Low-Fi marks one of the final appearances of Cliff, the totemic figure from Stereolab’s record covers taken from Anton Holtz Portmann’s comic strip Der Tödliche Finger (“The Deadly Finger”) in the Swiss underground magazine Hotcha!. Low-Fi also closes down the first phase of the group’s existence, and what better way to go out than with reflection?

Across the ‘90s and ‘00s, there were few groups as exploratory, as productive, and as exciting to follow as Stereolab. Charles Long’s sculpture often tangles with popular culture, including music – a recent piece, 2012’s Pet Sounds, features biomorphic shapes that broadcast samples from the Beach Boys album when hands are run across them. Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center is a much earlier installation grappling with similar ideas, and with Stereolab, it feels like Long found the perfect collaborators, particularly given their often sculptural approach to writing songs (if that doesn’t seem too simplistic an analogy). For Not Music, the group returned to the prodigious Chemical Chords sessions, selecting another batch of songs – the “dark side”, as Sadier puts it. There’s certainly something in that: the songs on Not Music take pause more frequently, admit to more complex emotional colouration. One wonders how potent the two albums would have been released as a double album, with both sides of the coin represented. Perhaps that would have been overkill. Yet Stereolab have always worked well with these contrasts – the dark and the light, the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. They may have released better records, but ‘John Cage Bubblegum’ is Stereolab’s finest 7″ single; no mean feat for a group that used the format so well. Their singles often feel like diary entries, explorations of particular creative zones, but ‘John Cage Bubblegum’ acts differently, tying together the first three years of their output with one sweep of the hand. Stereolab’s first release on London label Too Pure, where they rubbed shoulders with PJ Harvey, Th’ Faith Healers and Pram, is the consummate example of the group’s early form. On ‘Super-Electric’ the pieces fall into place so effortlessly: Joe Dilworth’s drums ride out the Klaus Dinger pulse while Gane’s guitars chime incessantly, and bubbling electronics disrupt the song’s coast.

In the time between Sound-Dust and Margerine Eclipse, Stereolab lost key member Mary Hansen, who died in a cycling accident in 2002. Gane and Sadier’s romantic relationship had also ended. Given this double blow, Margerine Eclipse could not be anything but a eulogy, particularly to the passing of Hansen. What is so remarkable is the hope that suffuses the record, even at its darkest passes. It’s an album that divides fans, though, with some finding it has too much surface sheen, too much stylisation. You can kind of see their point, but I’d prefer to read this as Stereolab finding a new degree of poise and confidence. Certainly, the process of recording risked mechanisation – the group would record base material, and their playing would then be looped. This was the first time Stereolab had recorded to hard disk, and while Gane and producer McEntire found it a fascinating approach, Gane would later reflect to Tape Op that he “didn’t want to do it that way again. To me, an LP can suffer from too much looping or artificial playing.” From there, Gane undertook a process he likened to excavation: “I cut a very, very tiny loop/sample, and I just glue them together so there’s maybe eight of them in a row, and that’s maybe lasting about a second, or a second and a half. The kind of blurred sound gives it something you can’t really precisely put your finger on, it’s a strange kind of loop. And then I pitch-shift them up and down to make a chord. And then all we do with the band, is we just listen really closely to what we can hear, Gane and Sadier also started their own record label, Duophonic, with their manager Martin Pike. While the label ended up releasing other groups (Tortoise, Labradford, Broadcast, Pram, The High Llamas, Huggy Bear, and the pre-Daft Punk Darlin’ all appeared on the label at some point), it is best known for releasing almost all the Stereolab albums and singles (on the UHF Disks imprint) while pumping out limited 7” and 10” singles (on the Super 45s imprint).

and try to reproduce it. I liken it a little bit to a sort of pop-art thing, where you’re recreating a commercial product, but in a painterly way.” Mars Audiac Quintet is often considered Stereolab’s strongest record, and it’s certainly a smart claim: they cover a lot of terrain across its four sides, their sound taking in becalmed miniatures (‘Des Étoiles Électroniques’, ‘The Stars Our Destination’, and the honeyed Lucia Pamela tribute ‘International Colouring Contest’), metronomic boogie (‘Transona Five’, ‘Transporter Sans Bouger’) and library music instrumentals (‘Fiery Yellow’). It’s also the home to ‘Ping Pong’, one of their best-known songs, matching a lyric about capitalism’s socio-economic cycles over a beat-pop blush.

Disks

Bachelor Pad Music is surprising for the light it lets into the group’s world, with songs like ‘Avant-Garde M.O.R.’ and ‘The Groop Play Chord X’ feeling like a deep exhale after the wound tension of Peng! and Low-Fi. The album marks the beginning of Stereolab’s ongoing fascination with ersatz lounge music (a genre that smuggled the strange into the everyday with surprising consistency) but also proves that Gane could write genuinely graceful and moving melodies, and ‘Ronco Symphony’ still rings true as one of Stereolab’s most unaffected, lovely songs.

We’re Not Adult Oriented’ might offer the thread that connects Peng! to 1994’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, but The Groop Played “Space Age Bachelor Pad Music” is significant for other reasons, not least the first appearance on a Stereolab record of Sean O’Hagan, ex-Microdisney member, current and future High Llama, and arranger supreme. For many, Emperor Tomato Ketchup is the emblematic, or quintessential Stereolab album. It landed at a time when their cultural currency was particularly strong, and it certainly had learned lessons from Mars Audiac Quintet’s occasional languors; everything on Emperor Tomato Ketchup is on-point and clearly articulated. The group’s remit is impressive here, from the bowdlerised funk of ‘Metronomic Underground’, through ‘Cybele’s Reverie’’s starlet pop, and on into a clutch of songs that have Stereolab at their most pop-avant (‘Percolations’, ‘Les Yper Sound’, ‘Tomorrow Is Already Here’).Sadier’s personal politics have always been deeply human, despite the desire for many to frame them as Marxism by numbers, and here she also shows great capacity for channelling the direct, emotional speech of the heart into song: ‘Feel and Triple’ traces the steps of Sadier and Hansen’s friendship with devastating honesty (“It took years to intimate / But finally love found a way / Unimpeded it could exist / So fun, so free”) while singing out a gorgeous remembrance of a singular individual. For the group’s first collaboration with Nurse With Wound (more a warped remix than an actual collaboration, as they never shared studio space) you can hear Steven Stapleton, NWW’s éminence grise, tearing into Stereolab’s material with glee, mutating it into abstruse patterns and building lattices of illogical rhythms. There are points in ‘Animal Or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’ where Stapleton’s collage aesthetic goes into overdrive, but the body of the 14-minute piece is a tribal thud that’s pure ‘It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl’. Dots And Loops saw Stereolab diving deeper into the peculiar alchemy of their Chicago collaborations – two-thirds of the album was recorded with McEntire at Soma Recording Studio. For the remainder, they decamped to Düsseldorf and Academy Of St Martin In The Streets to work with Mouse On Mars. If any record sums up the international exchange that was going on at the time, with The High Llamas, Mouse On Mars, Tortoise, The Sea & Cake, Gastr Del Sol and Oval all sharing aesthetic and creative territory, it’s Dots And Loops.