It's a cruel irony that, in the wake of Mary Hansen's tragic death earlier this week, Low-Fi, an early Stereolab EP which I had ordered a couple of months back, arrived here just as I and many others were coming to grips with the news. I never met Mary, I only saw the band play once, and yet it seems like I've lost a friend, and I feel sad for those who have indeed lost a friend.
Mary contributed harmonies to "Low-Fi" and "Laisser-Faire", and even though her involvement seems somewhat tangential on the band's first release with her onboard, by the time the supercharged "John Cage Bubblegum" and The Groop Played Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music followed shortly after, she was well and truly esconced. Her sing-song counterpoint to Laetitia's somewhat cooler delivery encouraged much gross generalising by dilettantes posing as critics (like me, perhaps), but it did add that final piece of magic to the way they effortlessly merged the lightness of their French pop and Tropicalia stylings with the hardness of Neu!-style motorik rhythms, not to mention their punk sensibilities, and god knows what else in a myriad of ways over the following decade.
At this point, it's still the Krautrock influences to the fore, though the coda to "Elektro (He Held The World In His Iron Grip)", following as it does three minutes of moog and farfisa meltdown, is about as beatific as they got. Laetitia's lyric for "Laisser-Faire" is typically left-wing in subject matter, and though she's often dismissed her words as just something to sing over the music, they seem eerily prescient with its prediction of a war within the decade. I quite like "Low-Fi", though it's very much in the vein of the Refried Ectoplasm tracks. "(Varoom!)" is another one like that, starts off as a straight-ahead indie tune which is followed by five minutes of rowdy noises with what sounds like a Bontempo drum machine accompaniment.
The Low-Fi EP captures another moment from that 92-93 period where Stereolab were lifting a notch from being just another very good indie band into something special.
