All The Bells & Whistles

The 00s: A Short List of Good Records from the Last Ten years (Pt. 7 [& 8] — Two Favorites)

Radiohead, Kid A

Don’t you love Kid A? It’s amazing, isn’t it? Let’s go listen to Kid A.

Star of the Lid, The Tired Sound of Stars of the Lid

Ambient music was born with three short pieces by French composer Erik Satie (you’ve heard his famous Gymnopedies in various commercials for detergent and ketchup and what have you.) The idea was to create music that furnished a room. Background music. He called it Furniture Music.

The concept (barely realized by Satie in his lifetime) was taken up by composer and mushroom expert (really?) John Cage, who developed it to create background music with minimal means. Brian Eno came along and made Furniture Music that, though ambient,broadened the space of the room itself in an aural landscape.

Decades later, we have Stars of the Lid, who make symphonic ambient music that breaks free from other Furniture Music by the force of its content. Nobody has ever been stunned into silence by a sofa. No ottoman ever reduced anyone to tears. No chaise longue ever sounded like God.

Two comparisons: Composer Arvo Part‘s musical theory and practice, called tintinnabulation, is based on the sound of bells — an attack of sound, usually in an otherwise still setting, followed by a long decay and and the absorption of the sound into silence again. Musical form is not based around themes or rhythm. The sound of one chord, played once — attack and decay — was form enough. Silence and space became integral to the music. The other comparison can be made to the undulation of the sea — a push or a reach from someplace large, followed by diminution and retreat, only to have the music throb outward again.

For Stars of the Lid, music doesn’t define a space. It defines what’s outside a space — or what’s inside it but unseen. It’s profoundly introverted, as if the space were a person’s own internal landscape. Visual comparisons can be made to the candlelit surrealism of David Lynch, or the symbolically vast use of time by Andrei Tarkovsky. And like all of these comparisons, the music can either soothe someone to sleep or swallow them whole and bring them into a waking dream.

The tools used are mostly guitars and effect pedals, along with a cello here, a trumpet there, and found sound throughout. Of course, it doesn’t sound like this. What looks minimal on paper sounds like an entire city of vapor, an ocean of bright sorrow. It’s soaring and static at the same time. For the past ten years, The Tired Sound of Star of the Lid has been ringing, swelling, and receding. It does so even when the stereo is turned off, after silence has been turned into pure emotion. To listen to it is to listen to the entire world.

by Timothy Imse

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