Wherever I Go You Are There

“Ah, I look outside/And wherever I go you are there/You color in the everyday/Wherever I go” - Broadcast, “Look Outside”

There are artists who have made a massive influence across the history of music. These artists tend to fall into two camps. There are the artists who are influential and commercially successful. People who fall into this category include Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, George Jones, and Dolly Parton, to name the first ones who come to mind.

On the other side of this divide are artists who are extremely influential, but they do not have the commercial success. The classic example of this is The Velvet Underground, a band whose music didn’t sell well when they were around, but its music has influenced thousands upon thousands of bands. Without the VU, we wouldn’t have R.E.M. and My Bloody Valentine, again just to name the first acts to come to mind.

Broadcast and Stereolab, the two bands that I am going to talk about this week, fall into this second camp. While both bands have not sold that many records, there are a large number of bands that have been directly influenced by their music. With Stereolab set to release a new album and go out on tour this year and last year’s release of a tranche of Broadcast demos, it felt like a good time to discuss these bands, considering what made their music special and looking at artists who have used their music as a launching point for their own projects.

Stereolab: The Forefather and Foremother

Stereolab was formed in 1990 by the now-married duo of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadler. When the band started, Gane and Sadler, with their band of contributors, created a sound that merged socialist and Marxist lyrics with Velvet Underground-style guitar noise, motorik repetition, and lounge music like Esquivel and Martin Denny. As they started to play live and release music through their own Duophonic record label, Stereolab’s unique sound earned the band a contract with Too Pure, the London-based label that discovered and signed PJ Harvey. The album released on this label, 1992’s Peng!, was only a sign of things to come.

With subsequent releases, the noisy guitars were replaced with synthesizers, and the styles of music incorporated into Stereolab's sound increased. Throughout the 1990s, Stereolab would come to integrate easy listening, funk, jazz, hip-hop, electronica, bossa nova, and 60s pop into their music. In the process of this sonic exploration, Stereolab released the seminal albums Mars Audiac Quintet (1994), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996), and Dots and Loops (1997). These albums are phenomenal listens and were immediately impactful, influencing the music being made around Stereolab.

After the release of Peng!, Too Pure became the home of a number of bands working with the same mix of musical influences as Stereolab. Pram, a British band anchored by the childlike vocals of Rosie Cuckston, released three albums on the label—The Stars Are So Big, The Earth Is So Small . . . Stay Where You Are (1993), Helium (1994) and Sargasso Sea (1995)—that mix Stereolab sonic elements into their blend of children’s instruments and dark, off-kilter vibes. Cuckston’s vocals can be a dealbreaker for people, but I think that Pram is one of the unsung bands on Too Pure, one that should get a little more attention.

In addition to Pram, Laika, another British band that has also gone unheralded, takes the Stereolab mixture and applies it to an electronic palette. The resulting albums, particularly Silver Apples of the Moon (1995), Sounds of the Satellites (1997), and Good Looking Blues (2000), are excellent, full of dub and club music elements while pulling from the Stereolab playbook.

Even though Stereolab was a new band, their impact was already being felt on the music scene, much like when My Bloody Valentine led so many other bands to ape their sound after dropping Isn’t Anything in 1988 and Loveless in 1991. One band that went on to use Stereolab as an influence was a band from Birmingham named Broadcast.

Broadcast: The Next Iteration

Taking inspiration from the early Stereolab albums, James Cargill and Trish Keenan, the duo at the heart of Broadcast, added haunting melodies and vocals derived from the psychedelic band The United States of America to the mix of repetition and noise. The resulting work keeps the rhythmic repetition of Stereolab while adding synthesizers and the haunting vocals of Keenan, which can be both distant and intimate in equal measure.

After releasing a compilation of their early EPs—Work and Non-Work (1997)—Broadcast released The Noise Made By People in 2000. This album’s blend of film score music, synthesizers, psychedelic drift, and pristine pop was the introduction to a sound that was both reminiscent of the futurism of the 1960s while being completely detached from the concept of time. Songs like “Echo’s Answer” and “Unchanging Window” are littered with fine detail and beauty and serve as pristine examples of the Broadcast sound.

On Haha Sound (2003), Broadcast further refines their approach, maintaining the haunting beauty of Noise while adding a more human touch, something that can be heard in the first track on the album, “Colour Me In.” Accompanied by jaunty music that sounds like something that would be played on a carousel in an abandoned amusement park, Keenan sings a sweet, wistful song, displaying a humanity that did not always come through on Noise. With Haha Sound and Noise, Broadcast separated themselves from their Stereolab-riffing roots and created something far spookier, influencing another generation of bands.

The Children of Stereolab

Given that they have been a band for 35 years at this point, it should be unsurprising that Stereolab has had the larger influence on underground music. To start, I should point to the various Stereolab off-shoots that have resulted over the years. There are, among others, Cavern of Anti-Matter, a heavy psych band led by Tim Gane; Monade, a floating pop project led by Laetitia Sadler; and The High Llamas, formed by previous Stereolab keyboardist Tim O’Hagan.

Stereolab’s influence on the current generation of music has been intense. If you hear a band that uses a droning, repeating synth line or adds a lounge element to their motorik, I’ll bet you a dollar that they say they were influenced by Stereolab. Some of the bands that fall into this category are Electrelane, Dummy, Still Corners, and Peel Dream Magazine.

Electrelane was a quartet that played a lively brand of synth-driven post-rock that was heavily influenced by the repetition of Stereolab. Their particular highlights are their Too Pure releases The Power Out (2004) and No Shouts, No Calls (2007). Both albums display their harmony as a band and are excellent, driving albums.

Dummy is a young band, only having formed in the 2010s. Their ability to blend pop sensibilities with synth grooves recalls Stereolab, but Dummy go on to create something new with the aesthetic by incorporating some shoegaze and other dreamy sounds. Their album from 2024, Free Energy, is an excellent listen from the new generation carrying on in the Stereolab tradition.

Still Corners is a British duo that now calls Texas home. While their more recent albums recall the arid landscapes of their new home, their music still maintains the lush synths and dreamy vocals that characterize late-era Stereolab (e.g., 2004’s Margerine Eclipse). Solid starting points for this band include Slow Air (2018) and Strange Pleasures (2013), both of which feature their strongest tracks and moods.

Peel Dream Magazine is the project of Joe Stevens, a multi-instrumentalist based out of New York. Over the course of his four albums, Stevens has taken the Stereolab influence and shaped it in different ways. For example, on Pad (2022), Stevens uses the Stereolab core of propulsion and dreaminess and merges it with ideas from new age wellness, tropicalia, and the Beach Boys, among other things. Each of his albums takes on different ideas, but they are all rooted in a base built on Stereolab.

There are a series of other artists who have taken the repetition as well as the bricolage aspects of Stereolab and integrated them into their music. The two examples that I want to focus on here are Jane Weaver and Gwenno.

Jane Weaver started off making folk music, but with her 2014 album The Silver Globe, she moved towards the Germanic repetition of Stereolab. On her subsequent album Modern Kosmology (2017), Weaver goes fully in on repetition, adding psych-folk, dream pop, and new age into her cosmic mix. Subsequent albums only saw a refinement of this sound. On her 2024 album Love in Constant Spectacle, Weaver starts to add some of her original folk stylings back into her heady psych mix.

Gwenno is Gwenno Saunders, who you may remember as a member of The Pipettes (don’t feel bad if you don’t; I don’t either). Under her own name, Gwenno has released three albums of pristine psych-pop sung in Welsh, Cornish, and English. (Fun fact: her music has helped to revive interest in Cornish.) Using the driving elements of Stereolab’s music as a base, Gwenno adds dance-pop, psychedelica, and electro-pop as well as her own fantastic vocals. While you absolutely should listen to all of the bands I’ve talked about in this dispatch, you should only listen to Gwenno if you are pressed for time. I think that she’s phenomenal, and she has a new record coming out this year.

The Brood of Broadcast

The impact of Broadcast wasn’t truly felt until the untimely passing of Trish Keenan in 2011. Their music was known on the underground, but people hadn’t really started seeing all of the places it was until attention was brought to the band following her passing. While there is overlap between the bands influenced by Stereolab and the bands influenced by Broadcast (Gwenno is such an act), there are bands that take their sound and aesthetic much more clearly from Broadcast than Stereolab.

A few bands that operate in this manner are Death and Vanilla, Vanishing Twin, Melody’s Echo Chamber, and Ulrika Spacek. Each one brings the haunting timelessness of Broadcast into their project.

Swedish band Death and Vanilla, of the bands I’ll discuss here, is the most slavish devotee of Broadcast. Their 2015 album To Where The Wild Things Are does, at times, sound like a lost Broadcast album. I don’t think this a bad thing; it’s actually what I like most about this album. But, as is prudent for bands who want to exist for a long time, they began to distinguish themselves. Their 2023 album Flicker is the strongest representation of how much they have grown while maintaining the haunting synths and dark energy of Broadcast.

Vanishing Twin is a British band that takes Broadcast as a core and mutates it into something far stranger. Over the course of their four albums, Vanishing Twin has managed to make music that has become more mysterious and challenging with each subsequent album. They are a truly fascinating project, one that I have enjoyed since The Age of Immunology, their 2019 release.

Melody’s Echo Chamber is the project led by Melody Prochet, a French instrumentalist. In her work, she takes the dark psych world created in the music of Broadcast and ties it on a buoyant pop vision. Her three albums are all exciting affairs full of swirling music located in the best place: outside of time.

Ulrika Spacek is a British band that uses a three-guitar attack to create a hazy, psychedelic world that is indebted to the haunting world building done by Broadcast. While their most recent album, Compact Trauma (2023), cleans things up a bit, the previous two albums, Modern English Decoration (2017) and The Album Paranoia (2016), are excellent examples of the influence that Broadcast has had on their music, featuring spectral vocals and a generally haunted ambiance.

Concluding Thoughts

Now that you are thinking about this (even if you already knew about this), you will start seeing both of these bands wherever you look. This was the case for me. I’ve known about both Stereolab and Broadcast since I was in undergrad in the 2000s, but I wasn’t actively thinking about their influence when I was listening to music.

The change for Broadcast occurred when I started listening to Death and Vanilla. It is extremely hard to miss how much they owe to Broadcast. For Stereolab, it was the Dummy album Free Energy. When I heard that album, a floodgate opened and I started seeing Stereolab everywhere, even though everyone else would have just said, “No shit, Sherlock. It’s been there the whole time.” And those rude people would have been absolutely right.

So, now that you’ve got this knowledge—or had it reawakened in you—you can start seeing the places where both of these bands are lurking in the music world and understand that although their sales were microscopic, their influence was way, way larger.

For this week, I’ve built a sampler video playlist. There’s a track from each band to give you an idea of what they sound like. I figured that this would be easier than trying to plug this thing with discrete YouTube videos. This is all from me this week. I’ll see you with Spins on Wednesday.