Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it. Saint Etienne are, simply put, one of the greats. The indie-pop legends just released their latest album The Night , which goes even deeper into the ambient lane than 's I've Been Trying to Tell You and finds the trio yet again twisting their own previously established styles into new and thrilling shapes.
I interviewed Bob Stanley more than ten years ago for a short little news hit during my early years at Pitchfork, so I was happy to get a bit more space and time with him to chat about the new record, his perspective on pop and the music landscape writer, and much more.
Check it out:. Saint Etienne have flirted with ambient throughout your career, but this record—as well as the last one—really pushes things into the ambient side.
Tell me about that choice when it comes to this new one. We wanted to do something that was calming. I suffer from insomnia—I haven't really slept the last couple of nights, so hopefully I'll get some sleep tonight. I also love the KLF's Chill Out , and we all thought that it would be nice to do a modern update on what that would be. So we all wrote songs and started taking them apart to fit the sounds of the album, and they got more and more stripped back until there were no drums at all.
We probably worked on it for a couple of years, this one. This isn't a new observation at all, but it does feel like there's been a general uptick in interest when it comes to ambient music across this decade at large. Tell me about your thoughts on that, as well as your relationship to ambient music in general. Yeah, there's the New Age stuff as well—the kind of things that Numero Group have been putting out, and some private-press records which, until a few years ago, I had no idea ever existed.
