STARS OF THE LID to reissue 30th Anniversary edition of seminal debut album

In 1995, Stars of the Lid 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?”

During a hiatus in the late 2000s, Wiltzie started A Winged Victory for the Sullen with composer Dustin O’Halloran and has since scored films and documentaries, whilst McBride made his move west, released a couple of solo albums and coached the debate team at University of Southern California. The duo returned to the stage in the mid-2010s for a series of revered tours, including a rare, filmed performance for Boiler Room at Brooklyn’s St. Agnes Church in 2015. Featuring a string nonet, this performance exquisitely captures how they transform their songs into a mesmerising, multidimensional experience. Stars of the Lid played their last show in Iceland in 2017, and another extended hiatus followed. In 2023, Brian McBride passed away.

Tracklisting

1. ‘Before Top Dead Center’ (2025 Remaster)
2. ‘Adamord’ (2025 Remaster)
3. ‘Madison’ (2025 Remaster)
4. ‘Down’ (2025 Remaster)
5. ‘Lagging’ (2025 Remaster)
6. ‘Lid (Live)’ (2025 Remaster)
7. ‘Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy’ (2025 Remaster)
8. ‘The Swellsong’ (2025 Remaster)
9. ‘Goodnight’ (2025 Remaster)

Pre-order here

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