Looper's Stuart David Explores
the Brave New World of Every Day Life

It's refreshing to find unassuming musicians out there like Stuart David, the former bass player of Scottish indie pop faves Belle and Sebastian. A boyish-looking 30-year-old with a renewed childlike wonder and a few gray hairs, Stuart is the brainchild behind the three-year-old electro-pop outfit, Looper. Unconcerned with consummating world domination and uninterested in living the rock 'n' roll fantasy, he's more a homebody who prefers a cup of water to a bottle of booze.

"I'm a simple man with simple taste," explains the soft-spoken singer, an avid reader of Martin Amis and J.D. Sallinger. Stuart's "ambitions" (as he calls them) are not exactly enterprising: lead an uncomplicated life and enjoy life's small wonders. His Scottish accent is thick and charming; his eyes, nestled behind glasses, are quiet and gentle; and his smile, shy with strangers, comes across as somewhat sympathetic and wholly humbling.

Like himself, his songs are genuinely sweet and endearingly unironic. "I was always trying to write about bigger things [in my songs]," said Stuart in a past interview. "But taking pleasure in simpler stuff and smaller entities, surely influenced everything ..." "Impossible Things #2," a romantic spoken-word piece from their 1999 debut album, Up a Tree (SubPop), recounts a boy and girl¹s seven-year pen-pal companionship that blossoms into a shy romance. This fairy-tale amour is the true account of how Stuart met his visual artist wife Karn. It is also the story line behind their creatively-balanced love child called Looper, which has Karn showing her super-8 film loops, Ronnie Black (Stuart's younger brother) playing guitar, and Scott Twynholm firing samples and working the keyboards.

Self-described as "Jesus and Mary Chain-esque electro-pop," the shyly sensitive Glasgow band meld words and images alongside their music. Looper's musical resume reads like a whimsical mix of wide-eyed lo-fi synth bleeps married with an engaging narrative. Their story describes the fascinating enchantment of everyday life, and their sound is an interesting assortment of cut-up electronic grooves and sampled breakbeat rhythms, sprinkled with live instruments like an acoustic guitar, harmonicas and flute.

Their new full-length album, The Geometrid (SubPop) focuses on technology and its effect on daily life. "I was caught up in the idea of it being the year 2000 and how in the past people thought the world would be all technology, " says Stuart. "Geometrid was really about the discrepancies between what we imagined it would be like in the year 2000 from back in the past and what it really is like. I think there are some things that were in science-fiction films that speak to us today, and there's a lot that doesn't as well. Technology is still quite limited in its capabilities in a way people didn't think it would be in the past. But I think it eventually won't be."

For Stuart, there is a sentimental contradiction associated with the advancement of machines. "Retro-futurism," he tenderly calls it. Quite the conundrum to figure out how someone with such simplistic "ambitions" as Stuart could also be so caught up in technology -- enough, say, to create a track like "Modern Song" by sequencing the static noise of a computer connecting to the Internet.

But beneath the optimism, rests a layer of paranoia. During their last American tour, Looper would end their shows with a little ditty called "Wh'¹s Afraid of Y2K?" a subject Stuart was all too familiar with.

"Karn and I had the cupboards filled up with canned foods, candles and things, and then at the end when it became New Year's Eve, we went to stay with Karn's sister and her family in the countryside, where they had their own acre and animals," recalls Stuart.

When no major disasters occurred, Stuart came out a tad underwhelmed. "I was hoping nothing would happen, but I was disappointed that nothing happened at all," he admits. "But [now] I am optimistic about technology. I thought that if we could get through the millennium bug scare, then a lot of things could happen."

Evoking nostalgic sentiments as the world around us accelerates at breakneck speed, old fashioned while others changes, Stuart and company effortlessly de-mystify the complexity of the info age with an unsung patience.

"We're trying to capture the feel of enjoying each day anew without the preconceptions that you get with aging," says Stuart with a sincere profundity. "Really, the older I get, the less jaded I become."

Check out Looper's website at http://www.treehouse.clara.net/looper.htm

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