On paper, you might assume that two-hour-long albums of sedate drone ruminating on mental hospitals, dying mothers and the tyranny of solitude could be a drag. Stars of the Lid, though, made it sound like the most inviting proposition in the world.
The ambient duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie last released music together 16 years ago, yet fans loyally hung on for more. They were masters of slo-mo sublimation, able to conjure great cumulonimbuses of sound, tall and broad and imposing without a storm ever breaking out. Stars of the Lid pulsed along without drums and conveyed deep wisdom in steady gulps. That reflected, writes Wiltzie over email from his home in Brussels, his partner’s power “of emotional connection”.
Though McBride’s death this week aged 53 effectively ends the project, there is a tranche of work still yet to be heard, says Wiltzie, who only returned from spending time in Los Angeles with McBride and their long-term label boss, Kranky’s Joel Leoschke, two weeks ago: “[We made] a lot of music that we were both happy with that needs to be edited but, good lord, my heart is broken right now.”
McBride and Wiltzie met in the autumn of 1990 at the University of Texas, fortifying their creative relationship with that all-important glue: staying up late watching Twin Peaks on shrooms. A run of albums from 1995 charts their evolution from four-track tremble to extended suites of treated guitars and modified orchestration, all progressing at a pace that would make glaciers blush.
Fitting for a group who could evoke the sensation of crepuscular rays filtering through stained glass, on tour they typically opted for grandeur, bringing string sections to planetariums, electrical plants and enough churches to sketch a drone-diocese across the world map. They truly grasped the divine on 2001’s The Tired Sounds of … and 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, a pair of records that have accrued a comparable aura in muso circles to William Basinski’s decaying tapereel or Brian Eno’s lunar expeditions. It’s hard to envision either one ever being dislodged from ambient’s firmament.
While clearly not the most ha-ha funny music under the sun, you can detect sly wit marbling Stars of the Lid’s output. Don’t Bother They’re Here cribs its title and melody from Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns, which a young McBride listened to every morning as his coffee percolated. Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage goes one further, winking toward another Brian McBride, Fulham FC’s captain in 2007, while layering a sample from Match of the Day over plaintive piano – about as far removed from avant-sternness as it gets. The duo were amused each time that reference popped up in the sports pages, says Wiltzie, so you’d imagine McBride may have also relished the droll tribalism left in the song’s YouTube comments: “Your club would never have a seminal post-ambient soundscape named after it.”
Heartfelt tributes in recent days have revealed more about McBride’s life, and his grounding in the seemingly unlikely realm of lightning-fast, highly competitive debate teams. Wiltzie recalls his bandmate held “the all-time best win/loss record for collegiate debate” as a student, going on to inspire a generation of critical thinkers through teaching stints at summer camps, high-school organisations and universities – most notably Chicago’s Northwestern, where his proteges “destroyed everyone over a number of years”.
“The music I make is exactly the opposite,” McBride once commented. “So I’m either a complete schizophrenic or really balanced.”
Come 2008, and the glow of the duo’s critical halo did more to harsh their working practice than the 9,000 kilometres and nine timezones which lay between them. “We felt,” Wiltzie explains, “that there was too much noise around us, as if we had suddenly created something meaningful on a level that felt superficial.” Bravely, they elected to pause. “It’s best to quote Brian here: ‘You don’t want to manufacture longing.’”
“We are really appreciative of the love from this fellowship of the miserable that manifested itself,” he continues, with surprising levity considering the circumstances, “but I can’t tell you how many people we offended over the years connected to our inability to graciously accept accolades and compliments.”
Even as they embarked on separate projects, questions probing the possibility of new Stars of the Lid material hung over McBride and Wiltzie. Through “stages of denial of quality,” sessions in the mid-2010s did bear fruit, with a “list of what was supposed to be the next release” chiselled out. Their final swells will emerge, plainly, when Wiltzie feels up to it. “I can’t yet put my arms around the memory of Brian, but someday I am going to try to do this for everyone, so at least the end is documented.”
Until then, when you next find yourself on a long-haul flight or in need of an emotional lifejacket while churning through a low ebb, do yourself a favour. Reach for the group named after the “cinema located between your eye and eyelid,” and revel in McBride’s rare gift for articulating the spaces that lie beyond, without ever needing to utter a word.
