Author: andrea Page 24 of 72

After 18 years and 11 albums, Stereolab have gone on the dreaded “hiatus,” according to a post from longtime band manager, Martin Pike: “As we recently made #51 with Emperor Tomato Ketchup in the Amazon 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums of all Time, we feel that our work is done for the moment.”

While I was saddened to hear about the hiatus, I was hardly shocked. The law of diminishing returns had most definitely begun to set in some time ago. And, after nearly 18 years, could you blame them?

During their lengthy career, consistency had been the group’s bugbear. Somewhere along the line their endlessly optimistic, faux-naïf approach to experimentation (a playful, fling-it-at-the-wall, see-if-it-sticks methodology) ossified into a kind of pleasant, tasteful aural wallpaper.

Maybe they started to lose me sometime around 1997’s Dots and Loops. When they left their home turf and took up residence with the Tortoise noodlers, things started to go slightly awry.

Not fatally so, mind you, but from that point onwards their music slowly lost the charmingly rough-hewn quality that made their early, occasionally strident locked-groove lullabies so compelling. Songs like “Brakhage” and “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse” were complex, jazzier, more playful —even airy. But with the new looseness came a certain aloofness, too. Without that central core of very human tension, it was inevitable that the center would not hold.

And it had been that way for quite some time.

I prefer to think about all the great moments they’ve had throughout the years: the marvelous singles (especially the one-offs), live shows and deliriously playful videos.

My fondest memory of the ‘lab is a secret Christmastime show they played at the Camden Irish Centre in 1994. Disco Inferno, Cornershop, Moonshake and Pram opened. (Talk about an amazing lineup! Never been topped since.)

They closed with a blissful 20-minute long version of “Contact” that had the audience levitating as one. One nation under a groove, indeed. At their best, Stereolab could hit that sweet spot of harmonic convergence like no other band.

I interviewed Tim and Laetitia for Warped Reality in 1995, right before the group left for Lollapalooza. Some highlights…

Tim: [referring to Lollapalooza] It’s really good to play in front of people who don’t really know anything about us. You don’t have to understand every single thing about what we do or why we do it to like it. It should be fun and enjoyable. And people might just get the groove of what we do and like the melodies. But then, it’s not “alternative rock” so I don’t know. There’s an awful amount of mainstream rock now parading itself as alternative music.

How did you become interested in Moog synthesizers?
Tim: They sound brilliant. I love archaic analog machinery. It doesn’t sound like anything else, really, and you don’t have to be a musician to play it. If you’re inventive you can get really weird sounds out of it —it’s as inventive as you are. I’ve had Moogs for 12 years and I still come across new sounds that I’ve never heard before. There are so many combinations that you can never recreate what you’ve done once before. And they look great!

Where did you get the hi-fi stuff from the back of Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements?
Tim: It’s taken from a sound-effects record. We did a radio interview and the woman said, “I’m not qualified to understand this stuff.” There’s nothing to understand! It’s just pseudo-scientific bumph. It’s humorous. It’s [also] a way of controlling the presentation off what you do. It’s very important that you have your own stamp and control of the way you present it. It’s the whole thing: the sleeve, the titles, colored vinyl.

Any amusing tour stories?
Laetitia: One of the wheels from the big tour bus fell off. It just rolled away. “Hey! There goes our wheel.” Thank god we weren’t going ninety miles an hour on the highway. That would have been pretty dangerous. Funny enough, we were in Olympia, Washington. We thought it might be the riot grrls because they don’t like tours that tour in big buses. “Big rich capitalist buses! We’ll get them!”
Tim: I never believed it for a second!
Laetitia: Oh, Tim, you can have a laugh about these things!

Stereolab, “Difficult Fourth Title” (AKA “Contact”) [1992 Peel Session]

Stereolab, “Explosante Fixé” [2008 Tour Single]

PHOTOS: STEREOLAB c. 1992, STEREOLAB c. 2006

Anthony Bourdain
Johnson & Wales University
March 18, 2009

Chef, author and culinary adventurer Anthony Bourdain certainly relishes his role as the bad boy of the culinary world. Striding across JWU’s Xavier stage in head-to-toe black, he was greeted by thunderous applause from the sold-out crowd of more than 500 students. Warming to their enthusiasm, the hyperkinetic Bourdain proceeded with a largely off-the-cuff hour-long talk peppered with pithy, loose-limbed observations and rapid-fire, expletive-laden asides.

And yet, despite this penchant for brutal — if not downright slanderous — honesty and decidedly prickly exterior, the most surprising aspect of his talk was that it revealed him to be a practical and even reflective observer of food culture and human behavior.

Which is not to say that the bad boy persona is all for show. Bourdain definitely walks it like he talks it. Having gone through some very dark times (as unsparingly related in his autobiographical exposé,Kitchen Confidential), he emerged with the hard-won wisdom of someone who’s seen (and been through) it all. As he wrote in Spin, “We had fun for a while, then we all ended up dead or in a methadone program.”

When asked by a well-meaning student whether he thought of himself as a role model for young culinarians, Bourdain could not have been clearer: “Please God, no. Do not do as I do!” Pause. “Have you read the book?”

After the laughter died down, he continued: “Certainly my culinary career was not one that any of you would want to emulate. I’ve spent a lot of time …making some really crappy food at some soul-destroying places.”

Those “soul-destroying places” indoctrinated the young Bourdain into the dysfunctional but unshakable solidarity forged in the anarchic heat of the professional kitchen. Calling it the “last refuge of the misfit,” he noted that cooks are able to say things to each other that, in the real world, would result in a lifetime of litigation. “If being called a goldfish dropping bothers you, you don’t belong in the kitchen. You can’t mind injustice and absurdity.”

Bourdain also summarized the many schools of culinary leadership, most of them involving Gordon Ramsay-like levels of yelling, screaming and intimidation, all delivered with a drill sergeant’s colorful vocabulary and martial sense of justice. “They don’t call it ‘the Brigade’ for nothing.” While the people who didn’t belong were “shaken out like antibodies,” those who stayed behind had each other’s back, no matter what.

Surprisingly, though, Bourdain characterized the worst moments in the kitchen as “not when there’s chaos and screaming but dead silence,” therefore signifying some fuck-up on an unprecedented scale.

While the subjects of Bourdain’s withering ire are legendary (Rachel Ray and her telegenic ilk; his former bosses at the Food Network; Billy Joel), his praise is doled out sparingly enough that you know it’s genuine. He singled out David Chang, the innovative chef-proprietor of the growing Momofukuempire, as “one of the most important chefs out there.” “His food is devoid of bullshit, it’s unfussy, and [most of all], it’s fun.” He also praised Chang’s realistic sense of scale and lack of pretension, two qualities guaranteed to serve him (and like-minded chefs) in good stead in the new economy. “Bullshit will be the first to go,” he noted.

He also praised the Travel Channel’s unwavering support for his globe-trotting culinary adventure show, No Reservations, now in its sixth season. “I have so much creative freedom with the show. I decide where we go, I get to travel with good friends, and I decide which films we get to rip off.”

When asked about whether Julia Child was a formative influence, he turned uncharacteristically serious. “She is easily the most influential person in American cooking. Without her, we’d still be grilling ham steaks with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries. And she never once endorsed a single product.” Huge cheers.

Ultimately, he made it clear that food should be thought of as not simply an aesthetic but also a deeply sensual experience. “Chefs are in the pleasure business. The real artistry of cooking is turning something unlovely and tough into something new, that transformation.” He added, “If you don’t like sex or music you’re not going to cook well.”

His final words of advice to young cooks just starting out? “There’s no way to learn how to cook if you don’t venture outside your comfort zone. So travel, eat wildly, and fear not if it’s something strange.”

PHOTOS BY ANDREA FELDMAN

I’ve so been neglecting this blog of late. Some hideous form of inertia has kicked in. “Oh, I posted last week! I can just kick back for awhile.” Suddenly a week had turned to a month, then two —before I knew it, the tumbleweeds were blowing through. Insidious!

It ends here! (Not so) new year, new leaf. I’m cleaning out the virtual dust bunnies and vow to keep things a bit more up-to-date around here.

And, in honor of what was a pretty good Monday (as Mondays go), I give you two three delightfully happy songs from Tom Cullinan’s Kitty Kitty Corp. Tom, as you may know, was the ringleader of gleeful noise anarchists th’ Faith Healers.

Cullinan’s follow-up group, the tuneful but no less quirky Quickspace (née Quickspace Supersport), have been relatively quiet of late, but there’s no indication they’ve called it quits. Rumor even has it there’s a Quickspace album kicking around with Roxanne Stephen (Faith Healers, bringing it all full circle) on lead vocals.

Until that surfaces, though, how about some Novak (sorry for the static —this is straight from the vinyl) and early Quickspace (“Quickspace Happy Song #2,” natch)?

(And, ooh, I just unearthed a demo version of “Rapunzel” as well. Enjoy!)

Quickspace, “Quickspace Happy Song #2” (from Precious Falling)

Novak, “Rapunzel”

Novak, “Rapunzel” (Demo version)