Re: Random Stereolab interview quotes

And this one about his creative breakdown after MAQ. Thank goodness they kept going!

"I just had a brain meltdown. It occurred around the end of an album called Mars Audiac Quintet. After we finished that album,
there was about a year where there was nothing interesting that I could write. Because I just couldn’t think any more in this style that I
thought was interesting, it felt a total trap for me, it weakened me alot. This period is the worst period, for me in the history of the band, in terms of writing the stuff and also in terms of, like, general sort of happiness. And I think that at that point, the band probably should have stopped, or would have stopped, normally.

But I had an idea that came about by accident kind of. We were doing atrack for this long-forgotten compilation, A Tribute to The Gods. The Gods were this New York band from the late ’60s. We did a track on it and I didn’t know what to do – it’s just random, free-form kind of music. And I went ’round a friend’s (place)… and I listened to it, and I picked up four little notes right in the middle of this kind of freejazz, free thing, you know, and I thought "well, what I’ll do is I’ll just loop those four little notes and play them. So I played them, and I just got into this thing of, like, having this (inaudible) repetition but basing it on a totally different dynamic, perhaps patterned in a more jazz dynamic. But to me, it fulfilled the same purpose as the first way of working, but totally different, and totally fresh. So from this idea, the album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which was the one I really enjoyed writing the most, because, again, it was new."