Stereolab: Angel Dust.

Stereolab play The Zoo on March Saturday and Sunday.

Tim Gane still has the back pack Gerling gave him when he was in Sydney a couple of years ago with Stereolab, the highly influential electronic and melodic pop band that also encompasses an art-rock aesthetic borrowed from Krautrock luminaries like Faust and Neu! and a more recent flirtation with post-rock.

"I actually use it all the time," he says. "It's become unusually useful. I never had one before and I didn't think I'd use it that much but I've ended up using it all the time. I recently took it on our European tour. There you are. A memory of Australia."

There are those who prefer the Stereolab of drones, electronic experimentation and lengthy workouts such as the brilliant 15-minute, Jenny Ondioline, mixed with a clutch of those shimmering '60s Euro-pop styled songs. Albums such as Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, Mars Audiac Quintet and Emperor Tomato Ketchup are the fodder of such fans.

By contrast there are those who prefer Stereolab's funkier, jazzier, electronic polyrhythm driven material as evidenced on Dots & Loops and Cobra & Phases Group Play Voltage In the Milky Night, the latter heavily-influenced by the jazz-fusion leanings of co-producer John McEntire of leading post-rockers Tortoise.

Sound-Dust is full of a space-age pop that caresses, bubbles and floats rather than the meandering brook of post-rock trickles that dominated on Cobra & Phases. Captain Easychord, the lengthy Space Moth, Baby Lulu, Hallucinex, the terrific Gus The Mynah Bird (sublime, so sublime) and the semi-classical Suggestion Diabolique all embrace - and expand on - aspects of the Stereolab sound - and that in itself makes Sound-Dust fascinating: it may well be the first Stereolab album that will appeal to both fan camps.

"I think it works better as a record," he says. "The last one was, basically, a summation of what we'd been doing for the previous nine years. It was kind of in between things and we had to let some of our old styles go and find something new. Sound-Dust isn't a totally new style but I was just trying to think of new ways to approach the puzzle of making music. I'm really excited by that and want to continue on doing it but, obviously, I want to reinvent it to a certain degree and that becomes more difficult - as you do more records and each year goes by - to keep up the same level of creativity.”

"I think it's relatively easy in the first one or two years to get a few hip ideas together and make an album or two but after that you are trying not to repeat what you've done."

That can't be made any easier by the fact you are so prolific.

"I guess we're just a bit restless. And the more you do, the more it gives you ideas to do more. I think the fact we also approach the records, and it isn't very fashionable, from a more creative - rather than an entertainment - point of view. We really have little idea of what each record is going to sound like as we don't rehearse the songs before we record them, so it made me laugh when I heard people say and read that we've made this record more commercial to try and get more sales. That was the last thing on my mind. I'm not actually aware of what listeners will think. I'm just trying to make the piece of music we're working on as interesting as possible. If that means it's more melodic than it's been before, well that's fine and, similarly if it's less melodic, that's fine as well. It's just a question of not knowing what's going to happen.”

"I'm interested in exploring something 100 per cent and if that means working on a smaller canvas and not trying to appeal to everybody and cover all bases, then that's what happens. I have themes and musical ideas which interest me and come up again and again but I'm always trying to put them in a new environment. Trying to adapt them into a different language. I think it's been quite a good evolution for me, but it is an evolution not a market driven change. You can't make good music unless you really love it and understand what you are doing. What comes out is what comes out. I don't have a concrete idea of what I want from each record or how I want it to sound.”

“If I thought all we were doing was the same old thing over and over again then I'd stop and think whether it was worth doing it. I'd be surprised if anybody liked every one of our records. It's a body of work that is there to pick and choose from."