Remembering Stars of the Lid’s Brian McBride With 10 Essential Records – Warungku Terkini

Stars of the Lid were responsible for some of the most sublime music of the 1990s and 2000s, in any genre. From their origins making mottled, metallic drone music, Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie grew into electro-acoustic composers of almost liturgical intensity. After meeting at a party in Austin, Texas, where they bonded over their love of the composer Erik Satie, the two kindred spirits were soon sculpting broad swathes of monolithic guitars on their respective four-track recorders, trading tapes back and forth until they gradually honed their sound. McBride once described an early practice session like this: “With some mushrooms in our veins, we both watched the final ending to Twin Peaks, and then Adam went into my bedroom, and I stayed in my living room, and we got our drone on.”

They released their debut album, Music for Nitrous Oxide, in 1995, and instantly stood out. Though the pace and atmospheric dimensions of their music bore similarities to other contemporaries inventing new forms of guitar-based music—many of whom, like Low and Labradford, would become their labelmates on the Chicago indie Kranky—Stars of the Lid were never quite reducible to terms like slowcore or post-rock. They were too ambient, too amorphous, too ethereal.

Still, what stood out about their work was not narrowly formal or musicological in nature; their music may have been rooted in the drone tradition of the 1960s, but it was distinguished by its overwhelmingly emotional charge. At its best—particularly on 2001’s The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, their twin masterpieces—their music felt almost unbelievably pure, an experience of genuine spiritual transcendence.

Given his music’s infinite calm, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that McBride was a champion debater in his youth and, since 2006, held a day job as a debate coach at USC. I think of debaters as professional motormouths, one-uppers, trained know-it-alls, calculating point-scorers, yet Stars of the Lid’s music was exactly the opposite: patient, empathetic, completely wordless. The duo perfected the art of expressing everything by articulating as little as possible.

Stars of the Lid released their last album 16 years ago. It has been 13 years since McBride’s last solo album, and nine since the most recent record from Bell Gardens, his duo with Kenneth James Gibson. In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, McBride and Wiltzie said that they were working on new music from their respective homes in Los Angeles and Brussels. “Stuff is happening,” said McBride. “We’re both working on things, but it’s not like there’s an ETA.” We can only hope some of that material will see the light of day. But even with a relatively slim catalog, McBride will be remembered for the generosity inherent in his music.