2LP - Stars Of The Lid - Music for Nitrous Oxide - 30th

Stars of the Lid may have released two of the most important and influential ambient-drone albums of the 21st century, inspiring generations of musicians, authors, artists, and filmmakers, developing a cult following and near-mythic status, but back in 1995 they were nowhere.

Well, not exactly nowhere, they were in Austin, Texas, to be precise, a city that Adam Wiltzie describes as a "rock and roll village, mostly... We were 100% in a vacuum and there was absolutely nobody that even remotely enjoyed what we were doing."

This is the environment into which Music for Nitrous Oxide was born, the first album from Wiltzie and his accomplice Brian McBride, made in glorious lo-fi in the semi-arid live music capital of the world. 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.