In the echo chamber of memory, certain sounds crystallize—sounds not just heard but felt, like static electricity in a darkened room. For me, the music of Broadcast and Stereolab is never background. It is architecture, staging, and a signal. These are not just bands; they broadcast an aesthetic language that arrived at my visual work as fluently as any formal composition, line, or theory training.
As an artist who came of age in the shadow of colonialism and climate anxiety—Puerto Rican, queer, and born into a world obsessed with apocalypse and reinvention—their music permitted me to paint with frequencies. My abstractions are not only compositions of gesture and color. They are deictic: they point to memory, history, and erased futures. Stereolab and Broadcast gifted me a mid-century imagination where utopia and failure coexist in the same reverb.
Sound As Medium, Memory As Surface
Broadcast’s The Noise Made By People and Stereolab’s The Margerine Eclipse didn’t just soundtrack my studio practice—they functioned as co-conspirators. When I sketch, Trish Keenan’s and Laetitia Sadier’s voices, breathy and aloof, loop in my head. It is not what they say but how they arrive in the song: like a visitor from a time just slightly adjacent to our own. Their detachment is not coldness; it is a poetics of distance. In this, I found kinship. The distance between viewer and painting, artist and material, nuclear facts and television signal is where my work lives.
At the heart of my visual practice is the idea that painting is a form of time travel. Not in the sci-fi sense, but in the way a cut of uranium glass catches light and recalls pre-Cold War domesticity and cosmic fear all at once. Broadcast’s music pulses with this same uncanny familiarity. The synths in Before We Begin are almost lullaby-like but tinged with warning. The detuned organs in Echo’s Answer whisper of industrial collapse. These sounds gave me a vocabulary for how to deal with fears of radiation—not just literal, but emotional, psychic—the slow leak of memory, the half-life of trauma.
I often think of waveforms when I paint, especially in my recent work using analog tools like pigment, plastics, and glass—the oscillation between attraction and unease. Trish and Laetitia’s songs were never meant to soothe—they hum with friction. Similarly, my visual pieces don’t seek to resolve; they scintillate on the edge of recognition, often suggesting the skeletal remains of industrial structures or seismographic ruptures. The world is born and ends not with a bang but a Moog synth filtered through memory.
Midcentury Modernism and Retrofuturism
Both Stereolab and Broadcast have often been described as retro-futurist. Retro-futurist is a lazy term unless you take it seriously. For me, their work isn’t about the past but the persistence of a future that was never allowed to arrive. This is where the midcentury aesthetic becomes politically charged. The sleek optimism of 1950s design—Eames chairs, modular cabinetry, amber glass, elliptical buildings—was marketed as comfort but built atop nuclear testing, colonial extraction, and Cold War dread.
I’ve leaned hard into this contradiction in my paintings and curatorial work, including projects like my uranium glass collection. The beauty of form is betrayal—the sleekness of modernism as camouflage for catastrophe. Stereolab’s lounge tracks like Cybele’s Reverie or Lo Boob Oscillator evoke this paradox. They flirt with Muzak but weaponize it. They seduce with melody but disrupt with text—Marxist critiques, anti-capitalist mantras, lyrical opacity. That tension is deeply painterly.
The same applies to Broadcast’s visual world. Their album art—especially Tender Buttons and Witch Cults of the Radio Age—mimics the fragmented logic of collage, channeling the same grainy saturation of old television idents and government-issued educational films. My work, especially in my vertical paintings and projected media, pulls from these broadcast relics: the color palettes of fallout shelters, the schematics of reactors, and the clunky interface of analog data.
Abstraction as Interruption, Not Escape
One of the most common misunderstandings of abstract art is that it is apolitical. But like Trish’s voice in Black Cat, abstraction can be a trap door. In the Broadcast/Focus Group collaborations, her vocals are stripped of personality, looped, and collaged into spectral signals—no longer a “self” but a tool. Similarly, I’m not interested in making expressive marks that announce me. I’m interested in textures that suggest a process, friction, or silence after impact. This is what makes abstraction such a potent mode for artists shaped by violence: it allows us to speak without repeating trauma.
The Broadcast was never afraid to abandon the form. Microtronics, Pendulum, and their later video-accompanied projects were messy, raw, and uncontainable. That spirit gave me the courage to reject my paintings’ resolution, let pieces remain raw or partially obscured, and interrupt lines with fields of shadow. Like Julian House’s collages or the post-structural techniques Trish employed using cut-up horoscopes and dada fragments, my approach to painting often involves slicing apart what I thought I was building and allowing the fragments to reassemble into something haunted.
A Soft Resistance
What I’ve always admired about Broadcast and Stereolab is their refusal to perform the artist persona. Trish’s shyness was never performative. She let the work speak. She didn’t care about being iconic. She wanted the songs to exist as transmissions. That sense of soft resistance—of refusing spectacle—is something I try to practice in both my role as a high school teacher-librarian and as an exhibiting artist.
Younger artists and audiences, especially in post-2020 cultural spaces, are rediscovering the magic of these bands. But they often overlook that this wasn’t music designed to go viral. It was intended to haunt. Designed to sit with you. It is designed to warp the contours of your perception so gently that you don’t even realize you’ve changed until months later when a synth line appears in a dream, and you wake up remembering an imaginary place.
I try to create places that feel remembered but unplaceable in my visual work: architecture from the nuclear sublime, memory palaces built in static.
Coda: Memory, Transmission, Reverberation
Broadcast and Stereolab taught me that every medium is a memory storage form: vinyl, pigment, glass, and film. They also taught me that nostalgia is a dangerous material—radioactive if not handled carefully. But when used well, it can power a new way of seeing and a new way of hearing. Trish Keenan once said she liked the idea of making music that sounded like a false recollection—something you think you remember but can’t quite place.
My work lives in that space.
It loops.
It signals.
It waits for reception.
And if you tune in long enough, perhaps you’ll see it for what it is: not a relic of the past, but a trace of the future we’re still trying to build—beneath the glow, beyond the fallout, on frequencies that never went silent.
Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción 