According to the Nielson company, vinyl sales hit an all-time low in 1993. Less than half a million vinyl units were sold in that year and few then current releases were even pressed onto vinyl. Although independent record labels continued to release vinyl records, vinyl as a medium seemed to be experiencing its obsolescence. And yet, that medium, in all its seeming obsolescence, is staring back at us from the cover of Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements: a close-up of a tone arm, cartridge and needle playing along a record, sitting on a turn table.
This is long before the recent resurgence of vinyl. So, the question is: what did this album cover mean in 1993? It’s original reception seems completely inscrutable now. And, yet, I was there. I bought the album on cd in 1993 and must have experienced the cover as no more than an homage to a (then) soon dead artifact. I remember listening to the cd that year and wondering, in the middle of “Golden Ball” with its reproduced vinyl slips and skips, what those slips and skips would sound like on record—whether or not one could reproduce those sounds on record—as if hip hop hadn’t already taught all of us that the sound of vinyl as vinyl could be reproduced on vinyl.
If this album cover had been released at any point in the last ten to fifteen years it might be understood as a form of vinyl fetishism. But did the average listener to Transient Random-Noise Bursts in 1993 know that he/she was supposed to fetishize vinyl? Some obviously did. The band did. In 1993 Stereolab released a limited-edition vinyl copy of the record pressed on sparkling gold vinyl. The vinyl was warped and most copies were returned but the acknowledgement of the vinyl as special object—after all, a fetish, before all sexual connotations, is an object imbued with certain magical properties—already existed in the life and history of the record.
But the fetishism extends beyond the object itself, it extends beyond the appearance of the record, turntable, tone-arm and stylus on the cover, since the cover is a reference to another record. The cover, and some of the samples inside, are from a 1969 test record pressed by a Hi-Fi magazine in the UK. The back cover also mimics the test record’s layout with one side of the upper half announcing “About This Record” while the other side promises “Technical Data”—the former listing the lyrics and the later providing the band members, producers, etc. There are two headers above that information done in hi-fi record rhetoric (i.e. “hi-fi is the convenient tag we use when we mean the art and science of hi-fidelity!”) and an announcement for the label itself: “for people who desire the finest in sound…always demand: Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks!”
The ironic tone, the gentile mocking of a pseudo-scientific discourse surrounding high fidelity, is a reference to a bygone era when, in the post-war boom, people had enough disposable income to spend on high end stereos with test records meant to do things like “confirm secure tracking” and “test the acceptability of equipment noise.” (both of these examples come from Transient Random-Noise Bursts). Think for a moment about a culture that purchased records without music, rather with “sounds” meant to balance and stabilize audio equipment. The obsession with this type of record—and the era of which it is a symptom—reached some kind of apotheosis in the mid-90s with actual cd reissues of what was labeled as “bachelor pad music” (as artifacts, not as test records themselves) and bands either purposely titling their records after actual records of the time (a la Stereolab) like Nation of Ulysses’ Raymond Scott-referencing “Soothing Sounds for Baby” all the way up to and including REM’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi.” (when I saw REM during the Monster tour in 1995, Michael Stipe introduced “Losing My Religion”—by far their biggest hit—as “an obscure song off of Equivel’s soundtrack to Journey Into Fear” Juan Esquivel being one of the leading auteurs of this type of stereo test record/bachelor pad music hybrid). But in 1993 this fetish didn’t have a name yet…in many respects Stereolab—whose name already references a stereo test record—was creating this fetish. The point of this book is to ask why they did it.
“Retrieve the past, Like a prayer, Bringing it back, Into the light, What was yesterday, Will reform today, To retrieve, Lost life, Lost loves, Retrieve, Lost words, Ideas, Overcome, Unconscious, Made conscious, Out of the darkness, Into consciousness, Made conscious, Out of the darkness, Into…”-“Pause”
Transient Random Noise-Bursts With Announcements is an album haunted by the past, yet, as the lyrics of “Pause” suggest, it is haunted by a past that “will reform today.” As the vinyl object faced its own obsolescence, as most of the instruments used by the group on the record (“vox organ”, “moog”, “farfisa”) were being replaced by midi patches and computer programs that could replicate those sounds (and improve upon them), and as the musical styles echoed in the bachelor pad, bossa nova, le yipe yipe sound had been subsumed by a history that privileged first the “authentic” voice of rock and then the “authentic” reaction to rock in punk (whose basic structure and ideology could be traced up through early 90s grunge), Stereolab set out to create an eulogy for an increasingly obsolete world.
Yet, the irony of this very story, the story told by this record, is that this pre-fetishization would go on to, in a sense, become a type of marker of taste and knowledge that would come to dominate the last 20 years of music—from the aforementioned renewed interest in hi-fi records, to the sampling of easy listening, French pop, electronic music in independent rock, hip-hop, etc., Stereolab’s record casts a long shadow.
Yet, the influence of Transient Random Noise-Bursts goes beyond music. It’s constant references to other things (artwork, music, styles, etc.) creates a kind of archive wherein one can discover these past relics. It’s no coincidence that one of the very first websites I ever visited was a Stereolab fan site back in 1994. Here, fans would gather together to figure out all of the musical references in the songs as well as the visual and titular references as well.
The obsessive collecting mindset that clearly is already apparent in the artwork and music of the record would come to be the dominant form of listening and music consumption in the decades after—what Simon Reynold’s in his book Retromania would call, somewhat dismissively, “record collection rock”. Indeed, there are moments in the last two decades of music, including Stereolab’s own catalogue, where the influence of the past has turned into a pastiche of sounds and styles in the present.
However, that hadn’t yet been codified when Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements came out: there wasn’t a place where styles from different ages could be archived, researched and then tried on. Instead, on Transient Random-Noise Bursts, Stereolab attempt to “reform today” by recovering the obsolete moments of the past before they are forgotten. In this way, Stereolab’s record may, in its original intention, actually be a rejoinder to Reynold’s highly influential thesis in Retromania that we are a culture obsessed with our own nostalgia for the past.
“Look at our symbols/they are alive/they move, evolve/and then they die.” -“Wow and Flutter”
Stereolab’s first releases, singles, eps and one album, “Peng”, all featured variations on the same cover: a cartoon illustration of “Cliff”, a comic of a figure in authority who eventually bumps you off, the good bourgeois spectator. Although the comic is Swiss, it echoes many of the same concerns of the French Situationists, whose writings, graffiti and films were highly influential upon the uprising in Paris during May of 1968. In their original inception, the Situationists saw themselves as an antidote to the modern spectacle of post-war capitalist society. One of their projects, articulated in a 1963 text by intellectual “leader” Guy Debord, was to bring the art of the past “into play in life and to reestablish priorities,” or, as a Situationist text from 1967 underscores, “past creativity must be freed from the forms into which it has been ossified and brought back to life.”
This is the project of Transient Random-Noise Bursts: to free the forms of past creativity and bring them back to life. Yet two questions remain for Stereolab’s project: 1) it remains imperative, if we aren’t to simply agree with Reynolds that Stereolab are symptomatic of a “nostalgia industry”, that we historicize Stereolab’s project. That is to say, Stereolab’s record is symptomatic not of the malaise that Reynolds attempts to diagnose but right before that moment…the “end of history” as it has been described in short-hand. To this end, a much better analytical work for reading the album might be Joshua Clover’s book 1989, which attempts to read the events of 1989, “watching the world wake up from history”, through the pop music of the time. 1993 is not that far away from 1989, and, if we consider that Stereolab’s earliest recordings date from 1990, then the loss and transformation that takes place in and around 1989 informs Stereolab’s aesthetic project.
The second question then has to do with object choice: if this rupture offers the opportunity to re-evaluate history anew, then why do Stereolab select the more arcane and banal artifacts to reanimate this engagement with the past? Here we return to the initial discussion of vinyl obsolescence. In his 1925 essay “Dream Kitsch” the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin argues: “technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell […] It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast […] and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It catches hold of objects a their most threadbare and timeworn point.” Though Benjamin was describing another history-defining turn, from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, his injunction: “When we reach for the banal, we take hold of the good along with it—the good that is there (open your eyes) right before you” could be Stereolab’s aesthetic program.
This doesn’t just simply “flip the script” and create a new canon, it creates an eruption in the flow of time and understanding—much like the moments on the record when, in the middle of “I’m Going Out of My Way” or “Pause” or “Jenny Ondioline” a voice, a recording, a numbers’ station from the past emerges and disrupts and takes hold.
“That what is exciting/The challenge, it’s the new nation/But the tensions have to be created, there’s no doubt.” -“Jenny Ondioline”
However, what Reynold’s book teaches us is that there is a risk in this process: indeed, Stereolab did (either wittingly or unwittingly) create an “alternative” canon: one of the things that decorated my dorm room wall was an interview with the band in chickfactor magazine wherein they offered a list of “records they cannot live without”, which included then impossible-to-find records by Silver Apples, Neu, Faust and Electric Eels. And, as Stereolab grew in recognition (they never were popular), the tracks that more explicitly referenced earlier bands (“Jenny Ondioline” and Neu, “Metronomic Underground” and Can) were offered up as evidence that the band was artistically bankrupt, and a growing suspicion (which would extend to many of their cohorts—thus seemingly legitimizing Reynold’s “record collecting rock” tag) that music was beginning to cannibalize itself rather than innovate.
However, this record comes before all this. It’s a moment before the creation of new canons and the ossification of cultural artifacts. It’s a pause in the sonic shape of a lock-groove lullaby of dream kitsch.
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