Artist: Stars of the Lid
Album: The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid

Label: Kranky

The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid
With a title like The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, one gets an idea of what to expect when this disc begins to spin. By slowing down their recording decks, running them backwards, feeding back the results and most everything else the owner's manual does not advise, Stars of the Lid produces music that works to slow the listener's brainwave activity and creates a pleasant space within which one may easily drift through the cloudy levels beneath consciousness.

The pieces that make up this album seem to consist of layered, often mysterious sound sources, contoured by ever changing amounts of guidance by the artists as well as by the indeterminacy of their production process. Some compositions drone, churn and swell on for as long as 20 minutes in an underwater dream while others linger for only a few moments down the hall from a piano emanating soothing chords.

This album has the ability to put you any place within the vagueness of purple and grey. The music varies slightly in density, lightness and feeling and is akin to floating in the boundlessness of warm water. Listeners will imagine hearing deep strings, breathing guitar, dislocated voices, a distant piano and maybe even their own bodies relaxing as their thoughts go off course in the gentle current of sound.

- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END   4 October 2001

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