I once asked a middle-aged composer I'd come to know-- one who writes fairly "difficult" art-music-- what she'd been listening to lately. Based on the complex theories behind her work, I figured she could introduce me to some crazy stuff. But she looked at me as though the question held little interest and said, "I don't know... Bach, mostly. And a lot of folk music. Some Pink Floyd." I was pretty surprised that, given the amount of mental effort her work asked of its listeners, she herself kept to music with such direct emotional power.
Still, it's an understandable inconsistency-- "cutting-edge" music isn't always synonymous with "inviting." No matter how much I dig Milton Babbitt, I'm more likely to put on Iron & Wine when I get home. The IDM/ambient sphere of artists and listeners has always had an underlying interest in marrying these extremes. (For example, Aphex Twin works at both the most abrasive and warm ends of the spectrum.) Many artists on the Kranky label are concerned with creating a synthesis of music that has "artistic" merit and that which remains inviting, and The Dead Texan is an album that achieves such a goal. It's a refined, original sound, but one that gives a listener more than it takes.
The Dead Texan is Adam Wiltzie, one half of Stars of the Lid, a band that has produced some of the best guitar-based ambient/drone music of the past 10 years. Rather than take the Fennesz or Keith Fullerton Whitman approach of mutating and splicing guitar tones, SOTL create reverberant drones through the expert manipulation of attack and decay. Wiltzie recorded the material for The Dead Texan while in Belgium and deemed it too "aggressive" for SOTL. And it is, though "aggressive" is a relative term when applied to music that sits upon the brink of consciousness.
Wiltzie doesn't depart dramatically from SOTL's most recent full-length, The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid; he employs similar two-chord repetitions, swells of stacked-fifths, and utilizes many of the same timbres-- swirling string-quartet drones and effects-laden piano. But as The Dead Texan, Wiltzie's music takes on a more composed quality. It cycles through complete chord progressions, allows steady rhythmic pulses, lets loose just a little bit of dissonance, and occasionally overlays vocals or an instrumental melody. His drones are accented with acoustic and slide guitars, as well as occasional samples and sine waves. While by no means traditional songs, the pieces of The Dead Texan thus feel at least like miniatures-- more manageable than SOTL's wide-open scapes, which can be devoid of reference points.
It's a wildly overused trope to describe dramatic instrumental music as "the soundtrack to ________" (e.g.: a rainy day, a lonely drive, an acid trip, a bear attack)-- the phrase is used to connote a sense of detachment engendered by such music, one that allows us to view our lives as a movie. But in this case, discussing the record's cinematic leanings is justified. Wiltzie has stated the influence of several film composers, and the title of his piece "La Ballade d'Alain Georges" namedrops an old French actor. More overtly, this release includes a DVD of videos for several of Wilzie's compositions-- all made by filmmaker Christina Vantzos. Her accompaniment for "Aegina Airlines" combines beautifully simple animation with abstract hues, representing the clarity of various musical elements through a literal "clarity" of imagistic presentation. Wiltzie shows himself increasingly drawn toward the world of film compositions-- a safe haven for modern composers who don't necessarily want to engage in "modern composition."
The vocal additions to "Glen's Goo" and "The Struggle" lend the songs a shoegaze tinge, recalling the hushed moments of Slowdive. In these spots, The Dead Texan's sense of cathedral-like reverence is balanced with extreme intimacy. Throughout, the attention to sound-quality and design is nearly as impressive as the music itself. Wiltzie has come quite far from his four-track recording days; The Dead Texan is an entirely enveloping album from a skilled craftsperson. Currently, he's working with Brian McBride on a new Stars of the Lid release, and with The Dead Texan as an indication, we should be very excited-- in a laid-back, barely conscious sort of way.
