Per Aspera Ad Astra
It's easy to speak of music in visual terms: line, texture, color. But ambient artists Stars of the Lid have gone a step further, incorporating field recordings of New York experimental line painter Jon McCafferty at work in his studio into their dark, isolationist sound tableaus. This was done as McCafferty painted the album's cover while listening to the band's music. It's an oddly compelling marriage; Stars of the Lid have always suggested the foreboding side of ambient pioneers like Robert Rich or Steve Roach, gliding sheets of tonal texture that evoke hidden spaces and endless corridors. McCafferty's paintings use stain, urethane, and vibrant colors around rich bands of vertical lines, and his titles often contain the Swedish wordpurl(the sound of water flowing). Using cellos, electric guitars, synthesizers, and other sound sources, Stars of the Lid conjure the common reflective properties of both McCafferty's work and their own.--James Rotondi