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Stars Of The Lid, “Even If You’re Never Awake.” Good music often doesn’t go how you thought it would go. It may have parts and sections that repeat, it may use recognizable sounds, it may introduce themes, it may have a discernible structure, but still it manages to surprise you by how it goes and where it ends up. Distilled into a principle: maybe it’s good music’s way of going that gets us going. Stars Of The Lid was an ambient music project of the late Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie. The duo’s music could loosely be described as lush ambient drone, scored for treated guitars, acoustic piano, and orchestral instruments. A review of their music in Pitchfork once called it “sculpted fields of sound”, observing that the duo’s “relentless commitment to subtlety sets them apart, as does their masterful hand with tone.”

In a rare interview, McBride described a fascinating process that revolved around working with real sounds. McBride recorded himself playing acoustic instruments, sampled the results, and then played those samples as a new sampler instrument. “It’s all about layering instruments and making new instruments out of the combination of different instruments’ decay and timbre” he said. “But the important part for me is that everything is real. I don’t use any sound banks or keyboards. I do have a midi keyboard but it’s just for playing my own sounds.”

Such was the duo’s skill in combining and finessing sampled real sounds that on “Even If You’re Never Awake” it’s impossible to hear any production seams besides stereo panning—the music sounds 100 percent live. Listening to this 9-minute piece on numerous walks (form follows function: the walks took, fittingly, about 10 minutes) I was surprised by how it grows from its opening horn phrase into quite another thing. A few moments stick out: a single crotale at 4:13, an oboe moving across the stereo field at 5:15, two pianos panned right and left at 5:30, bass strings added for oomph at 6:40. By 7:25 until the piece’s end, we’ve arrived at the quite another thing we couldn’t have predicted from the opening horns. This is the four-chord heart of the music and now there’s nowhere else to go but fade out.