Magnetic tape captures time by turning it into distance. Before pressing record, you decide exactly how many inches of tape will spool by each second. For the highest fidelity recordings—say, those pristine early-1980s Windham Hill albums—engineers used 30 inches per second. With so much space to work with, even the faintest overtone was rendered in dazzling detail, as if you were sitting inches from the performer. By contrast, the four-track cassette recorders that proliferated among musicians and hobbyists of the same era ran at just 3.75 inches per second. Their sound carried a gentle fog of hiss and distortion that could sometimes swallow the music whole. To the George Winstons of the world, such flaws were ruinous. But to others, they were where the magic lived.
Among those who embraced that imperfection were Stars of the Lid, the Austin-based duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie. From the beginning, their music was shaped by the humble cassette—its warmth, its fragility, its ability to stretch and warp time. Their 1995 debut, Music for Nitrous Oxide, newly reissued on vinyl, pays open tribute to that medium. The liner notes even name the Yamaha tape deck used in its creation. Late in the album, a track titled “Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy” spells out their philosophy plainly. To understand it fully, though, you have to remember what cassettes meant to musicians of that era. A tape wasn’t just a tool—it was a diary, a notebook, a living record of sounds and thoughts gathered from everyday life. Nitrous Oxide feels exactly like that: a scrapbook of moments and moods, less composed than assembled, capturing what lingered in the air in a specific time and place.
McBride and Wiltzie met by chance at a party. Wiltzie put on a piece by Erik Satie, and while everyone else groaned, McBride was transfixed. The two began hanging out and making strange, beautiful noise together. One of their earliest recording sessions happened after watching an episode of Twin Peaks on mushrooms. McBride had a radio show where he mixed four-track fragments into records and field recordings, pulling in whatever stray sounds drifted his way. As Wiltzie later recalled, McBride was the duo’s archivist, the one constantly gathering bits and pieces of the world to reshape later. At the time, he didn’t even play guitar—his instrument was the tape itself.
Even at that early stage, Stars of the Lid were masters of giving stillness a pulse. Their drones seemed alive, subtly breathing beneath the surface. The opening track, “Before Top Dead Center,” is a darkly humming piece of feedback whose gentle throbs evoke the slow respiration of some sleeping giant. On “Adamord,” McBride’s fascination with found sound comes to the fore: a fragile voice, maybe that of an elderly woman, speaks about heartbreak before the piece dissolves into metallic knocks, spirals of hiss, and quivering feedback. Every so often, a flicker of an oscillator reminds you of the music’s faint connection to rock—the same raw current that powered the MC5 or Spacemen 3, here slowed and abstracted into something meditative.
“Madison” hints at what the duo would later become. Its slow-building swells of string-like tones recall Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a gradual rise of symphonic power rendered in ambient form. So ethereal is the piece that when the following track, “Down,” opens with dialogue from Star Trek: The Next Generation, it startles you. Wiltzie and McBride blend it with another field recording—a preacher laying hands on a child, declaring, “God touched you in a wonderful way.” As his voice fades into a luminous, backward guitar drone, the music seems to hover between heaven and hell, between transcendence and unease.
While some tracks invite calm or contemplation, others edge toward uneasiness. “Swellsong” feels like something from a Tarkovsky film—vast, slow, and haunting. “(Live) Lid,” captured during the band’s first public performance, pushes into abrasive territory, its walls of feedback evoking Metal Machine Music’s chaos. The album closes with “Goodnight,” recorded live with rain pattering faintly in the background—a fitting finale for a record obsessed with texture and decay. The rain, almost indistinguishable from the tape hiss, blurs the line between the natural and the mechanical, reminding us how close the two have always been.
Listening to Nitrous Oxide, it’s often hard to tell what’s being played and what’s being replayed, what’s intentional and what’s accident. That ambiguity is the source of its power. Each fragment feels provisional, like one possible outcome among infinite others. Had it been recorded a day later, perhaps some new scrap of sound—some hiss, voice, or hum—would have reshaped the whole.
Now, nearly three decades later, and two years after McBride’s passing, Music for Nitrous Oxide returns as both artifact and elegy. Its reissue is a quiet monument to what Stars of the Lid achieved: two friends capturing the sound of time itself. They weren’t simply recording music—they were gathering moments, preserving the way memory erodes, hums, and breathes. They were, in the truest sense, harvesters of time.
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