Tape Hiss Still Makes Me Happy

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Stars of the Lid's classic debut album

Stars of the Lid, the duo of Adam Wiltzie and the late Brian McBride, are ambient music royalty.

Any serious list of the genre’s landmark albums will have to include either The Tired Sounds of… (2001), or And Their Refinement of the Decline (2007), if not both.

On Christmas Day of 1992, when the band was first formed, Brian and Adam were two broke stoners in their early 20s, studying at Austin’s University of Texas.

McBride loved academic debating and ran a college radio program (“The Dick Fudge Show”) where he played his own tape collages of strange samples.

One of his few listeners was Wiltzie, a former youth tennis champion who’d moved to Texas from New York City after a knee injury prematurely ended his career as an athlete.

Both were the kind of sophisticated music lovers that were heavily into experimental rock bands such as Talk Talk and Spacemen 3, but also enjoyed Brian Eno’s ambient productions and Arvo Pärt’s minimalist compositions.

photo: Cheree Jetton

Hanging out at a run-down house in pre-gentrified East Austin on a diet of weed bongs and $4 bottles of wine, they created their very own brand of weird instrumental music.

Wiltzie looped and processed guitar drones with pedals, while McBride added found sounds, tape loops and voice samples from obscure radio shows and TV series.

A third musician, the keyboardist and drummer Kirk Laktas, joined them temporarily, but dropped out around the time of their debut album release. In the sleeve credits, he’s referred to as “Kirk In The Plastic Bubble”.

That debut album, Music for Nitrous Oxide, was recorded over two years and finally came out on CD in 1995. It was one of the first releases for the local independent label Sedimental, which was run by a liquor store owner turned wine distributor named Rob Forman.

“The seductive aspect for me when I first heard their early recordings was this strong and clear amalgam of so many underground non-rock genres while still anchored in the unpretentious and subversive aspects of rock music-culture”, Forman is quoted in the press release for the 30th anniversary edition of Music for Nitrous Oxide on Wiltzie’s own Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing label.

“Their live shows at the time were powerful and marked with a subtle aspect of the arcane, and [the album] documents the project gloriously in this way and why it resonated at the time and still fascinates today.”

It’s safe to say not many of their local peers shared Forman’s enthusiasm and McBride’s and Wiltzie’s opaque tastes.

“We were 100% in a vacuum”, Wiltzie remembers, “and there was absolutely nobody that even remotely enjoyed what we were doing.”

In other cities in the US and the UK though, there were musicians with a similar interest in pushing the boundaries of the traditional rock band format, even though they had slightly different approaches.

Chicago was home to a rich experimental music scene, which included bands like Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol, while in Virginia, the trio Labradford was making elegiac drone rock.

Over in the UK, Scottish band Mogwai wrote cinematic tracks with long crescendo parts, while Bark Psychosis recorded dark and somber longform pieces in an East London church. Flying Saucer Attack from Bristol developed an idiosyncratic idea of “rural psychedelia” by adapting the fuzzy aesthetic of shoegaze and dreampop.

In a 1994 article for The Wire magazine, journalist and theorist Simon Reynolds drew connections between all these bands and projects, stating that they shared influences from an outsider music rock lineage since the late 1960s, encompassing art rock, krautrock, space rock, psychedelic rock, progressive rock and jazz-rock, while also being influenced by minimalist composition, improvised music and early ambient.

Reynolds gave this new movement a name, calling it ‘post-rock’ – which at first wasn’t a descriptor of an actual genre or even a scene, more a loose umbrella term for 1990s bands that made slow, textural, often abstract guitar music and weren’t too interested in traditional songwriting, empty rock’n’roll gestures and celebrity worship culture.

What most of them also had in common was a disdain for the traditional music industry. Closer in spirit to the DIY culture of the punk and indie scenes, they would record their music at home or in other unusual non-studio environments, release it on small, independent labels, promote it through photocopied black-and-white zines and sell it at fundraiser shows.

“I think it's probably true that most musicians would say they loathe or despise the genre that they're categorized into,” Adam Wiltzie says about the ‘post-rock’ genre tag today, “but you have to be classified as something. The funny thing 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?”

artwork: Patrick Lakey

In later years, Stars of the Lid wouldn’t often be categorized as post-rock, but usually filed into the ambient/drone category.

On their debut album Music for Nitrous Oxide, at least their instrumentation still resembled rock music – while the band would on their next albums incorporate piano, strings and horns, the only sound sources here were electric guitars, pedals, tapes and a primitive Casio SK-5 sampler. Most notably, they didn’t use any synthesizers.

In general, this album is more defined by what isn’t there than by what is.

To begin with, there are no classic song structures, no accessible melodies, no actual chord progressions, no sung vocals, no hooks, and no drums.

There’s a track on the album that’s called "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy”. Most of the album was indeed captured at home on a Yamaha MT-120, an affordable four-track cassette recorder. Such limitations might have resulted from their economic realities, but Stars of the Lid also turned them into a proud aesthetic choice.

Sonic Youth used guitar feedback between songs to tune their instruments during live shows; McBride and Wiltzie looped these interludes ad infinitum, turning them into actual songs.

The opening track “Before Top Dead Center” is five and a half minutes of barely anything at all. The first half consists of an extremely slow fade-in of two processed guitar chords, which then meander over indefinite low-end frequencies for the full duration of the piece, creating an unsettling yet strangely soothing atmosphere, before fading out slowly again.

Right after this uninviting start, they’re launching into a 12-minute lo-fi sound collage that starts with the reading of the excerpt from a letter written by Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Lois Wilson. The rest of “Adamord” is more guitar pedal feedback, layered sustained notes and sampled bolt blasts from the end titles of Twin Peaks.

We’re now 20 minutes into the album, and it turns out that “Madison” is just another nine and a half minutes of droning guitar chords over buzzing low end and esoteric choral samples.

“Down” brings together a snippet of a religious radio programme, samples from a Chopin piano prelude, and the voice of Star Trek character Data trying to teach his cat Spot not to hop onto his keyboard while he’s working.

The second half of the record contains the abrasive eight-minute live track “Lid", captured at Stars of the Lid’s first performance in the spring of ‘94, the aforementioned thirteen-minute composition celebrating their recording medium of choice, and late highlight “The Swellsong” where meditative hums appear over rumbling bass and crackling noises that resemble a dying Tesla transformer.

Music for Nitrous Oxide isn’t exactly easy listening, but these raw, beatless home-recordings are weirdly addictive. They might have little to do with what most people think of these days when they hear the word ambient, but feel closer to the calmer end of noise and industrial music.

A brilliant Discogs comment from 2018 says:

damn, this must have been a revelation to people when this came out in 95. this style of drone and ambient is everywhere nowadays, but damn – 95 was wonderwall and cotton eye joe and gangsta's paradise! mike patton was 27! people were on shrooms listening to sven väth! hows that even possible.... SOTL future boyz, much respect

Stars of the Lid would go on to refine their idiosyncratic approach over a bunch of albums on the influential kranky label in the second half of the 1990s, steadily growing a dedicated fan base in underground music circles.

In the next decade, they’d release the two sprawling and highly complex double albums that featured a much wider sonic palette than their early work and would finally propel them to indie stardom: The Tired Sounds of… (2001), and And Their Refinement of the Decline (2007).

Wiltzie and McBride both left Austin in the late 1990s, McBride for Chicago and Wiltzie for Europe. Both started new bands and solo projects, but returned to the stage as a duo in the 2010s and played their last mutual show in 2017.

Adam Wiltzie now lives in the Belgian countryside, scores films and makes music as one half of A Winged Victory For The Sullen.

Brian McBride lived in Los Angeles for many years, making music and coaching the USC debate team. He died from natural causes in 2023, at the age of 53.

The 30 Year Anniversary Remastered edition of Stars of the Lid’s Music for Nitrous Oxide will be released in July 2025 on 2LP and CD.