one of the places where I try to keep the initial essence that makes me like the piece of music I've written. Ultimately it's about capturing something that hit you in a single moment and holding on to it. Sometimes it's something as simple as the choice of the instrument for the part, the inversion of a chord, or the feeling you get when you first combine the notes of the melody. As soon as I hear one of my sketches or demos, I can remember that initial feeling well. But, at the same time, I want all the other aspects of the arrangement to be changed. I want to enhance the feeling I had, not to destroy it. John, Jim, Sean [O'Hagan], Mouse on Mars — they were all great at understanding this. I'd bring in my sketch on a cassette and describe it a little bit, and they understood how to arrange around it without changing it too much. That works well, because then I don't have to explain things to people. That's the worst thing for me!

No matter who the engineer is, I often see the same mixing credit on each record: "Stereolab" or "the Groop." 

I knew I was going to have to explain this. Those normally mean me, or sometimes me and Sean [O'Hagan]. It could also reference Laetitia and myself. It could also refer to [drummer] Andy [Ramsay] and me. It's not necessarily all the band. Especially when we were working in Chicago, we couldn't afford for everybody to be there all the time. So they generally came over, did their parts and then went back. We called whoever was there "the Groop," and oftentimes it would just mean me.

Of course, technology intercedes, and once you start down the road to a computer it's very difficult to go back. We didn't want to go back to "tape only" way of recording, but I didn't want the computer to become too much of an influence – this inert object telling us what to do. I prefer to treat it as a tape recorder: We can then do things with the sound afterwards, but the basic sound of the group is something I wanted to keep. I think that's important. We're very lucky to have had Andy Ramsay as the drummer. Not only is he a great drummer, but he's also interested in sounds. He was really great with drum machines, and he really helped explore the sounds. That's what we were looking for from computers: a way to open up possibilities that we might not find any other way. The problem then is not to get typecast into this type of sound. Computers make certain things easier, but they can make you get a bit lazy. Perhaps you're not looking for the unusual thing anymore, because it's so easy to find. But then that makes it become usual instead!

How collaborative is that part of the process? And how essential do you consider it to be?

Well, the mixing process is absolutely the most important aspect of Stereolab songs. The songs don't exist as any permanent arrangement before the mixing. Every instrumental track is running all the way through [the song], from beginning to end. It's only during the mix that we work out what we're going to do. I remember reading a guide to recording once and they said, "You must have your song arranged. All your instruments must be organized before you get to your mix." And that's exactly the opposite of what we've done. Everything is happening all at once before the mix! It's a mess. For us it comes together when we've worked through that final process. Just selecting, throwing away, adding.

It seems almost like sculpture. You start with a big block of sound, and you chip things away to discover the piece underneath.

I guess that's right — it's been sculpted. Once we started with the computer techniques, from Dots and Loops onwards, I started to approach the sound as if it were a montage, like a film or collage, with all these disparate elements. I like that process, because I tend to look for unforeseen elements in the music. I like building up layers, and then looking through those layers to reveal something underneath. It's most exciting if something occurs that I didn't pre-plan. New sounds come from the natural process of all of these things going on at the same time. I like the element of chance. For me, being in the studio is a process of discovery. I never call myself a "songwriter," because I don't have anything to "say" in that way. I want to discover. I always try to keep that in mind in the studio. If a song is sounding the same as when I brought it in as a demo, then it's a disappointment. I want to be surprised.

Stereolab is one of those bands that have completist, diehard fans. In talking to some before the interview, I gather that many of them considered Stereolab more of a singles band than an albums band. 

I think that singles are in a weird way more indicative of the spirit of the group. For me, albums have always been a bit of a mixed bag. I've never been perfectly satisfied with any of the albums in their totality. I always find that half the stuff is great, a quarter is good, and a quarter... is bad? [laughs] I don't know, or at least I'm indifferent to it. The thing is, we release everything. If we're working on an album, and we have five weeks to do it, it all becomes part of the record, no matter what.

You didn't cut out songs at all?

Not really. Sometimes a track from an album session might wind up as a B-side of a single, but in general, there were never any outtakes. We released everything. These albums were a document of what the band was doing at a certain point. It's never been about making an album that is "bigger and better" than our albums before. The bigger and better vibe is not something I get. For me it's more like, "This is who we are, this is what we attempted to do. This is what we felt was worth thinking about at the time, and this is what's coming out." I think some people understand that, and others go, "Well, it would have been better if it wasn't a double album." But that doesn't matter to me, because we weren't attempting to do that kind of thing. We were just putting out what we did. That's is the idea I had, at least. I'm a little more ambivalent about that now, and might do it differently today. Maybe we could have left a few things off and it would have made them a little bit more palatable. [laughs] Then again, that's not what we did. For me, all the tour singles, the B-sides, the music we did for an art gallery with Charles Long [Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center] were things that were done quickly and with really good spirit. Sometimes we just went in the day before it was due. That's what I really like. I think it's when I think the best sound comes. The albums had money put into them, which sometimes makes it a little bit too serious. 

So if someone picks up a Stereolab single or EP, it's something that really gets the Tim Gane seal of approval? 

I think they get more of the spirit of the band. It's not that the songs are always "better." That's dependent on your taste, I suppose. I often get asked, "What's the best album to listen to if people haven't heard you?" I normally recommend Refried Ectoplasm: Switched On, Vol. 2. It's a compilation of singles and stuff all around that time. To me it really captures everything that we were doing, especially the spirit of what we were doing. On the compilations, the songs don't have anything tying them together except the fact that they were recorded vaguely over the period of one or two years. And sometimes, they're better than things all done at once. 

Laetitia Sadier: "I love my iPod, because I love light things. I like to have an album, or a CD, and then put it on my computer, and then put it on my iPod. I’m gonna listen to the CD as an album to get a gist of what it is, and then I love that all these beautiful albums are gonna get shuffled, like an eternal radio, when you don’t know what's coming next, but you know it’s gonna be good."

I'm also interested in your relationship with criticism. 

I'm often aware of criticism, and in the early days I would read reviews. When you're first getting started, it seems so important to get good reviews, and it's a disaster if you get a bad one. [laughs] But later on you get less and less bothered about it. I mean, the "zero-out-of-ten" we got on NME for Cobra and Phases [Group Plays Voltage in the Milky Night] is a classic example. Everyone was really shocked, but I wasn't bothered particularly. I was surprised, maybe. It's funny, because when you get a review like that, everyone wants to support you as if you've had some major traumatic experience.

Some of the less critically acclaimed records seem to have become fan-favorites.

I'd say it's better to think of groups who have been around for a while as being kind of "in orbit." You go around, sometimes you're close to the sun, and sometimes you're far from it, out in deep space. That, very often, is all there is to it. Sometimes we could make the same record, and depending where we are in the orbit with critics, it would get a totally different review. Don't necessarily expect them all to have any great innovations into ideas about sound. They won't. By and large, they're just responding as a pack.

It seems like they won' t have any new Stereolab albums to write about it. 

It's pretty simple. While I was finishing the last sessions, I'd I felt like I'd exhausted any ideas that would work for Stereolab. I didn't want to make the classic "bad record" that some long-time bands seem to put out. I don't think we've made one of those yet. I can't think in a creative way within the limitations of Stereolab anymore, because there's just too much around it. The other part of it is that I was really tired of being away from my home and my wife for seven months out of the year. I wasn't sure whether to stop it completely, or keep it open, in case any good ideas came; like a good offer that sparked some creative thoughts. If that happened, I would do it. But until it does, I don't want to do it. It's as simple as that. We can call it a "hiatus."

What's inspiring you now?

Well, if I have the right environment I can write music very, very fast. For instance, I've done two soundtracks. When I did the first of those soundtracks, around the same time as the last Stereolab record, I noticed how much more exciting it was for me than working on the album. The idea of doing another album, and then another, isn't enough for me anymore. I need an environment where I can do something new. It's great to have a new way of finding the ideas that you already have. When I'm applying my ideas to film, I've got that restriction of fitting it into a scene. It's very interesting to see how a new container changes your ideas. I think there's a lot of freedom in that.