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Formed in 1990 by English guitarist/record collector Tim Gane and French singer/keyboardist Laetitia Sadier, Stereolab draws from both obscure music genres and fashionable academic theory. The confluence of sound and ideas produces mixed-up collages of German experimentalists and Brazilian songwriters, of Karl Marx and filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Coated with a sheen of bubbly vocals and pop dynamics, the combination makes for often beautiful, exhilarating music. At times, sure, it's maddening and dense, like a puzzle or a complicated children's toy. You want to pick it up and pull it apart until you figure out exactly which pieces make it work.

That's not necessarily the best approach, as I found out in an interview with Gane and Sadier. We were talking about their new record, "Cobra and the Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night," and I told them that I was impressed because the band seemed to use jazz on it in the same informal way that it had used funk on "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" (1996). Gane laughed. "It wasn't supposed to be funk," he said. "It was supposed to be swing, with all of the instruments playing the same riff."

The fascinating part is that Gane and Sadier and the rest of the band hope for that kind of misunderstanding, going so far as to expect it from their listeners. The possibility of hearing something on your own, to be able to listen with new ears and to misinterpret -- it's part of the plan.

On a recent visit to the band's label in New York, Gane sprawled across a leather couch with his feet up on a glass coffee table while Sadier often stood up to walk around the room and glance out the window as her partner answered my questions.

Who is Cobra?

Gane: Cobra is a 1940s and '50s surrealist group. And the Phases Group, that's a group of surrealists. But that's not really important.

Why not?

It's just words -- a cut up. Some of it was cut up from this great [André] Breton biography.

Is surrealism a recent fascination, or an enduring one?

Sadier: [Laughs.]

Gane: Nah, since we were teenagers. Dada, surrealism, situationism -- all that kind of stuff: We think about it and laugh at it endlessly. It always opens up and lends itself to new life. Those are the best things of this century. I think they all give you a philosophy of how to look at things differently. You can apply it to anything: to music; to the way that you construct; titles. We can use and choose the ones that we want at any given time. We're not religious.

You mean you're not dogmatic?

Gane: I don't think that any increase in knowledge can be dogmatic. I think that dogmatism comes from a reduction in the amount of influences.

Sadier: I completely agree. There are certain things that may broaden your view or your self-knowledge, or curiosity: situationism, surrealism, Marxism, art. Sometimes they have been abused. Breton was apparently a horrific bastard who sacked [dramatic theorist] Antonin Artaud for being too much himself. But theoretically, they are about knowing more, and being inquisitive and discovering the undiscoverable.

Maybe the danger is subscribing to only one idea. You get more when you can put ideas together.

Gane: I think new discoveries and new ideas and concepts come from the juxtaposition of existing concepts and ideas -- like mathematical formulas and chemical formulas. That's where my interest lays, in discovering possibilities, not in trying to invent something. The act of chance creates endless possibilities.

In terms of our music, it's sometimes based around these ideas, sometimes not. Often it's totally intuitive. It's where these influences begin to work on the intuitive level where you're not actually thinking about it in an academic sense or in a constructional sense, you're just reacting or creating something on the level of instant recognition.

Musically, is that how you come up with something that is more than the sum of your influences?

Gane: I think that you have to have something about you that is unique. Personally, what set us apart, at least in the beginning, was that there was a certain concept to the group, a philosophy or even an ideology about what we were doing and why we were doing it.

What was that? Can you encapsulate it?

Gane: To be unique was more important than to be good.

Next page | Laetitia Sadier on getting "a bit raunchy" to Can