One trend that emerged in the 1990’s was the rise of space-age bachelor pad music, inspired by the 50’s and 60’s blend of easy listening lounge sounds, bossa nova, and Jetsons-style futurism. Add a dash of French yé-yé music and…..

Bienvenue à Stereolab!

In the mid-80’s, Tim from England played in a band and after a concert in Paris he met Laetitia from France. The two fell in love at first sight and she soon moved in with him back in London. When Tim’s band broke up, the pair immediately joined musical forces to form Stereolab, an experimental group who self-released singles with leftist and Surrealist lyrics and slowly built a following among music critics and music geeks alike.

By 1997, Stereolab comprised six full-time members and a host of revolving contributors. Now signed to major label Elektra Records, the band were poised for a commercial breakthrough after years of positive press. Adding more pop elements to each successive release and lessening the droning experimentalism and lengthy songs certainly didn’t hurt. For their new album, Dots And Loops, they exercised their experimental side in the recording studio by employing a relatively new software called ProTools, which would come to dominate music-making over the ensuing decades.

Using computers to record was nothing new, but it could be exceedingly complex and time-consuming — with ProTools, even a child could construct a song. ProTools allowed all sorts of sound manipulation, including the ability to record a short section — for instance a couple of bars of bass, or a drum pattern — and then you could copy and paste the section, looping it, foregoing the need to record the entire song. And then you could assemble all the little blocks into a full song.

This modular method of recording was a decades-old technique: Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys did something similar, recording small sections and then mixing and matching to see which sections went best with which songs, but Dots And Loops was one of the first digital albums recorded this way, exclusively utilizing ProTools. The ProTools software, however, both gaveth and tooketh away; because for all of its ease, the knock against the program was the elimination of mistakes, the unexpected magic at the heart of music. Drum beats would now be locked in, precise, robotic. But some bands still figured out a way to swing! And for some, it worked with their sound — especially if their sound was all about electronics and futurism.

Released as a single in the fall of 1997, “Miss Modular” was a very minor hit in the UK — although still one of their biggest overall — and Dots And Loops became their bestselling worldwide album. Dansez, mes petits robots!