Stars of the Lid - Biography
Before they met, the guitarist/composers of experimental duo Stars of the Lid were on different but similarly precocious paths. Adam Witzie was a budding tennis protégé whose athletic career was cut short by a knee injury. He became a composer, sound engineer and band member of Windsor for the Derby. Brian McBride was “the Michael Jordan” of the debate team who ended up as the debate coach at USC and has released several solo albums. Their paths crossed in 1990, as college students in Austin, Texas, where they found themselves bonding over an Eric Satie moment and a shared obsession with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. In 1993 they began an intense and productive musical collaboration that has ended up as an audio file exchange process from opposite ends of the globe (with Witzie in Brussels and McBride in Los Angeles). From the get-go, it was clear that Stars of the Lid was a band aiming for the ineffable — note McBride’s definition of the band name: “Your own personal cinema, located between your eye and your eyelid.” Over the last decade and a half they have toured on both sides of the Atlantic and released seven full-length albums of utterly (and increasingly) compelling ambient compositions.
They recorded their first record, Music for Nitrous Oxide (1995 Sedimental) on a 4-track deck, and it comes replete in the edginess and exiting roughness you would expect from a great home recording. It’s a dark and unsettling record, with the sounds that emanate from the guitars defying the instrument itself. Sustained drones, eerie voices and resounding throbs bubble up and sink back under in these explorations of sonic texture and tone. The follow up, Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life (1996 Kranky), may sound like a nonsensical title, but it actually makes an odd sense that sums up the ethos of SotL, with an absurdist humor sitting alongside the, well, gravity of the music. Not to mention the aquatic element, a quality that seems to be omnipresent in these recordings. The dense textural fields evoke a submerged feeling, as trickling jungle sounds and murky, underwater pulses pull you into deeper sonic realms. The Ballasted Orchestra (1997 Kranky) draws the expedition under even further, as extra-long compositions fluctuate and flow with every kind of sound that suggests “depth.” Heavy drones pulse and transmogrify as stringy sustains and backward loops resonate over white noise, popping in and out of focus like half-formed thoughts. “Fucked Up (3:57)” suggests (as well as being another tongue-in-cheek title) that real-life witching hour where insomnia and psychosis meet.
The next album was an inter-media art project of sorts. Apparently the artist Jon McCafferty (who is most well known as the artist for REM’s Green) had been working on his paintings while listening to SotL and approached the band with collaboration in mind for their next release, Per Aspera Ad Astra (1998 Kranky). He ended up not only painting the artwork for the cover, but more unconventionally, the album also features ambient sounds of the artist at work in his studio. The sounds merge with the atmosphere of the recordings in yet another set of intriguing pieces. Groaning cello, ghostly chimes, aural creaks and pulsating resonances create a cohesive sonic world where amorphousness and clarity coexist. The following year, Avec Laudenum CD/LP (1999 Sub Rosa) marked the period where Witzie had relocated to Belgium, and it could also have marked a difficult creative patch, but these remotely composed pieces exhibit an assured, masterful brilliance. In places, the austere hums and orchestral swells manage to achieve the seemingly impossible effect of being simultaneously soothing and stirring.
Over the next two releases, SotL gain so much creative momentum and weight it almost feels like an approaching avalanche. The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2002 Kranky) is a 2 CD/3 LP set that raises the bar and is a wonderful example of just how exciting ambient drone music can be. In places shimmery and ephemeral and in places ponderous and somber, it’s a seismically shifting expose of altered states — a studied exercise in dynamics and textural adventure. There was a long period between this album and the next one, but Stars of the Lid And Their Refinement of the Decline (2007 Kranky) is just as masterful, if not more so. With so many stellar releases behind them it’s astounding that they managed to keep outdoing themselves, but this sprawling opus manages to bend sound, time and mind with such effortlessness that the craft of it is completely imperceptible, as if the pieces are forming themselves as we listen. The compositions work on the consciousness like meditations, which is one of the hallmarks of successful ambient music. But somehow “ambient” doesn’t quite cut it, since it implies what happens in the background. No, Stars of the Lid make music to be listened to.
