A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#19: Stereolab – Ping Pong (1994)
Repetition in different forms has been central to Stereolab’s art. Many pieces of their music settle into a long repetitive groove, although the style of that groove evolved over time, became less important and The Groop were never content to serve up repeats like some fossilised hard rock band whose fans demanded – and got – more and more and more of the same thing.
If you’re talking about their record release pattern during the 1990s then repetition came to look like a very deliberate strategy. For a period of seven years encompassing five main studio albums, each LP was heralded about a month in advance by a lead single released in both two-track 7” and four-track 10” or 12” vinyl formats and four-track CD. The lead track was taken from the album while the other three tracks were unique to the EP or single B-side.
This practice was followed slavishly from 1993’s Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements through to 1999’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. The only change was that the first three EPs came in 10” format, both black and coloured vinyl, while the last two were 12” black vinyl only, possibly because by the end of the century the scarcity of pressing plants rendered the 10” less commercially viable.
Ping Pong was the second of these five EPs, forming the advance guard for 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet. (Elsewhere in this series I cover the first in the sequence, Jenny Ondioline, and the last, The Free Design.) Like all the EPs, the lead track is the most obvious pop tune from the album and Ping Pong became Stereolab’s greatest hit, peaking at the giddy heights of #45 in the UK singles chart.
This was only fair, since it is a super-catchy little tune, showcasing their knack for singalong lyrics on that staple topic of pop hits, the capitalist-military-industrial cycle of economic depression, war and recovery. Given the profuse quantity of unutterable shite that filled the singles charts in the 1990s it’s actually a sin it didn’t place higher.
Second track Moogie Wonderland lands like a bit of a throwback to Stereolab’s earliest style, a noisy guitar and synth thrash that eventually droops into a slow blur as though someone has pulled the plug on the tape reel mid-mastering and it slithers into an eternally grinding drone in a locked runoff.
Side two opens with another pop tune, Pain et Spectacles, which translates as ‘bread and circuses’, another treatise (presumably) on the subjugation of the masses by the political elite. It’s sung in French, and although my schoolboy language skills have held up pretty well over the decades I can’t claim to understand much of it even when I see it written down.
On the face of it, the final track is another lift from the album, but Transona Five (Live), as the parentheses indicate, is a live studio take that is slightly different from the LP version. It’s ten seconds longer, and the mix buries the vocals a bit deeper so it’s a bit harder to hear Laetitia Sadier repeatedly intoning “You can’t avoid dying…”, which is perhaps not a bad thing.
Tim Gane has stated that the idea behind the song was to take an essentially cliched pop riff and repeat and extend it for so long that it lost its banality and morphed into something else entirely, and it’s successful in that aim. When it starts you do a double-take with the sleeve credits to make sure you’re not listening to a cover of Canned Heat’s On The Road Again, but by the end of the five and a half minutes you have entered a hypnotic state of meditation on your own inescapable mortality. Not at all a piece of old hippy boogie ‘n blues.
In one respect the Ping Pong EP shares a unique feature with the album (and later single/EP Wow and Flutter) in that they are the only instances where a Stereolab sleeve design uses an original photograph rather than an illustration, graphic or appropriation of a found photo. All three discs feature a close-up fish-eye photo of a Moog synthesiser control board taken by band associate Peter Morris, distorting the instrument into a perfect circle on the square sleeve, reflecting the disc within.
Ping Pong is also notable for the introduction of brass instruments to the musical arrangements, and also a lone violin. On this EP, as on the album, their presence is indistinct, blended into the mix to the point that you might not notice they were even there, but both brass and strings became increasingly prominent features of the Stereolab sound over the coming years. This contributes to the general sense of a shift in focus from the avant-garde to the pop side of their dual-personality by the end of the decade.
The shift in emphasis was gradual, however, meaning that Ping Pong and Mars Audiac Quintet lie at the mid-point of the three albums (Transient Random Noise Bursts and Emperor Tomato Ketchup being the others) that many fans often consider the band’s golden age, when they straddled the catchy and cranky extremes with the greatest aplomb.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 