Review Summary: m̶͙̗̅̉̋u̸͉̰͆s̶̳͓̘͑͊i̴̡͗̓c̷͈̑
Anything as big as a genre, even a genre as niche as ambient music, inevitably generates mythology. Though perhaps more resistant to hagiography than genres like rock or hip-hop, mired in performance and persona as they are, the legends emerge nonetheless: Brian Eno listening to the rain as he recovered from a car crash, William Basinski watching the twin towers fall as the last of the
Disintegration Loops master tape crumbled away, Tim Hecker obliterating a majestic church organ with nothing but a laptop. These legends inform the development of genre idioms and are consequential as such; in its own way, ambient is a realm of extremes, and any savvy listener can trace the way these extremes cluster around spacious atmospheres, around shifting repetitive phrases or chilly dominance of abstract recorded space over physical. In a broader sense, the emotional beats these myths evoke are
everywhere.
You want spacious? You want all-smooth gradations and grand gestures? Go nuts, you kid in the candy store that is ambient music writ large!
Music for Nitrous Oxide is unconcerned with indulging these perfectly-cogent appetites. Stars of the Lid’s 1995 debut wallows as only ambient can, a pitch-dark molasses of FM-dial nightmares and roiling tape distortion and downers. What makes these gurglings and grumblings so arresting almost 30 years later is a) how little real precedent they have and b) how effectively it works its limitations into a sense of discomfiting intimacy. In the early 90s, the corpus of something like "dark ambient" was barely a sliver of what it is now. Furthermore, its earliest luminaries— Lustmørd, Nurse With Wound, et al— were primarily concerned with a scope nigh-unattainable to Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, painting with cavernous bass reverb and dense squalls of feedback rendered in stark, awe-inspiring detail. Simply downscaling all that into a 4-track could only dilute the intended effect, so Wiltzie, McBride and soon-to-depart third Lid Kirk Laktas turned instead to ambiguity, to the pulsing buzz of their own equipment, to blurred-over ravings caught between stations and interwoven with sickly guitar drones. Heavy-handed, almost amateurish as their methodology could be (crossfading muffled screaming and gunfire from
Apocalypse Now into the alien-ancestry conspiracies behind the gelatinous “Lagging” really says a lot
maaaaan), it works a treat. After all, a small dark space can make your skin crawl more than any big dark space when it seems like there
might be something there with you.
These Lynchian spine-shivers aren’t the album’s only mode, though! SOTL’s infamous soft side is accounted for too, all around the moldering, fuzzy plumes of delay that fill “Down”’s back half and on the dusty, cosmic twinkle of “Adamord”. elsewhere, the sweltering amplifier abuse of “(Live) Lid” predicts acts like Yellow Swans at their most wild-eyed. The album makes its most enduring case for essentiality rather bluntly on album highlight “Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy”. It encapsulates the album’s variety, drifting through queasy metallic ringing,
Twin Peaks sampling, sharp solar flares of treble, muddy, drawn-out bass groans and wide-eyed pedal-f*cking. It exemplifies its ability to disconcert with the gut-twistingly close mic placement of some unidentifiable scrapes and scuffles and chitterings, and it exemplifies the band’s fully-formed-on-arrival taste for quiet pessimism as a voice blearily intones that music is life, a compulsory habit, no more sacred than any biological function but just as essential to us. The whole album is, at base, a remarkably sharp reflection on this point: sometimes, if you tilt your head just right, music and life are both frightening and unglamorous and pitifully
recognizable. There’s a horror-of-recognition hidden inside every horror-of-abstraction, baby.
If Stars of the Lid have a legend, it’s a looser and less punchy one than their aforementioned peers: soundtracking the lonely, dusky shadows wrought in the loom of the new millennium, moaning orchestration and pulses of resonance stitched together over
vast areas, literalized by the members mailing tapes back and forth between their homes in Belgium and America. Not too shabby as far as emotive monolith fodder goes, but as
Music For Nitrous Oxide shows, also very much only half the story. Like their eventual labelmates Godspeed You! Black Emperor, SOTL’s great starry ballads of distances were spun out of grittier, more aggrieved beginnings, and I can’t bear the thought of the “blistering heat and massive drugs and depression” of their Austin, Texas beginning being written out of the history books— After all, as
The Tired Sounds of’s “Down 3” very directly shows, the band themselves certainly remembered it for a long while after. So here's to
Music for Nitrous Oxide, and here’s to keeping it weird and uncomfortable and surprising in unassuming places. With any luck, we'll be doing it for a long while yet.
