Music for Nitrous Oxide (30 Year Anniversary Remastered)

Magnetic tape harnesses time and transforms it into distance. Before pressing the record button on a tape machine, you first select how many inches of material will be used to capture each passing second. For the highest fidelity applications—such as, say, an early-’80s recording on the Windham Hill label—30 inches per second (ips) was used. This enormous tract of real estate meant that the tiniest detail of each overtone was clear as a bell, and you felt as if you were listening to impressionistic compositions while sitting on the performer’s lap. On the four-track cassette recorders that came into wider use during this period, 3.75 ips was the “hi-fi” setting (commercial tapes play at half that speed). On recordings made with these parameters, artifacts including hiss and distortion are heard alongside the music, and sometimes even overwhelm it. While such imperfections are disastrous for the George Winstons of the world, for others, they’re a source of wonder.

In the beginning, Stars of the Lid, the drone project founded in Austin, Texas, by Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie, celebrated the time-warping magic of the humble cassette. The sleeve notes inside the duo’s 1995 debut album, Music for Nitrous Oxide, newly reissued on vinyl, proudly identify the Yamaha deck used in its creation. A track late in the record, “Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy,” serves as a kind of manifesto for SOTL’s early work, but to further understand what they were doing during this time, you have to understand how the devices fit into the life of the average music obsessive. A tape could be a kind of diary, a running record of life swirling around you. In some ways, this album feels more like a collage or a scrapbook rather than something composed, a beautifully fragmented document of what was in the air in a specific time and place.

The duo met at a party. Wiltzie put a piece by Erik Satie on the stereo and everyone hated it except for McBride. Before long they were hanging out and making noise—one of their earliest recording binges came after watching an episode of “Twin Peaks” together while on mushrooms. In Kranky co-founder Bruce Adams’ book about underground music in the ’90s, You’re With Stupid, Wiltzie explains McBride’s role as archivist. “Brian had a radio show, he mixed four-track bits and bobs in and out of records with found samples, and anything else he could find.” Tape samples were more prominent than they would be later because McBride didn’t yet play guitar, according to a note from Wiltzie.

Something Stars of the Lid were already very good at in this nascent stage was making drones that had an uncanny animation, as if their tracks were creatures and you could sense the life moving through them. The opening “Before Top Dead Center” is a darkly brooding piece of gently throbbing guitar feedback, and the swaying modulations suggest respiration, as if we’re watching the coiled potential of a giant reptile as it sleeps.

“Adamord” is where the LP introduces McBride’s eerie remnants of sound. We hear what seems to be an elderly woman talking about the difficulty of facing the day with a broken heart, and with this the piece slides into a metallic knock, spirals of hiss, and pulsing sections of feedback. At times, when we hear a fluttering oscillator, we sense the music’s distant but crucial connection to rock, the way the raw electricity that coursed through psychedelic music from the MC5 to Spacemen 3 could be abstracted into something a person might fall asleep to.

“Madison” is one of several tracks that allow you to hear what Stars of the Lid would become after refining their sound and inching toward modern classical. It has a symphonic bearing that pre-dates Eno and ambient music, a swirl of string-like tones that brings to mind the slowly gathering power of the prelude of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, with slow-motion splashes of cymbals and bows pulled across strings that feel like clumps of earth sliding down the side of a mountain.

So ghostly is “Madison” that when we hear lines of dialog from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the opening section of the following “Down,” it comes as a shock. Back then, every documentarian worth their salt kept a tape recorder by the TV to capture such scraps, and here it’s yoked to another one, a recording of a preacher laying hands on a child and saying “God touched you in a wonderful way.” As his voice fades and we slide into an impossibly gorgeous passage of backwards guitar drone that seems haloed by mist, we feel in equal parts the creepiness of the pastor’s voice and the spiritual allure of his message—we could be rising to Heaven or falling into Hell.

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While some tracks want to induce meditation or accompany druggy dreams, others challenge with tension and uncertainty. “Swellsong” could be from a Tarkovsky soundtrack, something that might play as we rumble through Stalker’s Zone. “(Live) Lid,” captured on digital tape at the band’s first public performance, is a slab of feedback that nearly veers into noise music, with some of the hard edge of Metal Machine Music mixed with cymbals and even a booming drum. And the closing “Goodnight,” also recorded live, includes a backdrop of actual rain behind the guitar. This natural sound has fascinated recordists since the beginning, and everyone knows how much a steady downpour resembles tape hiss.

It’s not always easy to tell where each individual unit of sound comes from on Nitrous, or to differentiate between what’s being played and what’s being played back. It creates a pleasing sense of randomness and confusion, a feeling that we’re merely hearing one result out of many possibilities. If a given track had been recorded a day or two later, perhaps another newly discovered fragment would have become its most important element. Two years after McBride’s death, having this long out-of-print record available once again in a carefully assembled and lovely physical format is a fitting tribute to what Stars of the Lid brought into the world. These friends were harvesters of time, and this is what they were gathering three decades ago.