Stars of the Lid - Music for Nitrous Oxide (30 Year Anniversary Remastered) (1995/2025)

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Stars of the Lid - Music for Nitrous Oxide (30 Year Anniversary Remastered) (1995/2025)

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"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."