On Aug. 25, 2023, the American musician and collegiate debate coach Brian McBride died, and with his passing the world lost one-half of Stars of the Lid, an ambient drone duo formed in Austin, Texas in the early 1990s.
McBride and Adam Wiltzie, his collaborator, released their first record, “Music for Nitrous Oxide,” early in the summer of 1995, and their final album came out in late 2007, titled “Carte de Viste.” Spanning the dozen years between the bookends of their career as partners, the duo delivered six albums with one coming out every year between 1995 and 1999 and then a two-year pause to 2001, and then another hiatus until 2007.
Their album titles display a playful self-awareness of their project and its seeming rejection of a serious formal commitment, which range from the bizarrely metaphysical — “Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for an Aquatic Life” (1996) — to the forthrightly introspective and self-betraying, as “The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid” (2001) and “And Their Refinement of The Decline” (2007) figure as the respective names of their sixth and seventh records.
Their song titles, like their album names, are blissfully unafraid to hop registers or to pirouette between the allusive, the tenderly loving, the poetic and the strange; “Gravitational Pull” begins with “The Better Angels of Our Nation”, an oft-excerpted phrase coined by Abraham Lincoln, includes “Cantus; in Memory of Warren Wiltzie” and ends with the yearner’s plead of “Be Little With Me.”
In the years just after the millennium, Wiltzie and McBride continued with their free-formed nominative assignments. “And Their Refinement” — widely considered to be their magnum opus — provides 18 tracks and a Scorsesean runtime of two hours, which traverses the listener across, among others, the exemplary poetic numbers of “The Evil That Never Arrived” and “Even If You’re Never Awake”, through the plainly labeled “Another Ballad for Heavy Lids”, to the ars poetica-esque “The Daughters of Quiet Minds” and, finally, home at the end with the hilarious “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface.”
The music under these titles — and that of much of the ambient drone genre writ large — cannot be said to possess any of the technical or structural features that constitute a conventional song; to call their work “music” feels almost woefully, consequentially imprecise. What it eschews in rhythm, beat, sampling and the whole standard architecture of verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-outro, it receives from a breathtaking treasury of texture and noise, where time is deliberately unordered, in stark contrast to the metered measurements of most other songs you hear.
Their work (noise? listening experiences?) does not correspond to a set of reproducible physical actions: you can’t drum a steering wheel to it or strum along on an invisible air guitar. This is all by design. The genre is, after all, called “ambient” because the sound is intent on surrounding the listener on all sides, fashioning a novel (land/color)scape rather than making deliberate incursions into an existing one. The only comparable physical action is meditation, or maybe standing in a crater on the moon.
We hear things in kinship with ambient music in our everyday lives: the fan blowing in the next room; the hum of a microwave; the intent bustle of city life through an open window; a plane overhead; the air speeding past us as we drive quietly at night. The discography of Stars of the Lid attempts to recompose these steady fixtures of common experience into expansive, world-building tracks and records, where the industrial hums of real machines are refracted by and into the weary inhales and exhales of lush synthesizers, distant horns, spacey guitars, and shimmering strings. If shoegaze, as a subgenre, offered the trajectory of alternative rock an avenue into a more noise-focused, effects-focused discipline while still retaining the core features of the broader genre, then the same can be said about what ambient drone offered electronic music: a palette of stacked textures through a digression into soundscape, the possibilizing of one harmony sustained for an amazing six or 13 or 20 minutes.
With McBride’s passing now over a year behind us, the albums of Stars of the Lid gain a special resonance. There is no chance of the duo making more music, or of Stars of the Lid returning to release old work in a form familiar to devoted listeners. I imagine this is a pain of all those who come upon a deceased artist for whom they develop an intense devotion: We are left with the task — and the immense privilege — of working with what we have, and holding on to it with a tighter grasp, and locating it in our lives with ever more dedication and generosity. McBride’s life was one of music, and now it is one we might discover in that music, folded away into the hours of sound and noise he developed in his own career and in his long and fruitful partnership with Wiltzie.
I find Stars of the Lid not only luminous and extraordinary, but utterly welcoming; if I could somehow establish a living space in the rooms furnished by these records, I would, and would regret ever having to leave. A friend once described their work as Schoenberg’s “The Book of the Hanging Gardens” reimagined for the information age, and I can’t help but agree with him — it really is, I feel, of that order and magnitude.
If you like Kevin Shields, Brian Eno, Boards of Canada or the more minimalist components of “Kid A”, I would encourage you to sit down and give Stars of the Lid an earnest listen. For me, at least, the discovery of them reoriented the way I think about sound, and, for the first time, correctly modeled a juncture between the noisy, staticky plentitude of our world and the structured music that leaps from it. The thought of being able to find them again for the first time brings me to tears.
Cole Chaudhari ’26 (he/him) is a News Editor.
He previously served as a Copy Editor and as a Staff Writer. Cole is double-majoring in History and English & American Literatures and is interning this semester at the New England Review.
