Dots And Loops

Part of Stereolab’s legacy was to expose the orthodoxy of indie rock by embracing stuff indie rockers would have found desperately uncool: space-age pop, cocktail jazz, elevator music. Where 1996’s *Emperor Tomato Ketchup* retained a punk edge (if you squinted, at least), *Dots and Loops*, released only a year later, was the full fruitcake. Compare the band’s 1993 epic “Jenny Ondioline,” a three-chord, 18-minute trance of noisy guitars and socialist incantations (“I don’t care, democracy’s being fucked”), with “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse,” which shifts from lounge waltz to variety-show jazz to synthesizer étude to funk-lite—a complex, almost pointedly corny descent into music that sounds less like the work of bonded mammals than some faceless corporation. That, of course, is part of the point: Marxist-socialist-materialists that they were, the band advanced the idea that all this manufactured stuff was in fact the real music of our mostly manufactured times: the swingin’ \'60s window dressing of “Miss Modular,” the soothing breakbeats of “Parsec,” the greet-the-day vibraphones of “Brakhage”—all of it sounded curiously prefabricated, musical MREs for enterprising youths on the go. Light, colorful, and effortlessly complex, *Dots and Loops* mapped the future the band had been searching for from the start.

Stereolab’s masterpiece fused analog with digital, past with future, Marxism with the commercial magic of music through a pristine record that defined an age of “recombinant pop.”