Illustration by Marie Bliss Delpy

They name songs after 1960s dentistry equipment. Their first video employed ‘self-hypnosis’. Their merchandise includes yo-yo’s and jigsaw puzzles and they have had a long and well-documented love affair with vintage gear. In 1991, the year Tim Gane & Lætitia Sadier kick-started an eccentric Anglo-French musical experiment, few would have gambled it would last eighteen years. But “The Groop” also known as Stereolab has survived divorce and the death of a founding member to emerge stronger than ever, all the while retaining their status as bona fide outsiders. An encyclopedic knowledge of music from krautrockers Neu! to Mexican lounger Esquivel! remains stitched to their sleeves, and they blend apparently anachronistic sounds and musical eras into a formula all their own — breezy Motorik beats on the surface, with Brian Wilson-like attention to detail bubbling underneath.
      With the release of Chemical Chords, the band have notched up their eleventh album to date. Unlike the eighteen-minute guitar drone of one of their earliest releases, Jenny Ondioline, this latest batch of dense, pop-infused tunes barely scratch the three-minute mark, and were inspired, according to their composer Tim Gane, by Motown drumming and ‘60s girl groups. As you might expect however, laconic French chanteuse and pioneer of librarian chic Lætitia Sadier isn’t about to be swooning over boys on motorbikes or prom night dresses.

Fondazione Federico Fellini

If dreams are a window into the unconscious, then Federico Fellini left the keys to his locked in a Roman bank vault. His Book of Dreams, a surreal record of the stories revolving around his head at night, has been tied up in legal red tape since the Italian director’s death in 1993. Now, freed at last, it displays all the fireworks of Fellini’s overactive imagination on paper and feels more personal than any straight diary could. ”When I was six,” Fellini once said, “I was convinced we had two lives, one with our eyes open and another with them closed. I baptized the four corners of my bed with the names of movie theatres and the show started as soon as I shut my eyes.” Recent studies have shown that on average, just one percent of our dreams relate to sexual satisfaction. In that, Fellini must have been an exception to the rule.

The songs of the spheres in the palm of your hand

“Is celebrational a word?” asks Matthew Stone. Not officially, but it’s a good fit for the maverick ringleader of !WOWOW!, south London’s notorious art-squat collective. The self-supporting community of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians stage word-of-mouth gatherings that deliver equal amounts of creativity and decadence. Their complex “happenings” exude the aura of secret initiation rituals, and can involve anything from single individuals to thousands of people. “We stand/lie here united in infinite possibility,” Stone explained in an invitation to a one-off “pirate” view in a dilapidated Peckham warehouse last year. The 25-year-old self-styled “art shaman” puts his co-conspirators at the center of his own epically disheveled photographs.