by
Juno Daily
on 27.05.2025 at 16:25pm.
Last edited: 27.05.2025 at 16:26pm.
Debut was picked up on by Peel, among others
Stars of the Lid’s debut album Music for Nitrous Oxide is to be pressed onto vinyl for the first time, 30 years on from its initial release.
Released on July 25 via Adam Wiltzie’s Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing imprint, the album has been remastered by Grammy-winning sound engineer Francesco Donadello and will be released on vinyl for the first time following the original CD release by Rob Forman’s Sedimental Records back in 1995.
“In the wake of losing Brian almost two years ago,” Wiltzie (pictured above, right) says of his late partner in the band Brian McBride (left), “I felt it was time to revisit and acknowledge this long-forgotten archive on the beginning of Stars Of The Lid.”
Ahead of the release, Stars of the Lid have shared a video for ‘Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy (Edit),’ created from images from the duo’s final tour, taken on the October 6, 2016, at the Óran Mór Auditorium in Glasgow, Scotland. The 16mm loops were created, projected, and documented by long-time visual collaborator Luke Savisky aka The Colonel.
Known for their beatless compositions crafted from droning, effects-treated guitars alongside piano, strings, and horns, the band officially formed on Christmas Day in 1992. 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.”
Armed with the four-track, some guitars and a primitive Casio SK-5 sampler, the pair began making Music for Nitrous Oxide, subsequently picked up by the writer Simon Reynolds and Radio1 DJ John Peel. They became best known for the genre-defining The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid from 2001 and 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, as well as their breakthrough album The Ballasted Orchestra from 1997 which this album shares so much of its DNA with.
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.
To pre-order your double vinyl or CD copy of Music For Nitrous Oxide (30th Anniversary Remastered), due out on July 25 via Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing, click here
