WOWEE ZOWEE (34)

By: Brian Berger
August 22, 2018

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the subject of our favorite albums of the Nineties (1994–2003). A new installment in this series will appear each Wednesday during 2018.

THE TIRED SOUNDS OF STARS OF THE LID | STARS OF THE LID | 2001

By the spring of 1997, rock and I were done. I studied ancient Greek and memorized passages of King Lear and The Cantos. I lived in Austin and worked in the classical department of Tower Records. I’d bought a banjo. I didn’t go techno, like some friends did. Sun Ra plays Moog for me. As for “post-rock,” I left before it arrived. When I first saw Jim O’Rourke at an experimental music fest in Atlanta 1994, he played tabletop guitar with a handheld fan. I knew Pharaoh Sanders too well — “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” — to be amused. AMM with Keith Rowe were incredible but that’s jazz, kinda; Keiji Haino guitar, voice and cane, Japanese blues. Revived Kraut-rockers Faust weren’t just bad but banal, nude “performance art” with chainsaw. The Freaknik street theater nearby destroyed them. Goethe would say so too.

And so, non-rock, please! I’d dabbled before. A guy named Conrad Conrad wrote an avant-classical column for Forced Exposure but the records were hard to find. Frank Zappa’s Freak Out list was more graspable, and then I dug in: I love Schubert, Delius, Bruckner, Mahler, Scriabin, Ives, Nielsen, Bartok, Messiaen. Ezra Pound knew Arnold Dolmetsch, Olga Rudge studied Vivaldi. In German “alte” means old. I love Rachmaninoff. My friend Greg is a Lucia Popp fiend and a pianist asked me out to the opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe. She played me Shostakovich afterwards, Keith Jarrett’s set of the Op. 87 preludes and fugues, which she revered.

One night a woman comes up, she doesn’t know the composer but can hum the tune, it was in a movie, mom’s favorite. Hmmmmm… Schubert piano trio No. 2? Yes! (Barry Lyndon.) I learned she’d studied Latin, was native Austinite, and with a dude in Stars of the Lid. I didn’t know them. We exchanged numbers, left messages, vanished like Ovid in exile. I sold my banjo and moved to Kansas to again study Greek.

It’s summer 2002 and I’m back in New York. I still don’t rock but sometimes I loll a little. At Kim’s Underground on St Mark’s, I see a new Mudhoney album, Since We Became Translucent, zero nostalgia but it looks swell, and also this, a triple-album by Stars of the Lid. That’s what the Latin gal said! No idea what they sound like but with a suite titled “Austin Texas Mental Hospital” I’m sold. Washington Phillips reference? Roky Erickson?

It doesn’t matter what else I thought or might have expected because it wasn’t that at all. Yet while listening, everything, somehow, was there, even with no drums, no words, just a few snippets of voices, and song — composition? — titles that often mislead. There are guitars, lots probably, but they’re so treated, layered, and augmented, it’s tough to say precisely what’s happening: ambient, symphonic, consolation, catharsis. Sunbaked limestone, geologic time, there’s no stoppin’ the cretaceous from hoppin’. Langsam. Gavin Bryars Vita Nova, a line from late Pound: “Yellow iris in that river bed.”

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WOWEE ZOWEE (34)

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