“Play This In Stere-ere-o…” © Mr. Jolico’s Rhyme Partner

Stereo Image

Since my club-going career started when I was about thirteen years old I probably have about a thousand anecdotes similar to the one I trotted out in yesterday’s post. But the sad thing is, since the incident in question, which occurred close to two years ago, I’ve been “clubbing” only a scant few times.

Perhaps it’s just old age setting in, but I only rarely seem to have the time, the money or the companionship on hand to make a night out happen these days. Then there’s the whole issue of finding nights I actually want to go to; where I’ll hear interesting music, the DJs aren’t self-important douchebags and I might actually meet some people who aren’t vacuous morons. One of the few occasions I went out since the “commercial for the death machine” incident that wasn’t to hear my good friend DJ12XU spin was to a short-lived Electro night at a club in nearby Northampton. They flip-flopped between a few different venues in the town before abandoning the Pioneer Valley altogether and setting up shop at a nightclub in some town I couldn’t locate on a map of the state if I tried.

ChromeoWhen I was afforded the opportunity to hit the night up I liked what I heard and had fun, despite the fact that my clubbing compatriot’s girlfriend was visibly unhappy to be hanging out in a bar on a Friday night when she could be at home reading the newest installment of Harry Potter. I wasn’t sweating any of that shit though because they played then-new Chromeo and Justice jams and a bunch of other joints that had been burning up my radio playlists for months. In the interim Canadian retro-Electro-R&B-slash-Synth-Funk duo Chromeo went on to become pretty much everybody’s dancefloor dandies last year, attaining an almost surreal amount of notoriety for their Fancy Footwork album. While Parisian twosome Justice’s “D-A-N-C-E” ended up getting nominated for a VMA, and I even heard if on a nightly Top-10 countdown on the local Clear Channel-ish station and on the in-house “muzak” radio station in an A.J. Wright discount department store.

This year has seen the release of a whole slew of records aimed at the alternative discotheque, with Hot Chip’s third LP and Hercules & Love Affair’s debut being some of the standouts. But nothing has been quite as ubiquitous as Chromeo or Justice were last year. With the last few months of 2008 looming ever closer Johnny Dark — one of the founders of Canadian Indietronic/Synthpop duo Junior Boys — and San Serac — an eclectic Electro/Disco/New Wave singer and producer whose Professional LP was another highlight of 2008 — have joined forces as Stereo Image to release an album (sure to please fans of high-concept LA-meets-UK duo Neon Neon and the aforementioned Hercules & Love Affair) that splits the difference between the Canadian Robo-Funk & Synthpop of Chromeo and Junior Boys and the glammy Art-Rock and New Wave influenced Post-Disco that Serac already established himself as a master of.

Stereo Image ‘S/T’Their album, simply titled S/T, is short and sweet, clocking in at just over 20 minutes in length. In that respect Stereo Image seem to be intent on recreating the sort of syrupy synthesizer Pop that dominated radio in the early-to-mid ’80s right down to the broadcast-ready brevity of the songs themselves. They pack a lot into each tune’s never more than 3-and-a-half-minute play time though. Serac’s songwriting treats such tried-and-true Pop-music cliches as romance and excess, partying, decadence and regret as if they’re epic in scale, imparting in them a sense of melodrama and over-analytical intellectualism with his lyricism and an overwraught theatricality with his Bowie-esque vocals which are only occasionally coated with the most tastefully subtle vocoder.

While the sonic backdrops provided by Dark help bring Serac’s cinematic word-pictures to vivid life. The characters and situations acted out through song are given an array of all-too-real CGI landscapes on which to stage their histrionics.  Street-light-illumined car interiors, exclusive nightclubs, neon-lit cityscapes, finely appointed apartments and plush bedrooms take shape out of Dark’s layers of sensuously throbbing synth-bass, flourescent-colored aquariums made from crystalline panes of shimmering keys filled with murky deep-sea effects , programming as elegant-but-sure-footed as any disco-dancer and whipping electro-slaps that could bring any hysterical lover to their senses or rouse an O.D. case from their stupor.

Stereo Image “Your Collapsed State”

When their songs aren’t projecting a musical movie on a wall in my mind the “stereo image” I’m most likely to be confronted with is that of David Bowie flying around the world, recruiting Prince from Minneapolis, John “Jellybean” Benitez and the Full Force crew from New York, and Depeche Mode/Yazoo’s Vince Clarke and The Pet Shop Boys from England, to produce a new record for him which he immediately debuted at Danceteria to ecstatic response. Of course no such events actually happened, so they’ll have to remain an “image” and nothing more. But it’s certainly what S/T sounds most like to me and I’m glad Stereo Image was able to make such a graphic impression with just a few synth gurgles and some snappy snare programming.

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