Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal

There is something distinctly Texan about Adam Wiltzie's music. With the late Brian McBride, the drone titan co-founded Stars of the Lid in 1993, releasing seven albums of ambient music as intelligent and ethereal as a desert mirage. Although he has lived in Belgium for nearly 25 years, he continues to produce music that suggests both the almost incomprehensible vastness of the American West and the horrific secrets it seems to contain. His new album Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal it sounds somewhere between a Western soundtrack and an output from an underground gas mining operation, with reverb tails from electric guitars bleeding into miasma of strings and horns. Perhaps it is time to think of Wiltzie in the tradition of European artists – his Wim Wenders Paris, Texas, his Daft Punk Electricity— fascinated by the grandeur of America in contrast to the compact continent across the pond.

While it may seem remarkable given his long line of collaborations and duo works, this is Wiltzie's first full-length under his own name. (Also contains only nine fuges for sodium pentothal – the co-author of “December Hunting for Vegetarian FuckfaceWiltzie spends much of the album's runtime in his comfort zone of orchestral drones, but whenever the ground threatens to sound too well-trodden, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its shimmering constellation. vibraphones, or 'Stock Horror', seen in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth. “Tissue of Lies” is one of the catchier stuff he's written, with a friendly two-string guitar pattern that's all the more mysterious for sounding so familiar: perhaps a cousin of Slowdive “Crazy”, or a ghost of classic rock.

Wiltzie has made a lot of music like this in the past, but it's easy to forget that he hasn't made much of this recently. His main work in the last decade has been A Winged Victory for the Sullen, his duet with Dustin O'Halloran, which is a bit more economical and more dignified than the almost self-deprecatingly quiet music he made in the first decade. about his career: the self-titled albums Aix Em Klemm and Dead Texan, the mournful and spectral shows on 2001's masterpiece The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid. (The Dead Texan A collaboration with Christina Vantzu, especially feels like a precedent for this record.) Is it long enough to call an album with drone environments more crowd-pleasing? Wiltzie does everything you hope it does Pentothaland then some.