Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie met in Austin, Texas in 1990 when they were both college students. McBride had a radio show on the college station and Wiltzie was a sound engineer for local bands like Ed Hall, as well as doing his
own recording. Ultimately he would work behind the desk for Bedhead. A mutual interest in music ("When you’re at a party in 1990 and you attempt to put on Eric Satie and everyone just scowls at you - Brian simply smiled" Wiltzie told XLR8R in 2003) and obsession with Twin Peaks motivated the two to work together. The duo formed a group called Stars of the Lid, and released a number of recordings for kranky culminating in the epic triple LP/double CD set "The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid."
As a live sound engineer Adam Wiltzie has worked with Labradford, The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. He currently lives in Brussels, recording and working at live shows across Europe. It seemed inevitable that, given the
extended process of recording Stars of the Lid’s albums, Wiltzie would turn to solo recording. Adam Wiltzie did collaborate with Bobby Donne of Labradford on the self-titled Aix Em Klemm album, however The Dead Texan album presents
a collaboration of a different kind. The Dead Texan is a continuation of Mr. Wiltzie’s nocturnal musical fumblings.Many of these songs could have been beginnings to new SOTL tracks,
but he felt they were too aggressive for the new Lid record, which is still being recorded as we go to press.Christina Vantzos is a filmmaker and video artist whose work has been shown in film, music and art festivals in Baltimore, Kansas City, Chicago and Brussels. She has accompanied musicians as a VJ and is working on a video documentary on teenage life in Scotland. Although Wiltzie began composing and recording
themusic on his own, he dabbled with combining his music with Vantzos’ videos; this eventually became a mutually collaborative project with the composition of the music and the creation of the videos becoming simultaneous. Both mediums
played off the other until audio and visual came to support each other seamlessly.

 

The DVD is divided into seven sections which add up to half an hour’s viewing time. The eleven tracks on The Dead Texan are sonatas to Stars of the Lid’s noctambulant fugues. Or as Adam Wiltzie describes them, mini symphonies. The presence of piano and strings are reminiscent of Zbigniew Preisner’s soundtrack work and the feel is suggestive of George Delerue’s early 60’s soundtracks, but the surreal smear of guitars is Wiltzie’s unmistakable contribution. Wiltzie has
been living in Brussels, Belgium for the past few years. A decidedly European, filmic sensibility wafts through The Dead Texan as a song title like ‘La Ballade de Alain Georges’ (with its reference to the 1940’s French actor). Tracks vary from the flowing, transparent melody on ‘A Chronicle of Early Failures - Part 2’ to delicate and fleeting vignettes. Combined with the creation of the seven video segments that accompany The Dead Texan, the tracks appear and depart as brief chamber pieces yet still fit into a greater whole.