No Filler Music Podcast - Sidetrack: The Dead Texan

Episode Date: July 8, 2018

We explore the work of acclaimed ambient artist Adam Wiltzie and his side project The Dead Texan. Wiltzie and his collaborator Christina Vantzou approach ambient music differently than Scott Morgan of Loscil, who we talked about last week, leaning more on real instruments sampled into the mix to create more organic sounding tones and textures in their music. If you like this music, check out Wiltzie's main project Stars of the Lid. For more info, check out our show notes: https://www.nofillerpodcast.com/episode/music-review-loscil-first-narrows#sidetrack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Home Depot, how doers get more done. The way we think about it is we always wanted to just make music that we wanted to listen to because we found in general that it was very hard to find music that we liked that was slow enough, that was mellow enough, that was quiet enough. in general, we find it's hard to find records that you can put on that are just completely narcoleptic all the way through the, all the way through the record. Those are our favorite records of all times. It's just a very quiet and all records. And you're listening to the Sidetrack episode for the week. This is No Filler Music Podcast.

My name is Travis. With me is my brother Quentin. And the voice you heard in the beginning was Mr. Adam Wilsey, who is composer and sound engineer. primarily known for his projects, Stars of the Lid and the Dead Texan. Q, do you remember which of those two projects you came across first? Well, let's say first here that the Dead Texan is what we're covering today. And I'm not sure. I feel like it was probably the Stars of the Lid. And I mean, you got just a little snippet of what the Dead Texan is.

all about. And if you listened to our episode last week on Lossel, if you thought that was ambient, I was going to say buckle up, but you don't need a seatbelt for this today. It's going to be slow and steady. Here's the thing, though. His Stars of the Lid project is way more, um, even more ambient. Even more ambient. I don't want to say more ambient, but just more drone, drone-like yeah you know as far as

I mean really I was listening to one of the records today and it's just holding a note you know and just holding it as long as possible

adding another layered note on top of it but it's really just like a tone that you're just that you're just going to hear yeah but so the dead Texan they only released one album as the dead Texan

right and that's the and that's the self-tive It came out in 2004. That's the music that we're covering today is from that album. And that one actually really does hold your attention the entire album. You know, I mean, I'm not to say that, you know, if this kind of music is your thing, that even more... I like how he said null, like null music, N-U-L-L. If that's your bread and butter, then, you know, you might really like...

Stars of the Lid, which again is basically just noise tracks. But the Dead Texan is something else. It's... Well, from what I can tell, so, Stars of the Lid is much more like classical based. You know what I mean? Okay. There's even songs, you know, on some of their records called like, you know, in C-sharp major or in A major.

You know what I mean? Like they are composing these songs like you would, you know, a piece of classical music. But Dead Texan seems to be more, there's, you know, guitars thrown in. It's more, I don't know, organic feeling to it, I guess.

A more experimental, like artsy almost, because, you know, there's vocal tracks thrown in. Yeah, it's all very dark, I will say that. Yeah, it is dark. So Dead Texan is Adam, Wiltsie and Christina Vanceu and I wonder if she sings

if she's the one that's singing Actually I wonder if they're both singing Because it's usually a duo Singing But yes All the music from the Dead Texan is It is very dark I disagree with you on that one actually

Not all of it is dark I mean So the track that we're playing today I think is not dark at all Moody How about that? Yeah, okay. I'll take Moody. But I mean, like, you know, I guess to me, ambient dark, you know, to me it sounds much more like ominous than the dead Texan stuff. But either way, it is, let's put it this way, dude. It's, it's like melancholy. Yeah, there you go. That's good. You know what I mean? Like it's more, it's certainly not like uplifting or, or, you know, kind of like how we talked about.

What was it? The track that we played, brittle by Lossel, we both kind of agree that had sort of a, like a inspirational type sound quality to it. Like it was, it was like, you know,

uplifting versus this stuff is more melancholy. I'm just going to stick with that word. Let's go ahead and play our track. So, um, I played that interview clip of Adam Wiltsy. He was describing,

I like how he used the word, narcoleptic to describe... Yeah, but dude, he had a lot of great descriptors for for this kind of music. Literally.

He's straight up saying like this music, he likes music that that will put you to sleep, I guess. Or just drones on, I guess. Maybe that's what he means

by like the music itself is an arcolectic. Yeah, and he said this has always been his favorite kind of music. So he set out to make music like it. Yeah, and I will say that,

like I said earlier, the Stars of the Lid stuff, is certainly an archalectic. You'll listen to a track and it's literally the same note being held and just played over and over again with subtle changes here and there. I think the Dead Texan stuff is much more interesting and keeps your interest.

So anyway, we played that interview from him. After that, we played this track. You just got to hear just a little bit of it. It's called Glenn's Glee. goo and that is track, I think, two or three on the Dead Texan. It's worth noting that they only have one release, and it's a self-titled release. So it was kind of a side project. I mean, it really was.

It was a side project for Adam and Christina. They both record their own music separately, but they came together. And interestingly enough, they made this record in Austin, Texas. All right, let's listen to it, bro. Yeah, all right. So anyway, you got to hear a little bit of Glens Gew, and you heard in that clip that guitar part that we were mentioning how they kind of throw on guitars and whatnot. This is the very next track on the record, and it's called A Chronicle of Early Failures, Part 1.

So let's just get right into it, and then we'll talk about it. So what I've always liked about this album is that, like, there's a lot of beauty. these songs. You know what I mean? Yeah. Lots of pretty, pretty instrumental instruments. I like the piano. The acoustic guitar is really pretty. It's impactful. Yeah, I like it a lot. But let's, so let's, since we, we talked about Lossel last week and I think after hearing this, like, the two artists are very, very different, right? Lossel's approach to how he composes ambient music, it's much more electronics-based versus... And it's beat-driven as well. Yeah, and it's beat-driven versus Dead Texan and, you know, both of these musicians, Adam and Christina, they like to use

real instruments a lot. You know what I mean? They will have string synthesized or synthesized in their compositions, but a lot of times they're using real guitars, real violins and trumpets and whatnot. I think what they do is they will record a trumpet making the note, and then they will bring that in, sample it and bring it in and use it to make this chord, you know what I mean? But two very different artists, two very different approaches to Ambly. at music, but... But hey, same label, dude.

Lossel and Dead Texan show up on Cranky. Yeah. And what's interesting is Lossel actually remixed a song of Christina Vansu's. Really? Yeah. A song called DHS. So, just to tie it all back together. But anyway, one thing that I wanted to mention was, when I first heard Lossel,

it's around the same time that I heard. dead Texan for the first time. My guess is that both of these artists showed up on whatever Pandora station I was listening to that introduced me to these artists. And at the time, I don't think I ever really had heard music that sounded like this or knew that there were musicians out there making albums of music that just sounded only like this, you know what I mean? As far as ambient music, you know, you hear it.

in maybe like movie scores or something like that, like those types of songs. But I never knew, you know, I don't know, a decade plus ago that there was just this huge catalog of music that was purely ambient. And I love it and I've been listening to it ever since. So you know how we always talk about down tempo music being very repetitive and, you know, and loop heavy and it's worth paying attention to because you will notice subtle changes even though the majority of each song is very repetitive. I feel like this kind of music, you know, it could be consisting of loops,

but they're very like sly with their changes, or with their loops to where, you know, you don't notice that you're listening to a loop. You know, like lots of overlapping layers and, yeah, it's got like a much more organic feel to it. Yeah, so I guess on that point, we talked about how Lawsley uses these drum, not drum, but really just a bass drum hit, you know, a lot of times in his music. Stars of the Lid and Dead Texan, sometimes there's no percussion whatsoever. there's no drum whatsoever, especially in stars of the lid. So it's interesting that to me, what I've always liked about Lossel is how he incorporates, you know, drum beats into his stuff, like the, almost like the heartbeat, bass drum kick type thing that goes

throughout the song, which makes it more, more close, closer to down tempo. I mean, it's not down tempo. But, you know, it's a step closer than stars at the lid for sure. but yeah so anyway yeah it's interesting to you know as we always talk about once you once you're introduced to you know a new type of music like it's just it's always great to to dive in you know speaking of which especially with this kind of music yeah especially with this because i mean and this will this will tie us into our outro song but this kind of type of music goes obviously goes way way back decades.

There's a artist that Adam mentioned who I'm sure I mean this is probably an artist that influenced every ambient musician since the 80s but he mentioned Brian Eno

who's a very well-known not just musician but he's a producer you probably heard his name right you Brian Eno of course. Yeah Yeah, well, it was that one album that was really popular, like music to listen to at the airport or something. Yeah, it was called, so, okay, so he did a series of ambient albums where he collaborated with other musicians sometimes.

But yeah, the first one was called Ambient One Music for Airports. The outro track is actually from his second ambient volume called Ambient 2, The Plateau. of Mirror, and he collaborated with Harold Budd, who is one of my favorite ambient composers, who focuses mainly on, like, piano compositions. And that's actually going to be our outro track for today. It's going to be a track from Harold Bud and Brian Eno. And the song that we're going to close on is called An Arc of Doves. So before we play the song, obviously this was a very,

really quick look at Dead Texan, barely scratch the surface as per usual. But if you like what you heard, go listen to that record. It's a self-titled record. It's the only record they put out. And if you want to hear more from Adam, listen to his primary project, which is called The Stars of the Lid. Anyway, this has been No Filler. You can check us out on our website, No Filler Podcast.com, where you can find links to our

SoundCloud and iTunes and all the other podcast apps that you can find us on. And next week, we are going to close out our Spoonathon, as we've been calling it, with a look at Gimme Fiction, which is their fifth studio album. Basically, we've been hitting, starting with series of sneaks. We've hit every album up to this one. We're going to stop here after next week. and maybe come back to their later albums down the road. But, you know, it's been fun.

Yeah, those first, from series of sneaks to give me fiction, they grew so much as a band. And like we said, like they arrived at their destination. Yeah, they arrived at their destination at Kill the Moonlight, which is the album we covered a few episodes. Yeah, but I look back on that now, and I actually think it's more appropriate to say that, like, Maybe they, you know, were at the airport, you know.

I'd kill the moonlight, but they took off with Gimmee fiction. Gemi fiction to me, it sounds, yeah, Gimmy Fiction is basically spoon as they are today. The songs that they put on Gimmy Fiction are the types of songs that they've continued to write ever since then. So anyway, we'll get into that. but yeah that's been fun dude looking into Spoon

our favorite collectively one of our favorite bands probably our favorite band yeah hands down so anyway this has been a quick look like I said earlier

a dead Texan another ambient musician last week we talked about Lossel go back and listen to that episode if you missed it for probably one of our favorite

yeah we have a lot of shared favorites cue I wonder if that's because we're twin brothers, I don't know. But either way. All right. So again, this track is, the track that we're closing on is called An Ark of Doves. It's by Brian Eno.

It came out in 1980. So this is an old one. So again, this type of music has been going on for decades. So there's a ton of stuff to dive into if you're, if you're fine that you're, you're interested in this kind of stuff. Anyway, that'll do it. This is No Filler Music Podcast. My name is Travis. And I'm Quentin.

And we'll see y'all next week.