Bleep

Things of quality have no fear of time, and in their decade’s worth of albums, Texas drone pioneers Star of the Lid enjoyed a gradual rise into the hall of fame for all things under the ambient umbrella. That progression is much like their music itself, unhurried and eager to take music across long distances. Their latter works are now arguably enshrined in the music canon, but the legacy of Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride started thirty years ago with their debut Music for Nitrous Oxide, now lovingly remastered and reminding us of the duo’s beginnings.

Long before the brittle-yet-warm racket Wiltzie and McBride kicked up together became synonymous with the achingly beautiful decay of America, they were two audio geeks in Austin with almost no connection to the city’s vibrant rock and roll focussed music scene. Finding brotherhood in mangled tape collages and engulfing fuzz, Stars of the Lid was born out of their mutual abstraction from what surrounded them. While to its creators, Music for Nitrous Oxide may have simply been a (slight) refinement from the drones Wiltzie and McBride were unleashing on unsuspecting college radio listeners at UT Austin, the rest of the world was slowly catching up to the duo’s noise-addled magic.

The glacial movements of ‘Before Top Dead Center’ introduce the guitar tones that Stars of the Lid somehow harnessed into an all consuming monument of sound, met with a subtle ringing as they gently buoy and flow through microtonal movements. While it may not have much to do with country, blues, or garage rock, the lurching textures of heaving metallic swirls have a certain Americana to them, sparking into reverent atmospheres while the two lift musings on alien contact and pensive confessionals slowly swept away by ocean waves, filtering through radio waves carried on the dust floating towards their Austin college dorms.

This 30th anniversary edition of Stars of the Lid’s Music for Nitrous Oxide is a very necessary document of ambient drone’s past, present, and future.