Vinyl - Stars of the Lid - Music for Nitrous Oxide (30 Year Anniversary Remastered)

Stars of the Lid may have released two of the most important and influential ambient-drone albums of the 21st century, inspiring generations of musicians, authors, artists, and 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 be precise, a city that Adam Wiltzie describes as a “rock and roll village, mostly… We were 100% in a vacuum and there was absolutely nobody that even remotely enjoyed what we were doing.”

This is the environment into which Music for Nitrous Oxide was born, the first album from Wiltzie and his accomplice Brian McBride, made in glorious lo-fi in the semi-arid live music capital of the world. Wiltzie met McBride in 1990 at the University of Texas, where the latter 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 to it, and then we kinda got to be friends and we started hanging out. I bought a four-track cassette recorder and we just started experimenting. I was doing guitar drones and he was making weird noises with all these cassette tapes that he had.”

The band’s official formation date is Christmas Day, 1992. Armed with the four-track, some guitars and a primitive Casio SK-5 sampler, the pair began making Music for Nitrous Oxide, setting themselves on an unusual, lifechanging trajectory. That debut album has taken on a near-mythical quality in the intervening years, the cosmic microwave background of an expansive universe that contains those aforementioned classics The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid from 2001 and 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, and also the duo’s breakthrough album The Ballasted Orchestra from 1997 which this album shares so much of its DNA with.

Music for Nitrous Oxide was where it all began, recorded with perfunctory equipment (at least by today’s standards) that also included a DAT tape machine for ‘Lid (Live)’ and eventually a Revox reel-to-reel for the closer ‘Goodnight’. Before we can get there, we have to go back to the start, and what an unusual start it is too. Seconds of arrested silence seem to tick away on opener ‘Before Top Dead Center’, an aeon in the streaming age. Hold your breath and marvel at the aberration, before far-off sonic asteroids begin slowly colliding with the magnetic tape. If a fade-in seems like career suicide seen through the prism of modern digital streaming etiquettes, then what Stars of the Lid were doing in 1995 was entirely against the grain too.

Chaos creeps into the vacillating loops, where Star Trek: The Next Generation meets Chopin in the layered, enigmatic swirl of ‘Down’. ‘Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy’, meanwhile, takes feedback and renders it beautiful by slowing everything down to a dilatory pace. This certainly wasn’t music for everybody, but the feeling Stars of the Lid were out on a limb was soon to dissipate. Music journalist Simon Reynolds, writing in The Wire in November of that year, began to join dots between likeminded artists - whether that be Labradford in Richmond, Virginia, Tortoise in Chicago, or Mogwai in Glasgow, Scotland - with many of these artists discovering common ground with other global outliers. Suddenly what had been created in isolation became part of a wider post-rock “scene” predicated on European space rock, avant garde jazz and ambient sound design.

“I think it's probably true that most musicians would say they loathe or despise the genre that they're categorized into,” says Adam, “but you have to be classified as something. The funny thing about post-rock is that Tortoise and Stars of the Lid don’t sound anything alike at all. I thought we were supposed to all live in this big house together or something?” Later down the line, Stars of the Lid would be elevated to the neoclassical strata, but back in 1995, all they had was a guy at the liquor store on the west side of town in their corner: “I lived on the east side of Austin, just because I was so broke and that was the cheapest neighborhood in the city,” remembers Adam. “There was this gentleman, Rob Forman, who put the album out on CD, and later reissued it in 2008 on digipak. Rob is more well-known in the wine world as a distributor but his Sedimental music label still exists. I didn't even know he had a label, but we were one of the first things he released.”

That inchoate period is bound up in Adam’s imagination with what the group were drinking at the time: “I was really skint during this period, and Rob had this great Spanish wine called Cuvée De Péna that you could get for $4, which was a lot of money to me back then,” he says, laughing. Clearly, the sample recording at the outset of ‘Adamord’ of Lois Wilson - founder of Al-Anon and wife of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W. - was not inspired by teetotal lifestyles or abstemiousness.

Reflecting on the album now 30 years later, Sedimental’s Forman remarks: “The seductive aspect for me when I first heard the early recordings Adam and Brian was the this strong and clear amalgam of so many underground non-rock genres while still anchored in the unpretentious and subversive aspects of rock music-culture. Their live shows at the time were powerful and seductive, and marked with a subtle aspect of the arcane, and Music for Nitrous Oxide documents the project gloriously in this way and why it resonated at the time and still fascinates today.”

Wiltzie now lives in the Belgian countryside in a village equidistant between Brussels and Antwerp. McBride, his California-based musical partner, died in 2023. The latest release of Music for Nitrous Oxide marks the first time it will be available to buy on vinyl, coming as a double album via Wiltzie’s Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing label. It’s an eventuality many fans of the band have been hoping for for the best part of three decades. “They've been chomping at the bit for many years,” admits Wiltzie, with a wry smile. For Music for Nitrous Oxide, the stars have finally aligned.