stereolab: transient random-noise bursts with announcements

Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements is Stereolab’s breakthrough album, their major label debut, and one of the most innovative releases of the 1990s, a musical decade signified by breaking down artistic barriers. Originally released in August 1993, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements builds on the promise of the band’s early releases Switched On and Peng! by expanding the scope of their highly distinctive mix of one-chord Krautrock grooves, distorted vintage keyboard noise and Euro-pop. Adding touches of ’50s and ’60s easy listening, exotica and space-age sounds as well as samba and French pop, Stereolab did more than any group in the modern rock era to expand the language of art music by incorporating styles left for dead by the serious rock community. Among the highlights is the fluid and lush opener “Tone Burst” with its layers of whirring analog synths, trance-inducing rhythm guitar and balanced motorik beat. The closing track, “Lock-Groove Lullaby” inverts those same elements to bring the album full-circle. Songs like “Analogue Rock,” “Our Trinitone Blast” and “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” experiment with more complex and adventurous structures. However, “Jenny Ondioline” is still the head-turner: a hypnotic, 18-minute-long tower of a song that checks all of the boxes for what the band had done up to then and points at everything they would do moving forward. Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements remains Stereolab’s most eclectic and experimental early release and also hints at the evolution that lead them to indie-rock stardom.