Stars of the Lid

Austin

Stars of the Lid began in Austin, Texas, on Christmas Day 1992. Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride had met while sorting through records at the local student radio station and went on to DJ together. McBride said the name described a private cinema, the one that plays between the eye and the eyelid. At first McBride handled tapes and loops and Wiltzie the guitar tones. From those came long, beatless pieces of effects-treated guitar, later joined by piano, strings and horns, with swells of volume and feedback standing in for rhythm. The band's own summary promised classical drones with no drums and no vocals to get in the way.

Kirk Laktas played on the four-track recordings, made between August 1993 and September 1994, that became Music for Nitrous Oxide (1995) on Sedimental, and left after it. Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life followed in 1996, and that summer they toured the United States with Bedhead, a band Wiltzie also worked for as a recordist and live engineer. They named Arvo Pärt, Zbigniew Preisner, Gavin Bryars, Henryk Górecki, Brian Eno, Talk Talk and Labradford among their touchstones. One early piece, Taphead, borrows the name of a Talk Talk track.

Kranky and the tired sounds

The Ballasted Orchestra (1997) was their first album for Kranky, and that October they played British dates supporting Labradford. Per Aspera Ad Astra (1998) was built around field recordings of the painter Jon McCafferty making its cover, and Avec Laudenum came out on Sub Rosa in 1999.

By then McBride was living in Chicago and Wiltzie in Austin, about to move to Brussels. They could not afford studios, so they worked at home on samplers and mailed DAT tapes to each other. McBride said the distance gave each of them time to mull over what the other had done, and Wiltzie described the result as a hodge-podge made while they moved from four-track to digital. Planned from the start as a three-LP set, to break their habit of a record a year, The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid came out on 29 October 2001. It opens with the two parts of Requiem for Dying Mothers. It sold about 5,000 copies at first. Some three years later, word of mouth online sold 10,000 copies within six to eight months, and Kranky co-founder Joel Leoschke rang Wiltzie to say something strange was happening.

Refinement

McBride said they had decided together to slow the pace of their releases. And Their Refinement of the Decline was recorded, processed and assembled over five years in Brussels and Los Angeles, and appeared on 2 April 2007 as Kranky's hundredth release. Cellos, trumpets, flugelhorn, clarinet, harp and a children's choir join the drones on pieces such as Even If You're Never Awake (Deuxième). Its Metacritic score of 87 tied it with In Rainbows among the best reviewed albums of the year, and Wiltzie said it sold even more than Tired Sounds.

They toured it from November 2007 with a string trio, and in spring 2008 crossed North America for the first time since 2002, with Luke Savisky's layered 16mm projections behind them. Churches became their characteristic venues, and sets that year included Arvo Pärt's Fratres and Alexandre Desplat's music for Syriana.

Apart, and the end

After 2009 the band played only occasional shows. Wiltzie had formed The Dead Texan with Christina Vantzou in 2004, and in 2011 released the first album of A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Dustin O'Halloran. He also worked in film, co-writing the main themes of Lion with O'Halloran. McBride made solo records, scored Vanishing of the Bees, started Bell Gardens with Kenneth James Gibson, and coached college debate at Northwestern, Redlands and USC. In 2015 Kranky reissued both double albums on vinyl and the band played a filmed Boiler Room show in a New York church. In October 2016 they toured Europe around a Moog System 55, which Wiltzie liked because it has no presets. Their last show was at Harpa in Reykjavik on 30 December 2017, at a festival curated by Sigur Rós.

McBride died in August 2023, aged 53. Wiltzie told The Guardian that his death effectively ended the project, though he hoped one day to finish material from sessions in the 2010s so that the end would be documented. Pitchfork ranked Tired Sounds sixth among the best ambient albums of all time, and 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell called their work some of the most important music of the 21st century. A fan archive, Stars of the Lid Forever, made with the band's blessing, keeps the live record.

I don't put out anything unless I fall asleep to it.

Adam Wiltzie, 2016