Stars of the Lid

I met Wiltzie once, he was...not especially nice. My gf and I went to see WVFtS on one of their first tours, and a very close friend in common suggested we "definitely" say hello for her, which is something I'm typically loath to do. I introduced myself after they played and I don't think his eyes ever left his cell phone. Maybe he was having a bad day.

Nope, sorry, not a new one. But the seminal 'Aix Em Klemm' is getting a 20th anniversary reissue (for those of you still looking for this one on vinyl).

It's easily one of the best things SotL or either of them solo ever did. I trust ZS to back me up on this.

it really is, i love it. it's the first record in my ambient collection, alphabetically, and i can't count the number of times i've stepped over to that shelf to listen to something without words and immediately grabbed Aix Em Klemm upon seeing it.

it's always hard to pick individual tracks on ambient releases, but "the luxury of dirt" always stands out to me. otherworldly, lovely synth.

interesting bandcamp notes on the reissue! (weird line spacing in original, i'm too lazy to fix it)

AIX EM KLEMM Is the moniker of the ambient music project consisting of Adam Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid / A Winged Victory for the Sullen) & Robert Donne (Labradford / Anjou). As Adam Wiltzie told Sadness Is In The Sky fanzine, his collaboration with Bobby Donne began when "We all met during a Texas swing of a Labradford tour that Stars of the Lid opened for back in 1996. They stayed at my house for a few days and we became close.”

A year later Wiltzie was asked to join Labradford for their Mi Media Naranja European tour of 1997 as
the sound technician. This tour also included Bruce Gilbert of the legendary band Wire who was the
opening act and joined them in the van for the entire tour. With Bruce’s nightly improvisations of minidisc
field recording explosions running through a Sherman Filter Bank, it left a profound effect on Adam &
Bobby, and led to inspiring internal philosophical discussions on the importance of improvisation.

After concluding six weeks in the van the idea of creating a unique collaboration separate from our other
projects was realized. The duo exchanged tapes over the course of a year and then Donne ventured to
Austin, TX for a week to record at Wiltzie's home studio in 1999. The in-person collaboration moved
much more quickly than the exchange of tracks by mail. One track on the Aix Em Klemm album,
"Sparkwood and Twenty-One," was written and recorded in one day. The duo took the mysterious name
Aix Em Klemm and the self-titled debut was released in the autumn of 2000.

As of late, Wiltzie lives in Brussels, and Donne joined Stars of the Lid on their last tour of Europe in 2016
playing modular synth. They still collaborate musically so new Aix Em Klemm recordings remain a
possibility.

god if their canadian shipping wasn't so hefty I'd buy....a lot of those records, damn

AWVftS post on FB for Bandcamp Friday:

Today is the day...
Bandcamp waives the fee today in support of artists.
Make sure to follow us over there to get our news directly.
We have something coming...
Bandcamp:
AWVFTS: https://bit.ly/2Znd5Jt
adam bryanbaum wiltzie: https://bit.ly/3mZP1q0
Dustin O'Halloran: https://bit.ly/36tQAXF

New AWVFTS album Invisible Cities

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-winged-victory-for-the-sullen-invisible-cities/

there should be a separate Winged Victory for the etc. thread so my heart doesn't jump every time this thread is bumped

Agreed, and because I've found AWVFTS's material quite disappointing so far.

Probably why there's no AWVFTS thread...

Aww. I liked The Undivided Five quite a bit when it came out.

nice score

it's the first record in my ambient collection, alphabetically, and i can't count the number of times i've stepped over to that shelf to listen to something without words and immediately grabbed Aix Em Klemm upon seeing it.

it's always hard to pick individual tracks on ambient releases, but "the luxury of dirt" always stands out to me. otherworldly, lovely synth.

Agree with this. It's funny, though, because this is an album I really love where I always skip the first track. Isn't there a thread about that? I know some people love "The Girl With The Flesh Colored Crayon" but I can't stand that style of singing, and if I'd just heard that one track without having already been a Labradford / SotL fan I'd have never checked out this amazing album. There are vocals on another track too but they don't bug me nearly as much.

the first AWVFTS album is great

Speaking of Labradford, I can’t listen to them because on multiple albums they seem to have embedded extremely high pitches in their music, on the edge of my hearing range, but right in the sweet spot of my dog’s hearing - she goes crazy (not in a good way(

is she a labradorford?

we're not 100% sure (shelter dog; intriguing past), but i can say confidently that she is NOT a labradorford. she can't stand it!

i can't believe i wasted my best joke ever in the stars of the lid thread

think of this thread as the training grounds for the joke. you can spend 10, 15 years working on it here. and then, when SotL releases something new, you can unleash it in another thread

Not to cut across what is one of the finest jokes I've ever seen but this has bugged me for a bit: are Labradford named after the basketball player or is it something more obvious/arcane?

Not sure, but it does seem like A Stable Reference to something.

The second best joke in the thread!

I'll take it :)

maybe she'd like CS + Kreme's Snoopy?

I enjoy the first two AWVFTS albums and like their subsequent stuff just fine, though nothing as transcendent as the high bar of Stars of the Lid. Have not listened to anything from new album yet.

I just listened to Aix Em Klemm for the first time in a long time, just the other day. Agree re the first track, which is also why some of the early Labradford albums are hit-and-miss for me.

Am I wrong or does Labradford only do the high-pitch thing on Mi Media Naranja? It's in multiple tracks on that album but I don't recall it on their other albums.

Not to cut across what is one of the finest jokes I've ever seen but this has bugged me for a bit: are Labradford named after the basketball player or is it something more obvious/arcane?

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, February 3, 2021 9:33 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

my assumption is it is a take on the band name "La Düsseldorf".

referencing the town in west yorkshire, beloved of american people everywhere

Courtesy of BandNameOrigins.com:

How did Labradford get their name? Sorry, we don't know how Labradford got their name.

stars of the leeds xp

A Wakefield Victory for the Sullen.

Sigh. It was the best I could do.

thought that was pretty good.

Am I wrong or does Labradford only do the high-pitch thing on Mi Media Naranja? It's in multiple tracks on that album but I don't recall it on their other albums.

At least Fixed::Context has the high pitched sounds appearing.

I think the new one is lovely.

that is, Invisible Cities. I imagine it would work quite well for its original purpose, too.

From a FB post today. Maybe there will be another album one day:

Once upon a time if you wanted to go away for a while it might have been easier to disappear without being swallowed by the internet.
Lately, there has been a myriad nefarious activity (vacuous sounds uploaded digitally & unauthorised physical product) that it behooved oneself to trademark the Stars Of The Lid moniker. Part of this new endeavour is an official merchandise store Hello Merch We are slowly digging into the archives and re-printing former tour-shirts from ages long ago, starting with these two visible in this post (More arriving in time for Christmas) And in our gruesome passive-aggressive way, eventually some new music, unless the world ends next week, which seems plausible at this point…

Order: https://www.hellomerch.com/collections/stars-of-the-lid
Order: https://www.hellomerch.com/collections/adam-wiltzie

I saw that post and totally skipped over the part at the end because I thought it was just about march, damn I'll take any glimmer of hope for new music from them

And one of them is already sold out completely. Jesus, you really do just have to jump on everything IMMEDIATELY these days to even have a chance. Good for them, this bodes well for more shirts and merch down the road.

!!!!!!!

legit just did a little yelp.

https://www.facebook.com/100050668261250/posts/518163743215897/

nice remembrance of making Ballasted Orchestra, for its 25th anniversary. not even attached to a reissue or anything.

I was watching a recent French spy drama. The protagonist had completely screwed the pooch - he'd misjudged a situation, his agent had been captured, total disaster. His response, almost instantly, was to trash his apartment. I sat there watching thinking "I would never do that". In that situation all my anger would be turned inward, to curdle into shame. It would never have occurred to me to direct it outwards like that. My therapist made the point that the anger is going to go somewhere. She often tries to connect me to a healthy, self-protective, outward-directed anger.

Luckily for me, anytime I need to do that I just need to visit the RYM page for Gravitational Pull vs The Desire for An Aquatic Life, so I can read Threntall's review: "Cool, warm and enveloping drones. Very much what the rest of their more famous discography sounds like. Not really good enough to standout, but certainly enjoyable and relaxing to listen to."

New AWVFTS single? Why thank you.

https://awvfts.bandcamp.com/album/all-our-friends-are-vampires

Good job there Whiney

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-stars-of-the-lid-made-two-ambient-masterworks-20150721🕸

god DAMMIT sotl you’re killing me! Aaaaaagh oooh nooo *dead*

xpost

Doh how did I do that. Hmm.

Anyway this stood out to me, possibly cause I read this thread backwards and that newish post about dealing with anger was in my mind.

McBride: I like late at night because there’s no distractions. There’s very little chance there’s gonna be dogs barking. You’re not gonna get phone calls. Working on the music, for me, it’s kind of important to not fake it in some ways, to not try to force this emotional state out of it, to sort of pay attention to what’s going on in your life, if you’re feeling inspired or motivated just letting it happen. Especially after you’ve released a bunch of records for a long time, you don’t want to manufacture longing.

Anyway that link is dead, here’s the live (lid) one:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-stars-of-the-lid-made-two-ambient-masterworks-63198/

And what’s a good starting point for AWVFTS? Any consensus there?

The new Winged Victory single is reliably pretty, but there was something about the merging of McBride and Wiltzie's sensibilities that was of a fundamentally different order - Wiltzie left to his own devices, or with O'Halloran in Winged Victory, tends to the syrupy I find, whereas perhaps McBride scuffed the edges a bit in even the last two SOTL records.. I prefer McBride's solo records, at any rate, and I've long since given up on the idea of new SOTL, despite the rather infuriating tendency that they have to vaguely intimate new music every few years or so.

And what’s a good starting point for AWVFTS? Any consensus there?

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Wednesday, March 15, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Start with the first album and go chronologically until you start to get bored. They’re good but they lack the secret sauce of SotL.

…and as much as I like Wiltzie I think McBride is that secret sauce, as evidenced by his first solo album which I rate nearly as high as the last to Stars albums.

I love the first album. "Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears" was on my nighttime playlist for years.

yeah, i've enjoyed their separate efforts quite a bit. i wish i could listen to them without knowing about stars of the lid. but SotL was and is so very special. i think upthread is a spot where i got to see them live. it was just brilliant, one of the top few hours of my life

xpost

Seems we are mostly in consensus. I too appreciate that little bit of a sharp rough tang that gives their work as a duo just that hint of seasoning.

Based on y’all’s recommendations I’ll put McBride’s first solo release on my list. That would be When The Detail Lost Its Freedom, published under his own name? Still trying to get all the names of their different acts sorted — Dead Texan is also a Wiltzie project, okay I’m starting to piece together the clues here.

Lmao wish I could say witnessing a musical performance was a peak life experience. That time I was really high when I was in high school and Primus played my hometown? Nah probably not. I did very much vibe with Sonic Youth at Lollapalooza in Atlanta. Okay sorry tangent.