Features Soundtrack: Miracle Fortress

What happens when you ask one artist to talk you through their favourite tracks of another? Well, we’re about to find out. Miracle Fortress takes a break from his current headline tour to talk us through his top five tracks from ambient duo Stars Of The Lid.

Madison
On this early work, we hear the soft contours of a 4-track tape machine’s response to the band’s weighty guitars. I like to think that they’d created a sound too large for a 4-track recorder to manage, and forced as much of it as they could on to the deficient medium. We hear the tape buckling slightly under the weight of hefty, diverse chords. Odd mechanical guitar clicks poke occasionally through the fabric, never gaining much traction. Since it’s a lo-fi recording the process is very present and apparent in the finished recording, which means intimacy over immersion, something that will change on later recordings.

madison by Stars of the Lid on Grooveshark

I Will Surround You
By now the band had shifted to hi-fi recording techniques, which this track demonstrates immediately with its inclusion of a subtle subharmonic push. The opening chords are noncommittal, asserting neither a major nor a minor scale, and so our attention will drift in and out of our surrounding situation, back to the content of the music and outwards again. Something I really like about ambient recordings when done well is their subtle enhancement of a scene, without creating a complete transformation, as a pop song would. This track represents a very modest style, but for me it and tracks of its kind are an indispensable element of spending time alone. As the warmth of major key overlays arrives unceremoniously near the 4-minute-mark, the place we inhabit might become more.
I Will Surround You by Stars of the Lid on Grooveshark

Piano Aquieu
This one is an ideal holiday snow-melter that will warm loved ones like opening a present. We could entertain a few close friends, or otherwise build something alone in the garage on a summer’s night. I find music like this can really induce focus during simple tasks in the home, where a song could invade and disrupt.
Piano Aquieu by Stars of the Lid on Grooveshark

Appreludes (In C Sharp Major)
Fanfares for a gala event slowed-down, or the first few paragraphs of a novel wherein we discover a familiar voice. A relative tidbit, the mood darkens suddenly, considering the band’s usual pacing, with C-sharps major and minor in overlay. This an ideal starting-point for a changed frame of mind, late going in a busy day.
Apreludes (in C sharp major) by Stars of the Lid on Grooveshark

December Hunting For Vegetarian Fuckface
The ideal drone title yields an LP’s side-full of endless strings and horns with only subtle shifts and movements. With current listening methods we could fade two copies of this, with a staggered start, into each other continuously ad infinitum. Here is a faultless use of our whole spectrum, unsullied by a single transient, lifted gently by evolving manoeuvres in a vast arrangement. Faces become more beautiful, scents more distinct, and the individuals among us filled up with something new, or at least something we haven’t noticed for a little while.
December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface by Stars of the Lid on Grooveshark