Stars Of The Lid – Music for Nitrous Oxide (30 Year Anniversary Remastered)

Description

Stars Of The Lid may have released two of the mostimportant and influential ambient drone albums of the 21stcentury, inspiring generations of musicians, authors, artistsand filmmakers, developing a cult following and near-mythic status, but back in 1995 they were nowhere. Well,not exactly nowhere, they were in Austin, Texas, to beprecise, a city that Adam Wiltzie describes as a rock androll village, mostly… We were 100% in a vacuum and there was absolutely nobody that even remotely enjoyedwhat we were doing.

This is the environment into which Music for NitrousOxide was born, the first album from Wiltzie and hisaccomplice Brian McBride, made in glorious lo-fi in thesemi-arid live music capital of the world. Wiltzie metMcBride in 1990 at the University of Texas, where thelatter used to present his esoteric student radio show:Brian was playing tape collages and weird samples,remembers Adam. I liked the show and I used to listen toit, and then we kinda got to be friends and we startedhanging out. I bought a four-track cassette recorder andwe just started experimenting. I was doing guitar dronesand he was making weird noises with all these cassettetapes that he had.

The bands official formation date is Christmas Day, 1992.Armed with the four-track, some guitars and a primitiveCasio SK-5 sampler, the pair began making Music forNitrous Oxide, setting themselves on an unusual,lifechanging trajectory. That debut album has taken on a near-mythical quality in the intervening years, the cosmicmicrowave background of an expansive universe thatcontains those aforementioned classics The Tired Soundsof Stars of the Lid from 2001 and 2007s And TheirRefinement of the Decline, and also the duosbreakthrough album The Ballasted Orchestra from 1997,
which this album shares so much of its DNA with.

Tracklist:

Before Top Dead Center
Adamord
Madison
Down
Lagging
Lid (Live)
Tape Hiss Makes Me
Happy
The Swellsong
Goodnight