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And Their Refinement of the Decline | 
| Artist: Stars Of The Lid
Label: Kranky
Category: Music
List Price: $18.98
Buy New: $14.99
You Save: $3.99 (21%)
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 29433
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5.5 x 4.9 x 0.5
MPN: 100
UPC: 796441810024
EAN: 0796441810024
ASIN: B000NIIUX8
Release Date: April 3, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Tracks:
Disc 1
| • | Dungtitled (In A Major) | | • | Articulate Silences, Pt. 1 | | • | Articulate Silences, Pt. 2 | | • | The Evil That Never Arrived | | • | Apreludes (In C Sharp Major) | | • | Don't Bother They're Here | | • | Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage | | • | Even If You're Never Awake (Deuxieme) | | • | Even (Out) | | • | A Meaningful Moment Through a Meaning(less) Process |
Disc 2
| • | Another Ballad for Heavy Lids | | • | The Daughters of Quiet Minds | | • | Hiberner Toujours | | • | That Finger on Your Temple Is the Barrel of My Raygun | | • | Humectez la Mouture | | • | Tippy's Demise | | • | The Mouthchew | | • | December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface |
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 A revival into a quiet sheet of sound... October 19, 2008
F. gutierrez (Fort Worth, Texas USA)
When I listen to this album, it's like I am listening to a completely new album all over again and again and agian and again...Do you grasp the concept? A NEW album, a completely different and familiar sound. The Duo has completely grasped my attention with with this indescribable and magnificent peice of work. When I heard the track "Humectez La Mouture" I fell into an emotional state of tears when I had never known what it was to really cry or even why it came to that point. Maybe it is because it is one of the most beautiful and haunting peices I have ever heard, or because I knew it would be the song I would have played at my funeral one day. Please, if you EVER spend a dime on a peice of music...buy this album. I purchased it twice...CD and LP.
We could all sleep easy if this is what we heard when we closed our eyes. October 13, 2008
Alex TB
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The ambient scene is dying, and the general attitude towards ambient music has almost spiraled back into what it was before Brian Eno pioneered it forty years ago. People just don't seem to have the enthusiasm for atmosphere anymore. Less than experience, people now lean on beats and catchy, trashy melodies. They scoff at the thought of this type of music, and it never occurs to them that it is actually supposed to put them to sleep.
After a long break since their 2001 album The Tired Sounds of Stars Of The Lid, the Austin Texas ambient duo returned last year with yet another ambitious double album. Refinement might actually be an introspective cross reference to The Tired Sounds, which very well might have contributed to the decline of ambient music. That album was ambitious, but in the stereotypical sense of the word. It was, in a word, tired. Spanning two disks and god knows how many records, it often spent twenty minutes leaning on the same dull, inconclusive melodies, and segmenting them through three separate movements with negligible variation. It worked on occasion, but the album as a whole failed as ambient music, being downright dull and unrewarding while actively listened to, and uncomfortably dissonant while passively listened to.
That said, six years later, Stars of the Lid have clearly learned from their mistakes and made their true masterpiece, And Their Refinement Of The Decline. It is not the groundbreaking ambient album that we were waiting for, that would make as much impact on the genre as any Brian Eno or Harold Budd records, but it is a refinement, and we see the band in as perfect a condition as they have ever been in.
The style is the same at its core. Stars of The Lid make ambient drone music, and it comprises mostly of long lasting chords that are held for a long time, and gently drift into one another. This music is, in the same style as Brian Eno and other ambient music, meant to be atmosphere more than anything. This music is meant to accompany a daydream, color a visual passage in a movie or fantasy, or aid in relaxation or sleep. I also find this music appropriate to study to, and I have a very hard time finding music I can study to. Well, not for math. I can do math with music on. It actually even probably helps. It's the social studies and English that is hard for me to do with music. It is hard to read a passage or write something while listening to music. It's the words. But I can study with Stars of The Lid on. At least most of their songs. That says something for what it accomplishes as ambient music.
The instrumentation is pretty simple. Most of the main drone is comprised of cellos. The cello might be my favorite instrument. I was trained on the violin for half my life until I quit. If I could go back in time, I would choose the cello over the violin in a heartbeat. It is the perfect instrument for ambient music, a gentle middle tone below the sharp, often cutting violin tone and above the deep simplicity of the bass. Three people are credited to the violoncelle in the liner notes, "violoncelle" being the more official name of cello. Little history lesson here, cello literally means "little" in Italian, while the "violone" is a classical instrument seldom used today that was essentially a slightly smaller upright bass played while sitting down. The cello is literally a "little violone." The choice to make the cello the basic, fundamental instrument of the music was a good one. Scarcely anything is warmer and more soothing than a cello drone.
The majority of the melodies are played either through synthesizers or on a certain member of a humble, comfortably small horn section that is utilized in a scattered manner. And then each chord is touched with a deep echo. The result is usually very relaxing, and even the largest sounding chords are simple, pure, and warm. Melodies often take a long time to present themselves, and they usually only consist of two or three chords, but once they do, they are memorable. The problem is, most of these songs sound the same and have few unique signposts for recognition unless they are given a very significant amount of time. And even then, you probably won't be able to recognize them by name.
But don't let that fool you. Stars of the Lid have developed a knack for songwriting that eluded them on The Tired Sounds Of Stars of the Lid. Most of the melodies on that album sounded like broken doorbells, and Refinement only steps back into that territory once or twice with much greater success, namely Don't Bother They're Here (maybe this one was supposed to sound like a doorbell?). The band have also stepped away from the eternally dissonant style of The Tired Sounds by making the chord progressions more conclusive and easy on the ears, which is exactly what they should have always been in the first place. This is an ambient album that does not waste time with avant-garde intricacies, and instead immediately pins down a goal and sticks with it. No extra stuff. Just relaxing ambient music.
Highlights are not few. The opening Dungtitled gently starts things off with minimalist chords that slowly sweep around a single constant, an ever present pedal point drone in A. Then we have the only segmented piece on the album, the two movement piece Articulate Silences. Both parts are fundamentally different explorations of the same minimal melody, the first a gentle, comforting piece, the second a slightly more experimental piece, dipping with drones from registers beyond the reach of the first piece.
From here on out, the album scarcely hits any missteps, and the pattern of excellence continues through both disks. Particularly impressive is Aperludes, which sounds like less of a song for sleeping than a Brian Eno soundtrack piece. It evokes contentment, rather than closed door finality or longing. Another killer track is Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage, a shimming evocation of natural beauty. By the second disk, things occasionally get a little darker or more bittersweet. Two songs in particular are much more bittersweet and emotional than their predecessors. That Finger On Your Temple Is The Barrel Of My Raygun evokes a distant feeling of danger, and Tippy's Demise cleverly represents itself. The tipping point has been reached, and the song is clearly the manifestation of this. We hear whatever Tippy is die. The dynamics are important. The closing epic, December Hunting For Vegetarian ****face, caps off the album. It doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, occasionally touching on moments of dissonance through the tranquility. It's nice, but almost twenty minutes is a bit long for one chord with minimal variation.
Minor flaws aside Stars Of The Lid's And Their Refinement Of The Decline is one of the best, most memorable ambient albums in years because there really are not any strings attached (well, figuratively.) What marked the downfall of the ambient movement was experimentalism. When people started realizing that they could make ambient music themselves from the confines of their own home and post their work on myspace, they realized that they had to try something new to differentiate themselves. Stars Of The Lid have come to realize that they can make ambient music that is simple, professionally. This is a double album to be remembered for its melodies as well as its atmospheres, and it foreshadows a recovery of the ambient genre back into something that is special, not messy, for its contrasting goals. It is as much a box of tools as a box of treasures.
Music that keeps you on the creative track August 31, 2008
J. Schaefer (NM, USA)
I play this album on repeat while writing code. I find that I often lose complete track of time and do some of my best work while this beautiful album holds the normal bustle of the office at bay. Even after two months now, this album is still as potent as it was on the first spin.
Headphone Commute Review June 8, 2008
Headphone Commute
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It seems that I've been lately in a "chill out" mode, talking up Somnia, Hidden Shoal, and Darla labels, so it only makes sense that I turn my attention to Kranky once again. Two disks full of ambient bliss come from this Chicago label, giving us yet another quality release from Austin based guitarists Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, also known as the Stars Of The Lid. The latest SOTL release, And Their Refinement Of The Decline, is much more than a collection of drone-based ambient textures. It is indisputably modern classical in nature, where acoustic sounds stand out in front of the curtain of beatless soundscapes. The waves of pads and strings gently swell in dynamics towards the perfectly groomed and endless playa del sonido. These cycles of calmness retreat and repeat, as does everything else in the universe. Some critics may snicker at the genre, reminding them of massage parlors and yoga studios. But that may be because their mind is over polluted with thoughts - the daily noise that always promises a better tomorrow. But only if they pause and really listen, they would locate the present moment and the peace that lies within, with Stars Of The Lid providing the ideal accompaniment. In the world of contemporary ambient composition few excel in continuous evolution of sound. Stars Of The Lid is at the frontier, along with Hammock, The World on Higher Downs, Fennesz, Bitcrush and William Basinski. Their latest album reasserts once again, that Wiltzie and McBride are indeed the stars of our own personal cinema, located somewhere between the eye and the eyelid.
Struck by this album's beauty February 8, 2008
Philip (Dallas, TX)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We all know that feeling, perhaps between your lungs and your heart. Right around where butterflies appear when you're really nervous but the place right above that is struck by beauty and happiness and nostalgia. This album brings about feelings of all of the above and drags listeners along for a massive length of two hours.
When I first heart of Stars of the Lid I didn't get the music at all but something kept me coming back to it. The name, the hype, the cover art, or the thought of the slowly moving sounds and how they truly affected my life. I'm mostly hoping the latter is the case. After some thorough listens it's amazing to me how the album really did change my life. It slows you down and gives you time to put thoughts together, gives you time to really think about things and realize this life moves far too fast. All of these feelings and thought are dragged along for the duration of the time through beautiful compositions of horns and strings. At times while listening to the album I find myself visualizing the sounds of the horns and strings emerging and hiding behind the following sounds which reveal themselves to the environment of sound and composition. It is difficult to differentiate when the songs being or end, though as it is playing it really doesn't matter.
This is an album for anytime. It is one to be actively engaged in, one to sleep to, one to drive to, or one to read to. The effect simply must be desired. It is nearly impossible to effectively describe the effect this music may have on a person's life but to an extent this is how it has affected me. This is what I see and think and become while the soothing, relaxing sounds are evolving. Highly recommended.
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