Audiopile Review: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal marks the first proper full length from Stars of the Lid co-founder Adam Wiltzie, though he’s certainly remained active over the decades with soundtrack work and other projects like The Dead Texan, Aix Em Klemm and A Winged Victory For The Sullen. Despite Wiltizie’s best work coming mainly from these collaborative efforts, Eleven Fugues is one of the strongest records he’s in his extensive and already impeccable discography. It’s also the closest he’s come to the majestic tenderness of his beloved work alongside Brian McBride, whose recent tragic death can be felt in the darker corners of the record. Mixed by Robert Hampson of Loop, Eleven Fugues ebbs and flows from wide open vistas brimming with heart-wrenching strings and into slow-mo descents of glacial ambience. And the occasional puncturing of his dreamy guitar tone through the vapours always adds a sweet relief to the heavy proceedings. Excluding the ten-minute album opener, each track here is under 5 minutes, though his incredible ability to wring such emotive highs and lows in such short spans of time is rather atypical of the lengthier durations he’s tended to work within, resulting in a succinct and easy-to-digest album. A perfect entry point for the uninitiated! 30 years into his remarkable ascent as one of the foremost purveyors of ambient and drone, Wiltzie has arrived with a debut proper that matches the emotional intensity and sacred quietude that has rightly earned him such slavish fans, yours truly included. A 2024 highlight.

The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved. Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.”

Recorded at Wilzie’s home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space. Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis. These are fugue states as much as fugues in a literal classical music sense—smeared epiphanies of uncertain memory and spatial dislocation, coaxed from the unconscious and set aloft.