About this item

The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.”

The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved. 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.”

Recorded at Wilzie’s home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space.

Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis.

These are fugue states as much as fugues in a literal classical music sense-smeared epiphanies of uncertain memory and spatial dislocation, coaxed from the unconscious and set aloft.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There are incredibly few things that Adam Wiltzie or Dustin O'Dalloran put out that I won't buy (or Brian Mcbride for that matter), and that's obviously not going to stop at this impeccably conceived album by one of the most important composer in the modern-classical sphere. It's *beautiful* and every bit what you'd expect, with a little of what you wouldn't.

TRACK LISTING

1. Buried At Westwood Memorial Park, In An Unmarked Grave, To The Left Of Walter Matthau
2. Tissue Of Lies
3. Pelagic Swell
4. Stock Horror
5. Dim Hopes
6. As Above Perhaps So Below
7. Mexican Helium
8. We Were Vaporised
9. Don’t Go Back To (Boogerville)