Stars Of The Lid - Stellar evanescence

Oceanic, lethargic music, painted in the void. Ambient music for the most hidden and "sedimented" imaginary landscapes of the human soul. Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno, Zbignew Preisner, Arvo Part, Labradford and Henryk Gorecki: a mix initially related to isolationism too, but one that has always gone beyond the simple transfiguration of silence, opening onto sonic territories where the evanescence of sound discovers, astonished, the ecstasy of a subterranean lullaby, lost, unconscious. Impalpable, solitary, errant music. The perfect soundtrack for a gaze lost in the void, in search of a truly otherworldly Eden. Music in which silence is, at once, the bank and bed of a river in flood, placidly turned toward the mare magnum of stasis and self-abandonment. Music that calls us from a very distant beyond, where language is still a simple, poetic sequence of sounds in constant, imperceptible evolution.

Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie met in Austin, Texas, in 1990. Shared musical passions led them, two years later, to launch the project Stars Of The Lid, a moniker denoting one's "personal cinema, located between the eye and the eyelid," as McBride himself said in an interview. A fitting choice, in other words, one that shows how their music is essentially a symbol beneath whose surface lies the semblance of a "threshold," the latent meaning of a non-place that brings what is real into contact with what, of this reality, is only simulacrum, indefinite image, psychological abstraction. In this threshold, "the homage to the beauty of the sound that surrounds us" is consumed, an homage that originates, first and foremost, in an attentive and sincere listening to our living space.

So, almost as a reaction to Austin's thriving rock scene, Adam and Brian began putting down material using a 4-track. Some of these lo-fi recordings would soon find a first, notable outlet in the cosmic ambient music of Music For Nitrous Oxide, released in 1995 by Sedimental, a label that, in presenting the record, placed it in the lineage of productions by Eno, Main and Spacemen 3. Dominating the sound are the two guitars: frayed, stretched out, unrecognizable. Smoky, ethereal textures, in service of music that seems imprisoned by an impassable otherness, set beyond time and space. It's the background noise that testifies to an extremely remote, unexplored source ("Before Top Dead Center"), a distant point that emits vibrations and sustains parallel galaxies, like the darkness that sharpens one's disorientation before the immensity of the cosmos.

In these astral deserts, made of crackling solitudes ("Adamord"), one gives in to endless drifts ("Madison"), floating among frayed, curving drones and frail, derelict voices ("Down"), which drag themselves toward depths vibrating with panic terror ("Lagging"). It's a restless pictorialism, despite the premises. And it becomes ever clearer that, on this "mental" journey, horizon after horizon is crossed, gradually imploding in on itself ("(Live) Lid").

The poem of cosmic space is, first and foremost, the poem of boundless inner space, because, it's worth repeating, physical distances are nothing compared to spiritual ones. "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy" erects a sonic cathedral on whose facade trance-like wonders flow, small grating disturbances that speak of a dust-like psychedelia, drowned in the abyss of dissolution.

Thus, the "threshold" is investigated, its mystical value analyzed, uncovering the immeasurable meaning of ecstasy and absolute abandonment. For this reason, Stars Of The Lid is synonymous with emotional liberation. The invisible sonic stratification ignites within us a subliminal play of detachment and transfiguration. Hence the clear, cold "perfection" of psychological shallows in which the details load with mystery within a darkness that rumbles, bewildered. From silence, an island of metaphysical, shadowy wonder. Presences buried within an ancestral whirlpool ("The Swell Song"). It's no surprise, then, that it's the rain that welcomes the final glimpse of universe in "Goodnight." Rain as final cleansing, the subdued hallelujah of the earth reawakening, whore of despair.

Their love for contemporary classical music and the shift toward a more impalpable, impressionistic sound finds its first decisive step toward a more distinctly personal sound in the following Gravitational Pull Vs The Desire For An Acquatic Life (initially pressed in 1996 by Sedimental in just 709 vinyl copies). "The Better Angels Of Our Nation" is the best possible overture for a record that declares its intent to position itself between "the force of gravity and the desire for an aquatic life." It's the grinding of infinity.

"Cantus II: In Memory Of Warren Wiltzie" is one of their masterpieces, with its inexorable sinking, proceeding pilgrim-like toward the remote sanctuary of silence. In this continuous splitting/fission of noises, levitating sounds and subconscious sedimentations, the fate of a "minimal" odyssey plays out, made of perdition, desire for return and Promethean tension. Then, far away, the rumbling of water, space expanding, slowly fading. It's the mysterious "song" of dissipation: slow and inexorable.

"Jan 69" (found only on the Kranky reissue) is the enchanting undulating motion of a celestial fog. A languid exotic aura instead runs through "Lactate's Moment," with drones sliding, often overlapping, one beside the other. Whispers, diluted feedback and melodic cells take on the character of a wandering symphony, seeking redemption. That redemption which seems to be offered, without too much sacrifice, by "Be Little With Me," almost an anticipation of the Chatham-esque "mass" of "A Crimson Grail".

More mature from a compositional standpoint but, perhaps, not as engaging as its predecessor, "Gravitational…" is nonetheless a fundamental work for understanding the internal evolution of their sound, finally "defined," down to the smallest detail, in the excellent achievement of The Ballasted Orchestra (1997), the first truly essential album of their career.

Time expands, the record's length touches eighty minutes. The duo's ideas can thus be developed and refined with care. Noise interference dissolves in favor of an unfurled blanket of drones, while the emotional palette covers the entire arc connecting despair to the most blissful contemplation. The subdued, distant resonance of "Central Texas" marks out, at the opening, an extremely deep space, soon after overwhelmed by the precipices of "Sun Drugs," whose immaterial enchantment is barely scratched by imperceptible noise cracks. It's the aimless journey of notes stretching to their utmost limit; a vivid, touching mirage, silhouetted against an unintelligible void.

Supernatural tranquility, abstract immensities, a pneumatic void: the pacified yet inexorable flow shows that this ambient music also, of course, takes up the "psychological" challenge of Brian Eno's "Apollo." Shreds of what is human still linger, but barely perceptible, as if distorted cryptograms ("Down II"), before being completely pulverized by the sidereal vortex of "Taphead," which throws open the "view" onto a bare stage, charged with "tragic" vertigo, symbols not yet entirely annihilated of an endless plunge.

Despite the static effect, the "dramatic" charge of these metaphysical tableaux is frightening, and the sensations released, instead of pouring outward, work insidiously beneath the surface, channeling their imaginative power directly back to the secret source of the sound. It is, then, a vicious circle of production and reception, in which the listener assumes an essential role, that of tinting the sound waves with the dazzling, indelible colors of their most "fearsome" imagination. The journey, then, lies beyond the pillars of Hercules of the psyche. The body gripped, pinned to the ground by an immeasurable gravitational force, the soundscapes free the mind, letting it levitate in a drowsy half-sleep steeped in mystery ("Fucked Up (3:57 AM)").

Sealing their passion for "Twin Peaks" and its soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti, there come, then, the two parts of "Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30": the first, a minimalist up-and-down of micro-melodies; the second, a web of scattered sparks accompanying, as in a millennial vigil, the pitiless clouding of consciousness. It's the sublime fire of a flame going out; the twilight tremor of silence babbling nonsense to dismantle its own essence; the thrilling of infinitesimal annihilation; the derailment of time into something dangerously close to the breath of the Eternal ("The Artificial Pine Arch Song").

Visceral, minimalist, ethereal: The Ballasted Orchestra is the duo's first major proof of maturity, finally able to balance, with elegance and mastery, McBride's manipulative, "earthbound" touch with Wiltzie's transcendental dream-logic.

Confirming this state of grace, shortly afterwards came the release (on Trance Syndicate) of the 12" (shared with Labradford) The Kahanek Incident, Vol. 3 (1997). On "Texas", the Virginia band combines three different Stars Of The Lid compositions, laying down a carpet of restless, rarefied ambient. Wiltzie and McBride, meanwhile, assemble various sounds from the Labradford constellation on "Virginia", stretching out, for over twenty-one minutes, a fog of invisible, ethereal wanderings.

It's certainly an interesting work for following "live" the artistic dialogue between two bands that have often been compared; however, unless you're a ruthless completist, I'd recommend instead dwelling on the EP Maneuvering The Nocturnal Hum, released the following year on Earworm (750 copies on vinyl), which includes two other long and intriguing excursions. Side A condenses two old compositions by the duo: the first five minutes ("Jetebel (Music From The Short Film") belong, in fact, to a kind of soundtrack that Brian had put together for a film planned by a certain Dan Kern back in his university days; the remaining fifteen minutes ("Porch"), meanwhile, had originally been composed (and then discarded) for Music For Nitrous Oxide. The result is a hypnotic nebula of disoriented drones, caught in a vortex of cinematic splendor. Only the occasional sampled noise periodically underlines the otherwise "earthbound" side of the operation.

It's an experiment that edges close to the cosmic music of Tangerine Dream, and which, in its imperceptible crescendo, shifts our emotional center of gravity elsewhere. Side B, meanwhile, makes room for a live document, taken from a concert held in Calgary in 1996: for over twenty-three minutes, a blanket of liquefied, timidly celestial drones hovers in mid-air above the heads of those present.

⟦Q1⟧

The fascinating achievement of Maneuvering ideally closes out the first phase of their story. Wiltzie, tired of Texas and craving a breath of fresh air, moves to Belgium. Continuing only by email, the collaboration between the two ends up suffering disproportionately from the traumatic separation. The next step consists of a collaboration with painter Jon McCafferty, creator of a series of canvases inspired by the music of "Music For Nitrous Oxide". Per Aspera Ad Astra (1998) – the title of the album born from this cooperation – sets out to give shape to a "material music", to an "impalpable painting".

Guitars, organ, cymbals, field recordings, and sounds/noises captured in McCafferty's studio (while he was busy brushing paint onto canvas) are filtered, distorted, re-encoded into an "unconscious" sonic flow, channeled into a tunnel descending into the bowels of the earth.

Divided into two suites of three movements each, the work lends itself to a listening experience that is both "cryptic" and "meditative". A sense of internalized desolation runs through, for instance, "Low Level Listening", caressed by metallic reverberations. The unfolding is, as usual, panoramic, even if the emotion seems to freeze little by little, worn down by the short breath of inspiration. So, rather than tinging the void with wonderful sonic petals, the music's "deep" minimalism ends up only partly rising to the project's "transcoding" challenge, so much so that, aside from the chamber music of "Anchor States Pt. 1", Per Aspera Ad Astra remains a work in which the intellectualist streak ends up distorting the very emotions the music is trying so hard to bring to the surface.

This transitional period also casts its shadow (though the darkness is by now thinning out...) over Avec Laudenum, released in 1999 on the Belgian label Sub Rosa. Unlike its predecessor, in which McBride's weight had been greater, this new work reveals Wiltzie's more "transcendental" touch (to whom, truth be told, most of the work is owed) and a more pronounced melodic impulse.

In three parts, "The Atomium" continues to scatter through space auroras of muted timbres like distant candles. The sound has regained a density and expressive force (in Belgium, Wiltzie fell in love with Flemish painting, particularly Rubens...) sufficient to evoke the "beyond" even with just a few accents, however indecipherable within the enigmatic unfolding of the tracks. "Dust Breeding (1.316)+" is a private ecstasy, a probe cast into the unconscious. Empty space swallows everything that moves nearby, like some unknown monster. For its part, the "minor" requiem of "I Will Surround You" echoes into a depth made of ever more fragile memories, ever more at the mercy of time.

However, despite being a rather interesting work, despite its corollary of imaginary landscapes, Avec Laudenum proves to be, above all, a transitional work. A work with which the band manages to leave behind two years of uncertainty and difficulty, preparing themselves as best as possible for the creation of their most inspired work.

An austere, formally refined album, The Tired Sound Of… (2001) is the point of no return in the drive toward sublimating the drone into an indefinite carpet of micro melodic variations. Though still living far apart, the two finally prove able to understand each other's limits and expressive potential, and the result is something magical. The sound is polished to the point of the unbelievable. Things (both real and imaginary) lose their substance, becoming sonic symbols, frightened flames in the dark; a darkness that is, in turn, an allegory for the silence in which these hallucinated states of divine torpor float (though perhaps "sail" would be more fitting), these undying ecstasies of unconscious fragments that, reassembling and dissolving, release strange traces of invisible otherness.

It is, quite simply, concrete music emerging from the darkest tunnels of the unconscious. When "Requiem For Dying Mothers" begins, it also becomes clear that the fusion of film music (Preisner), cosmic ambient (Eno and Schulze), and contemporary classical (Messiaen, Górecki and Pärt) has by now reached its peak in terms of communicative power and expressive tension. There's the tremor of a distant melody behind the enchanted swirl of violins and drones ("Pt. 1"). We descend through spatio-temporal tunnels, the mutating void unfurling ahead, a wonder that terrifies ("Pt. 2"). Then, a piano and a room set apart. Ghost voices: traces of presences that have lost all human semblance, becoming simulacra, suspended abstract paintings, whirlpools of analog-digital collisions. It is the depiction of an interiority no longer able to manage contact with reality, choosing instead to sink into its dense depths of impenetrable unease ("Pt. 3").

The first part of "Austin Texas Mental Hospital" conjures the image of a flame slowly freezing, trapped in a weary, slowed-down motion. In the second, meanwhile, waves of light dazzle the consciousness, whispering to us that, behind these swells—now imperious, now as delicate as a butterfly's wingbeat—the echo of a lament lingers on, the despair of a language that, though yearning for the absolute, must necessarily content itself with skirting its shore. And it is for this reason, then, that the music of Stars Of The Lid is intimately, profoundly nostalgic: theirs is a perpetually unfinished "nostos", a supremely errant journey that, having crossed every geographic barrier, calls for ultimate liberation, the irreparable breaking of the last human boundary, to make room for a hushed breath, for multiplied perspectives (see, for example, the diaphanous third part of the same "Austin Texas Mental Hospital").

It almost seems like a sweet shipwreck, then, the first cry of "Broken Harbors", a soft, "marine" hypnosis that first fades into a nocturnal skyline, where the luminous flickering of the stars slides vertically behind the screen of a drowsy horizon ("Pt. 2"); and then pushes into a clearing thick with fog, toward a chiaroscuro seabed where the sounds become ever more insubstantial and abstract, until they turn into dismembered resonances, infinitesimal refractions ("Pt. 3").

True to one of their great loves, the second album opens in the wake of Badalamenti: “Mulholland” is, thus, another pictorial fluctuation evoking immense spaces, inaccessible places, unexplored peaks. From the deep oblivion of which seem to emanate accents and tonalities of a supernatural shimmer of psychological nuances. An example of what might be called “unconscious psychedelia,” a hushed delirium of the universal soul. A soul which, snatched from torpor, mirrors itself, for the last time, in the wind (“The Lonely People Are Getting Lonlier”). In “Gasfarming,” the shiver of dawn assails our awakening, and if the piano dominates “Piano Aquieu” (where it raises an ethereal lullaby to the sky), and in the first part of “Ballad Of Distances” (where, with the patience of an old sage, it probes the mystery – the mystery of emotion that precedes the word, to put it in Céline's terms), in “Fac 21” the strings tickle the stratosphere of the heart.

Even more superb, if possible, are the reverse frames of “Ballad Of Distances (Pt. 2),” yet another puddle of sweet melancholy. Closing the album is “A Lovesong (For Cubs),” with its near-total sonic vaporization, and with the shadow of silence stretching ever more mysterious and menacing, even if, after such a long and fascinating journey, it no longer seems so sinister and intimidating. What remains is a placid, blissful breath, in a half-sleep preparing itself for the imminence of the eternal, just as one prepares for a final farewell.

With its majestic synthesis of ambient, cosmic and neoclassical music, The Tired Sound Of Stars Of The Lid remains one of the most important works of the last twenty years, placing the Texan duo among the pantheon of great inventors of elusive, mercurial forms. The “tired sound” of Stars Of The Lid is a sound pursuing ultimate rest, the blissful resignation of inner forces, in order to define a range of action in which all sounds/noises (even the “impossible” ones) finally have the capacity to replace words and to name things as if for the first and last time. The trajectory, then, is a descending one: the sound progressively weakens, in search of silence, the sonic zero-point. We follow the path, along which mirages pile up and sublime enchantments follow one another.

After the masterpiece, the duo seemed to vanish from the scene. Just when hope had all but faded, this very year sees them rouse from oblivion with another colossal offspring, in both scale and ambition. Across its exact two hours of music (just three minutes shorter than its predecessor), Their Refinement Of The Decline (number 100 in the Kranky catalogue, just as its predecessor had been number 50) lays out another gem of impressionist descriptivism. The emotional involvement is, once again, total and profound, just as there's an evident shift toward a more pronounced melodicism, starting with the slow-motion fanfare of “Dungtitled (in A Major),” which opens with a Kubrickian dejà vu (the opening sequence of “The Shining”…) and floats in a vacuum, with echoes and projections of scattered solemnity. It might be, who knows, a new liturgy of the boundless (“Articulate Silences Part 1”), with vibrating, melancholy strings slipping under the skin like Black Tape For A Blue Girl blades (“Articulate Silences Part 2”).

Everything flows, swept up in the unbearable slowness of musical becoming and unbecoming (“The Evil That Never Arrived”) – just a few shivers of unease, so we know: nothing is quite as it seems (“Apreludes (in C Sharp Major)”).

Poised on the immaterial becoming of sound, a profound stillness, a Leopardian stillness (“Don't Bother They're Here”); thus, from afar, we trace peaks and hollows, nature teeming with metallic glints, like a beast weary and soaked with rain (“Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage”). A revelatory vigil, in which the subliminal role of music (“Even If You're Never Awake (Deuxième)”) draws us into a journey within and beyond ourselves, toward a strange simulacrum, toward the titanism of surrender (“Even (Out) +)”). And what else is “A Meaningful Moment Through A Meaning(less) Process” if not a watercolor for the most indescribable and insidious of nostalgias? That nostalgia, in short, which calls into question nothing defined or real, but only the ultimate meaning of ourselves, our deepest root.

Opened by the restless “Another Ballad For Heavy Lids,” the second disc shows a more overt dynamism and also draws on a slightly “denser” sound, even though it is still the “suspended,” austere and cinematic expansion that forms the hinge of their metaphysical frescoes, as the thirteen minutes of “The Daughters Of Quiet Minds” amply demonstrate. The very brief, yet aching, elegy of “Hiberner Toujours” possesses a timeless, “utopian” austerity, unlike “That Finger On Your Temple Is The Barrel Of My Raygun,” which instead gives off a radiant indolence, anemically emphatic. It's a path that grows gradually more introspective, weaving arabesques of sensation and shreds of dream, until it slides toward the abyss of memory, over the notes of a dreamy piano (“Humectez La Mouture”). This “tragic” decentering reaches its peak in the classicizing requiem of “Tippy's Demise,” an intense, boundless mystery, like “remnants of a deeper purity,” shreds of a mental symphonism (“The Mouthchew”).

Music holds a secret that only our feelings could ever trace. It happens, then, that as we lose ourselves within these oceans of paradisiacal splendor, in which even the memory of hell (the “earthly,” Strindbergian hell…) is filtered and roused to new life, we are caught off guard by projections of memories digging back through time, perfecting the body's decline with the elevation of the soul into an imaginative realm for the eternity of memories (“December Hunting For Vegetarian Fuckface,” seventeen minutes of ascetic drift, seventeen minutes of unintelligible delirium).

In short, with their indefinite, boundless scores, Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride seem to want to remind us that music is a symbol behind which hides a light that, in claiming us, gradually takes possession of our body and mind. We may have to wait another six years, or perhaps more, to travel from end to end through another one of their sonic microcosms. Still, we already know it will be worth it.

SOLO PROJECTS

Aix Em Klemm: “s/t” (2000)

Having recorded the inconclusive Avec Laudenum, Adam Wiltzie teams up with Bobby Donne (bassist of Labradford) for the Aix Em Klemm project, whose self-titled album is a two-faced Janus where the combination of Stars Of The Lid's celestial drones and Labradford's fluid atmospheres, though not always sharply focused or fully mature, yields thoroughly enjoyable results. Alongside the guitar drones and electronic textures, we find occasional vocal interventions, proof that the duo's intent was to work more toward song-form (even if it's still a song overloaded with transcendence).

The “orchestral” metamorphoses of “The Girl With The Flesh Colored Crayon” and “Prue Lewarne,” and the introverted, nocturnal “3×2 (exit),” are followed by the resigned vision, with a tail of hypnotic frequencies, of “Sophteonal,” the digital stillness of “The Luxury Of Dirt” and the diamond-like new age of “Sparkwood and Twentyone,” which brings to an extremely relaxed close an album to be listened to with eyes shut, with no pretensions and not the slightest doubt about the pacifying goodness of certain kinds of music.

Dead Texan: “s/t” (2004)

Together with filmmaker Christina Vantzos, in 2004 Wiltzie himself brought Dead Texan to life, authors, so far, of a single self-titled work, in which, while a cinematic bent is evident on one hand, on the other a certain lineage from The Tired Sound Of… is more than clear, apparent already in the opening “The Six Million Dollar Sandwich,” but also in the celestial harmony of “Girth Rides A (Horse)” and the hushed waves of “Beatrice Part. 2,” all possible variants of the parent band's neo-classical ambient. However, across these eleven compositions, the sound is denser, more overtly unsettled, even when, as in the case of “Glen's Goo,” vocalization transfigures the fresco into a kind of post-ambient song.

In this precarious balance between the irreparable, almost "terminal" evanescence of the recent The Tired Sound Of… and the cinematic grandeur openly related to the work of Zbigniew Preisner (see, respectively, the first and second parts of "A Chronicle Of Early Failures"), Dead Texan move along the border between condensation and dilution. Here, then, the piano sketches the outlines of desolate hermitages lashed by rain ("Taco De Macque"), unreal places where whispers and noises hold back the devastating wave of memories ("Aegina Airlines"), subterranean unease ("When I See Scissors I Can't Help But Think Of You") and emotional wonders drawn in minimalist circles ("La Ballade d'Alain Georges"). An extremely enjoyable work full of hidden nuances, beautifully framed by a slow-core version of Tortoise's "The Struggle".

Brian McBride: “When The Detail Lost Its Freedom” (2005)

McBride's first and, so far, only solo exploit arrives only in 2005, following in the footsteps of Stars Of The Lid's most relaxed and impalpable work. When The Detail Lost Its Freedom slowly wins over the listener's emotions, while remaining, all things considered, a transitional work that isn't entirely well-calibrated. It's "Overture (for Other Halfs)" that immediately captures the essence of a work built mainly around the slow evolutions of guitar drones, accompanied by an always transfigured, polished use of piano, violin and trumpet. A kind of aquatic scenery welcomes into its womb the forming and dissolving of these sonorities. The only shame is that, over time, the record shows a certain inconsistency, an incompleteness perhaps dictated by the rather occasional nature of the project (remember that the album came about following Wiltzie's temporary "absence", busy at the time making "Giving Up The Ghost" with Windsor For The Derby).

So, the extremely delicate tones of "Piano Abg", the ethereal slow-core of the "song" "Our Last Moment In Song", the tender "I Will", the funereal fanfare (with light guitar brushstrokes) of "The Guilt Of Uncomplicated Thoughts" and the unconscious stirrings of "For Those Who Hesitate", while sketching out an intense emotional spectrum, never manage to go beyond a simple rehash of established, by now rather unoriginal, patterns. Likewise, "Silent Motels" fades away swallowed by the night, but leaves behind an easily penetrable mystery, one not really acquainted with the emotional depths and existential abysses of Stars Of The Lid's most important work. The same goes for the chamber music of "Latent Sonatas", certainly enveloping, but lacking flashes of personality, lacking the "magic" touch that McBride had elsewhere managed to infuse into his music.

(14/06/2007)

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