A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#15: Sterelab – Jenny Ondioline (1993)
I’ve never been a ‘completist’ nor a prolific buyer of singles, especially those that were otherwise available on albums. I also gave up reading the music press in the mid-1980s, somewhat limiting my knowledge of new releases. So even though I really liked Stereolab I didn’t religiously buy all of their releases unless I happened to see them during a foray into a record shop. Luck is therefore the main reason I ended up with copies of the Low Fi EP and the stand alone single of John Cage Bubblegum.
And although I wouldn’t normally buy advance singles taken from a forthcoming album, I nevertheless find that I have four such records by Stereolab. Each of their full-length studio albums from 1993’s Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements up to Sound Dust (2001) was preceded by a four-track EP, featuring one or two tracks from the album and two or three non-album tracks. The four that I possess were bought largely because they appeared under my nose and because I reasoned that I was getting at least two songs I wouldn’t otherwise get on the new album. Plus in two cases they were cute little 10” discs – hard to resist.
Miss Modular, the advance single from Dots and Loops (1998), won’t feature in this series because it appeared under my nose on CD and spuriously I’m sticking to vinyl here. The first of the other three is the 10” Jenny Ondioline EP that announced the arrival of Transient Random Noise Bursts.
The title track is of course only the first 3m52s of the track that on the album would stretch to over 18 minutes with the addition of a long Neu-like one-chord groove extending from the instrumental backing to the first part. A different six-minute take was also issued on a 7” single with an alternate version of French Disco (spelled Disko) sold on their tour supporting Pavement in early 1994. The latter track is available on Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2) and the alternate Jenny Ondioline was reissued on the expanded 2019 reissue of Transient Random Noise Bursts.
As is common with Stereolab, the song’s title has nothing whatsoever to do with the lyrical content, which is all about political struggle. And if you are visualising a woman called Jenny you are also wrong. The Ondioline was in fact an early analog musical synthesizer developed in the years after 1939 by a French inventor called Georges Jenny. I know what you’re going to ask next and the answer is also no, the Ondioline is not part of the instrumentation on the track, despite The Groop’s well-known fondness for a bit of vintage analog synth.
Golden Ball is the other album track on the EP and in a shocking deviation from common practice the lyrics actually feature the words “golden ball” at one point, according to one of those online lyrics sites, but given how inaccurate they can be I wouldn’t guarantee it. I can’t hear it myself, but with my cloth ears that doesn’t mean much either. The music builds slowly from a monotonous twanging guitar into another long one-chord thrash. It’s a different mix from the album, running about 20 seconds shorter, featuring a bit of Velvets-style lead guitar early on as the vocals begin, and ending with a short return to the solo twanging instead of swerving into a brick wall with a moogy squawk and blood-curdling needle scratch as on the album.
French Disco is reassuringly not sung in French (apart from the words “la résistance”), nor does it sound like disco music. It’s a great riff and hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on Switched On Volume 1. The lyrics to remaining non-album track Fruition are printed on the sleeve, I was about to say helpfully, but that’s questionable. Allusion, tribulation, transmutation… (but no fruition). Well, whatever. It’s a gentler, downbeat number showcasing nice vocal harmonies from Hansen and Sadier.
Overall the music reflects the steady progression of Stereolab’s early heavier style as they gradually blended in more delicate pop touches but it’s all still very much more Krautrock than Sacha Distel, making it a very satisfying little disc from my perspective. It’s on plain black vinyl.
As well as a CD version there is also an extremely rare clear vinyl version (a rather cleaner version of clear than Low Fi), of which only 36 copies escaped into the wild, 25 of which are autographed by the band members. The remainder of the pressing (of unknown size) came out blemished by some contamination of the vinyl and were destroyed.
Presumably Stereolab switched pressing plant after this, as the album encountered problems too, with off-centre pressings and numerous returns of the gold vinyl version. My gold vinyl copy plays fine, but the label on side one is doubled up, with one of the prints spreading noisily over the run-off groove. If I was desperate for cash I could flog it for up to NZ$600 apparently, but it would break my heart to do so. Similarly, this EP is going nowhere.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 