In an admiring review of their most recent studio album, 2004's Margarine Eclipse, Spin Magazine hailed Stereolab as one of pop's 50 most influential ensembles. "No one can do beautiful, energising crossover pop like Stereolab," concurred The Independent, while a US writer, one Eric Greenwood, echoed the sentiments of thousands of "Lab devotees when describing the band's enduring appeal thus: "The formula has never been broken; it's only tweaked slightly with each new album, and I never want it to end."

Indeed, over fifteen prolific years of qualitatively consistent output Stereolab have accrued a vast, peerless cache of work, hallmarked by a unique, carefully evolving but instantly recognizable sonic imprimatur. In addition to over a dozen glittering LPs, their back catalogue is littered with fan-pleasing gems: limited editions, one-off collaborations, split singles et al. In the process they've galvanised an extensive, staunchly loyal international fanbase; become a byword for playful, stylish excellence; struck a blow for the feminisation of rock and booked a permanent seat at experimental pop's high table.

Not bad for a group who eschew many of the established calling cards of rock careerism in favour of dedication to a singular, picturesque muse. To all intents and purposes, Stereolab continue to inhabit some hermetic parallel universe forever redolent with the innocent-yet-glamorous promise of space age futurism and timeless radical chic; their essential fluorescence blissfully unsullied by the dreary spreadsheet certainties of the modern music industry.

Theirs is a rich, overflowing palette, readily able to blur the gulf between Os Mutantes and the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra; merge Krzysztof Komeda with the Velvet Underground, Francoise Hardy with Neu! and Burt Bacharach with Esquivel. A deluxe blend, in other words, with ingredients plucked assiduously from pop's coolest outposts: 50's lounge, Rive Gauche chanson, Brazilian tropicalia, North American art rock, East European film music, Krautrock. hi-fi test recordings, mood music and more. Somehow they distil these apparently incongruent components into an ageless exotica that is all their own.

Their song titles alone are evocative exercises in arcane modernism: John Cage Bubblegum, Lo Boob Oscillator, Jaunty Monty And The Bubbles Of Silence, Motoroller Scalatron, Ticker-tape Of The Unconscious, Suggestion Diabolique and the like - designations that are evocative, smart, mischievous and, like the music they frame, somehow impossibly sophisticated yet beguilingly childlike. Ditto a litany of vivid, graphically alluring, naively modish record sleeves.

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For more of Stereolab's biography, please visit the Stereolab artist's page on our main website, when next at a computer.