Adam Wiltzie was one half of the ambient power-house Stars of the Lid. The other half of it died last year. And Wiltzie has a new album, Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal. The first song is titled "Buried At Westwood Memorial Park, In An Unmarked Grave, To The Left of Walter Matthau." Brian McBride was the other half. He shared a name with a soccer player.
Wiltzie has stated that the opener is not a reference to McBride. McBride did live in Los Angeles. I don't know where he's buried.
I don't know how he died. I don't care to speculate. The music him and Wiltzie made was some of the most impactful, heart-opening stuff I have ever listened to. Don't take my word for it. Listen to them.
I think it would be impossible not to see Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal as an elegy for a dead friend. Circumstances cannot allow otherwise. This is a sad album. The air it breathes is grieving.
About myself. I was suicidal when I really got into Stars of the Lid. Their music did not heal me. There isn't any explanation other than grace for what got me out of my pit. But they were around when I got better. And circumstances will not permit me to deny their influence on my restoration. They are important to me. I am passionate about their music.
About my suicide. I never acted on it. I ideated. I was obsessed with the method,[1] manner,[2] and means[3] of my execution. It was easier to think about ending things than to think about how I would move on from such evil thoughts. Saying anything more would feel like milking a tragedy. So, let's air it out and be done with it. We should feel guilty when we believe we can act as instruments exacting our own judgement. It's a miracle that I'm alive.
Sodium Pentothal is a barbiturate. This is the blurb about the drug I pulled from the album's bandcamp page:
Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.
This seems like a tongue-in-cheek description to me. Hyperpop, slutpop, or whatever Charli XCX is making has always seemed like the escapist's choice in terms of music. Ambient music is made for lingerers, for those chasing the butterfly shades of spiriting no matter where it takes them.
But, on the other hand, a fugue is something you can lose yourself in. If any classical music form were to embody the interiority of an altered state it would not be a symphony with its grand pronouncements upon the passions, but a cerebral and transfixing fugue. If any classicist has come closest to resolving the image of the otherwise spirit then it is Bach,[4] the master of the fugue.
Fugues are complex, complicated, bewildering, and enthralling. They are a form of music in which a theme is split into many voices and variated until the theme transcends the manner of its own issuing and all variations converge into one complete whole. Like light filtered through a prism with its issuing rainbow refracted back into a single stream of light. And this single stream is the melodic line.
The word 'fugue' comes from Latin. 'Fuga' means flight, flee, or escape. It is the root of the verbs 'fugere', to flee, and 'fugare', to chase. When we listen to a fugue we might think we are either the hare being chased by a hunting melody or the dog determined to catch the fleeing theme when, in reality, we are only the totality of the music moving itself. Like a circle seeking its own ending.
A fugue for a depressant, I imagine, would sound like someone trying to remember a slowly fleeing dream. There might be an image or an impression that the sleeper awakens with. And this piece of the puzzle might resound with aspects of the ensuing day. But the totality—the resolving of what was lost with what is before us—is only the realization that the dream is not over and that we are sleeping still. Wiltzie's new album provides a fugue for such an experience. Notice the singularity. Eleven Fugues is an album with only nine songs. And to my mind they all make up only one fugue. I've heard that people on barbiturates can get confused easily.
The theme is introduced with the opener. And it is the most powerful song on the album, I think. "Buried At Westwood..." begins with three bass beats to kick us off. And these beats are themselves kicked off immediately into an abyssal malaise of sound. This malaise sounds like a pissy string section tuning up their instruments amid a spat of group in-fighting. Two more beats return about twenty seconds later and it reminds me of a mantra that a meditating person must keep in their head to remind themselves of their breathing. And, indeed, a single beat sounds out at regular intervals as the swellsong begins in earnest. Sour-sounding strings swell and an underlying synthesized drone carries up the world of the song until it peaks with the constituents of this songworld quickly being stripped away from each other until just this single synth tone remains. The narrative of the song is of an internal dissonance resolving itself into properly-proportioned harmony. The midpoint, therefore, is when the dissonance is isolated from the rest and it is pleasantly harrowing.
This one tone (quite reminiscent of the tone developed on Keith Fullerton Whitman's opening track off of another ambient masterpiece, Playthroughs[5]) persists to the listener's anxiety. What will happen? Will it fade as well? Instead our survivor develops into a full new world of music like a new universe beginning in another's demise. At five minutes and thirty-three seconds, a massive bass drone hits the mix and I believe that the instrument sounding such a drone is an electric guitar. I should mention that this is Adam Wiltizie's bread and butter. Stars of the Lid is famous, in Jimmy's book, for utilizing the guitar for all of its incredible tone-texturing potential. And here is no difference. The guitar sounds like sunlight caught upon the surface of waving ocean water and the water is a sapphire blue. This sunlight shines in steel and the song ends as if we were watching a flower the size of a planet blossom from the view of an orbiting moon. And then the song ends.
For longtime listeners of Wiltzie and McBride this will sound like familiar ground. If the reader is unaware of the duo's previous efforts then I implore them to listen to affecting cuts such as Wiltzie's "Rhythm of a Dividing Pair," McBride's "Our Last Moment in Song," or the pair's triumphant two-parter "Requiem for Dying Mothers." For the dozen of us Stars of the Lid superfans the agonizing question was not what their rumored new music would sound like, but what variations upon familiar themes they would provide. A few years ago, we got a taste.
Adam Wiltzie released a track on a compilation album called "How to Disappear Inside a Thirty Piece Orchestra" and announced that, despite being the sole artist credited on the track, Brian McBride did help him produce it. The song could easily be an outtake of Eleven Fugues: it is simple and effective, crystalline and moving, and swells to such a well-depthed scope of harmony that the song seems to evaporate before we realize it's really even over. Like much of Eleven Fugues, "How to Disappear..." is a cold song. And it stands in contrast to the warm-note the group ended things off on.
Stars of the Lid's last LP came out in 2007. It was called "Stars of the Lid and their Refinement of the Decline." And the last song on it is called "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface." It's still my favorite song-title of all time. And the first time I heard it it was like hearing someone else recall a dream I myself had held cherished and close to my heart for years.
It is seventeen minutes long and all consists of one drone that enters into our psyche and expands into a lush and jungled spiritual expanse. There is an orchestra in it. It sounds large. And, at one point, we hear prominent throat-singing adding texture and quality to the already rich and thick drone. Like "Buried At Westwood Memorial," the drone grows to a point until its dissonance is realized and then it turns to harrow itself until only that one dissonant aspect remains. And then it grows and grows and grows until the listener cannot believe what it is they are listening to. In "December Hunting's" case, the finale is a slow-going and delightful melody played by a few string instruments. It's too long of a melody to hum along with. But it is dignified enough to stand out etched into the listener's memory like a long and aching scar carved into the earth itself by a once-mighty and now-dried river that had arched its way across deserts and under forests.
The first time I heard this song was like finally finding the perspective to resolve an image I had been tossing around in my head since I had been born. My baseness had resolved itself into a piece of the grand development of the theme of who I am. It had been a dark and evil winter where I had been lonely and beside myself. And then one day I realized that this moment of passion was only for a time and that it too would turn upon its own imperfection to resolve away into a greater and joyful whole. I would say my mourning was turned into dancing but "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface" is not a song for dancing.
My affliction was something that I began to see as something that brought with it a perspective to bear upon the world that was singular, dignified, and entirely my own. Suffering isolates. And only in solitude can we fully realize the truth that speaks us.
Which brings us to the end of this fugue. Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal does not end happily. It ends like a drug does: it withdraws and leaves us in confusion. The arch of the album is one of bereaving recognition.
Wiltzie has stated that there is a body of unreleased Stars of the Lid music out there. But that it would take him some time to wrap his arms around the departure of his collaborator.[6] Eleven Fugues, I believe, is that wrapping of arms around his loss. Unlike other (or, indeed, most) Stars of the Lid finales, this album ends on a painful note. If the opener is not about Brian McBride's death, the last two tracks surely are.
The aptly titled "We Were Vaporized" keys us into this fact. Stars of the Lid were an expansive duo. They got their start on albums that were similarly drug-obsessed, yet lacked the orchestral lushness they would go on to develop. They had comforts of their own but they were strange comforts. Music for Nitrous Oxide, Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for an Aquatic Life, and The Ballasted Orchestra are all oxygen-deprived and unsettling albums. Dark guitar drones are occasionally lighted by calmer illuminations. But whether these aspriations are drug induced is a question left to the listener. See songs such as "Fucked Up (3:57 AM)," "Cantus; in Memory of Warren Wiltzie," and "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy." These are all songs where an ominosity pervades. Where the string sections are haltering at the almost imperceptible ranges of the soundscape. And where dark shadows twist and snap around our listening heads. "We Were Vaporized" is a song playing in this sort of key. And it trails off into silence.
Silence where the closer "(Don't Go Back To) Boogerville" begins. This title sucks. But it isn't without its redeeming sadness. It sounds like something a child would say to his imaginary friend as he imagines it withering and dying before his eyes. Or like something a delirious and tear-stained boy would say to his dog as a stranger puts this boy's dog down. This song sounds like that. The one thing to note about it is the one thing a listener cannot miss: a cello line so up front and serated it sounds like the performer was carving into the instrument itself. If this is music inspired by Bach then its inspired by his Chaconne. This is the sound it would make if two giants were operating a crosscut saw vertically upon the largest tree the Earth had ever known. And that the sound of their sawing was not the grains of wood split by iron teeth but was the music of the history of this growing-being being pried apart from itself. Aching and repeating and turning back into itself as its dust of dying wood flies into the slivering air—the self from which this bleeding and still bleeding pain is sawed out of itself is ripped from what is dead and lifeless and gone. Like the tree was old and sapless by the time of its hewing and its limbs were black but still it was a tragedy to topple something so dignified. Like the day of its felling was a grey and rain-stained day.
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[1] belt
[2] sitting
[3] belt
[4] J.S.
[5] Track 3a (2waynice)
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Jimmy (he/him/his) is a writer from Oregon. He was born in Pocatello, Idaho. He has published pieces with ergot., Indicia Literary Journal, and Eunoia. He lives in New York. Catch him on his website, jimmywrites.com.