The future of Stereolab

Moka I get where you're coming from & that's pretty much how I interpreted JP at first. But he's revealed his true colors as a huckster charlatan who is bizarrely fixated on transpeople beyond the "compelled speech" bit. the "enforced monogamy" thing in the NYT interview, I mean, what can you say? he's making buckets of money by appealing to a fairly pathetic demographic of sad, insecure young (mostly white) men that feel emasculated or disenfranchised by our current cultural/sociopolitical climate. having said that, this very knee-jerk, vindictive, and punitive streak on the left fucking sucks. This one gets a strike, this one gets a pass/doesn't get a pass, so and so is cancelled. It's like they want the gulags up and running now so they can staff them. Scary

I never thought Stereolab ruled anyway so I don't have a dog in this fight but she has more than one 'bad opinion', she's been a long term supporter of a reprehensible bunch of libertarian arseholes - but because nobody in the US has heard of them they apparently don't exist. I don't remember anyone on ILX tying themselves in knots trying to explain Mo Tucker's views, we've even got someone saying JP isn't that bad after all - it's amusing, if nothing else.

"she's been a long term supporter of a reprehensible bunch of libertarian arseholes - but because nobody in the US has heard of them they apparently don't exist"

we've just not heard about it I assume (I hadn't). also it helps that she's relatively out of whatever small spotlight she was in while stereolab were still an active band.

Why would anyone care about Mo Tucker’s views, lol? She made those records like 50 years ago.

Also, Tom, if you are accusing ILXors as being “Soft on Libertarianism” — have you peeked in the Grimes thread?

I'm not accusing anyone of anything just enjoying watching the spectacle of Stereolab fans standing on their heads. I mean I was listening to a Gary Glitter album yesterday so I'm not one to point fingers at the people for liking the artists they like.

you need a bit of blind-eyed kiddie-fiddler/crypto/realfascist tolerent pragmatism to get by sometimes, but at least we love music!

the spectacle of Stereolab fans standing on their heads

Drink deep the tears.

we've just not heard about it I assume (I hadn't). also it helps that she's relatively out of whatever small spotlight she was in while stereolab were still an active band.

― akm

yeah i legitimately didn't know there were fake marxists out there or that sadier subscribed to the jews-for-jesus equivalent of marxism. i guess i shouldn't be surprised, but seriously, for god's sake, libertarian marxists?

If they were actually Marxists... LOL I just glance over at my TV and, bingo, there's Jordan Peterson!

it generally seems like Sadier's politics have taken the same weird libertarian turn as her friends at Spiked did. certainly disappointing but the 'committed Marxist shifts right and rails against PC culture etc. in the decades after fall of the Soviet Union' thing is much more common than it should be unfortunately

in that context her support for Peterson isn't particularly surprising

Elsewhere, Tim is doing some soundtrack stuff.

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/peter-strickland-interview-by-larac-cory

Strickland also runs the label Peripheral Conserve and is a founder member of the vegetarian food preparation recording outfit The Sonic Catering Band

Excuse me?

Why would anyone care about Mo Tucker’s views, lol? She made those records like 50 years ago.

Why would anyone care about Laetitia Sadier’s views, lol? She made those records like 30 years ago.

Don’t ask me, I’m not a Stereolab fan.

(But as a VU fan — Mo Tucker’s present-day political views are barely even a curiosity. She hasn’t been active as an artist in decades.)

Last time I saw her live was in the late 90s and it was brilliant.

be nice if these thread revives were as lively when someone, oh, I don't know, makes a good record or writes a good song or something. If someone had bumped this to talk about a new Laetitia Sadier album I'd be willing to bet the thread would die on the vine within 24 hours

Compared to in the past, I've noticed that people here tend to express more general enthusiasm for the music they're talking about than they would have some years ago, when maybe they would have been more critical... but there tends not to be that much discussion of it. Perhaps people are more grateful that in what sometimes seems like an increasingly awful world artists are still making art... but the more urgent business is political. Whereas in 2007 or so (around the time I started really paying attention) people here took music a lot more seriously. Maybe this just reflects changing priorities as people get older. Since Sadier always wrote political lyrics, it's disappointing to see signs that she's not on the same page people thought she was — naïvely, maybe, I would have trusted her to have broadly sympathetic politics. It doesn't mean enough to me to make me stop listening to Stereolab. In fact, I'd still like Stereolab to have a future, though not if the parties involved aren't interested. (Actually I was worried when I saw all the posts in the thread revival that someone had died.)

I used to find the thread title quite annoyingly shit, but reading it in a more prosecutorial manner - it definitely works for me now! If Laetitia really wanted people to only talk about her music, she'd would have elected to talk the usual insipid pseudo mystical indie drivel or whatever, but if she doesn't think throwing your lot in with the Spiked crew and bigging up JP is going to elicit heaps of scorn, then she'd be very naive. But I doubt she is and will pretty much expect this kind of response!

I don't follow her or her career but it looks to me that she has been pretty successful at keeping her more outlandish political beliefs under her hat, judging by the consternation induced among her fans by these remarks about the Canadian Clown. Does she have any connection with the singer from Pram who gave up music to join the cult full time?

dunno tbh, but finding the consternation and butthurt quite amusing!

Does she have any connection with the singer from Pram who gave up music to join the cult full time?

Cuckston was briefly part of Sadier's band Monade. And obviously they go way back as Too Pure label buddies.

we're through the looking glass here, people

Maybe this just reflects changing priorities as people get older.

Good post, NJS. I suspect it is more this^^ than the spirit of the times; as the board style was a lot different in the early/mid–2000s (another era when politics & world events consumed most posters’ thoughts).

"it generally seems like Sadier's politics have taken the same weird libertarian turn as her friends at Spiked did"

I'd never once heard of Spiked and I imagine most US stereolab listeners haven't either so that's another reason why this has never gained much traction. I assume that's a UK mag.

if you ever watch/listen to any bbc tv/radio current affairs/news/politics shows you might be already familiar with some of their fabulous roster.

They're a continuation of Living Marxism, which got put out of business for losing a libel case over their claim that a photograph of a Bosnian Muslim in a detention camp was faked, they just loved Milosevic, Karadzic and those crazy guys. They grew out of Trotskyist jokers the Revolutionary Communist Party but are now sort of, to put it kindly, epater les bourgeois media provocateurs - and they are all over the UK broadcast media with their hivemind you-say-black-I-say-white nonsense.

Kinda like Neocons but crazier but also less dangerous because less actual access to power

"crazy" is wrong, they're far more mundane than that, smug posh kids who have to keep finding an out group to roleplay

A long time ago I vaguely knew someone who got involved with them - an extremely good looking, extremely posh girl - I hear she ended up marrying some right wing American guy.

Sounds like Int3rcept-meets-Inf0w4rs horseshoe theory stuff

be nice if these thread revives were as lively when someone, oh, I don't know, makes a good record or writes a good song or something. If someone had bumped this to talk about a new Laetitia Sadier album I'd be willing to bet the thread would die on the vine within 24 hours

The Cavern of Anti-Matter LP came out this year and I've seen very little talk about it anywhere. I like it, but I'll admit I forgot it existed after a month.

Laetitia released a terrible album with her band Little Tornados and I'm not even sure anyone here acknowledged its existence. I think it came out this year.

Huh, had no idea this existed. Her solo albums including the one that came out last year have all been consistently good, and not particularly alt-right in any discernible way.

The new Caverns album is great,band they also re-issued their first album Blood Drums, which I hadn't heard before, and which is also great.

If anyone's interested in Little Tornados:

http://fiverosespress.net/little-tornados/

There's more info about their 2018 album. I did not enjoy it at all! Seems like it came and went.

the last Sadier album I got (Silencio, 2012) was great

there was one last year too, right? I got it in London. Pretty good but didn't jump out at me. Sounded like Cobra/Sound-Dust era Stereolab.

Which one was that, the last one I got was Chords for the Lobster Tidied Rooms

i think it was called Salt Brain

Since Silencio, she put out Something Shines and Finding Me Finding You (as Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble). Both are fantastic.

yeah Finding Me Finding You. I liked it, will dig it out tonite.

inclined to agree that jettisoning appreciation of an artist's entire body of work because of a stupid tweet is a bit much.

but tbf I listen to a fair chunk of music by people with criminal records, loathsome politics etc.

Same here but it's more than a stupid tweet.

doublechecked wikipedia to see if the RCP actually ever identified as trots -- often an issue in flyspeck sectarian uk groupuscules -- and the answer is apparently YES tho i think they were nonetheless not echt fourth-internationalists despite a thread of connection (unexplored in WP) to the IS: their argt was that the living line of revolutionary marxism had broken and would need to be re-established

anyway what actually caught my eye was that they drew up a document in 1983 called PREPARING FOR POWER so you can't say they weren't optimistic

(their chief source of presence is probably that they were REALLY early in on the internet, running a v successful internet cafe called CYBERIA and putting themsevves around as advisors on e.g. magazine wanting to turn digital -- i worked with a little clutch of them in the mid-late 90s and tbh, terrible politics aside, learnt quite a lot abt computer publishing from them)

(by "worked with them" i mean i worked for a magazine that had brought them in as consultants… this is was around the time of the libel case)

lol @ CYBERIA

I remember doing an 'ambient' DJ set with a load of Fax CDs in the basement of that place which was a 'smart bar' called... Sub Cyberia. DJ Spooky was hanging around and there was shiatsu. This is about the most mid 90s scene I can think of.

Didn't know about the politics except that they were around squatter activist places I guess.

it was in whitfield street i think