To paraphrase an old Gene Siskel joke, the subject today is going to be repetition.  The subject today is going to be repetition.  The subject today is going to be repetition.
The subject today is going to be repetition.
The subject today is repetition.
The subject today is going to be repetition.
The subject today is repetition.
The subject today is going to be repetition.
The subject today is repetition.
The subject today is going to be repetition.
The subject today is repetition.

Naturally you stopped reading when you saw the pattern, and skipped down to this line. Go back and look at it again. Dull, sure, but also kind of striking and poetic the way the lines find their own rhythm. You’re not going to read every word, unless you’ve been tipped off in advance that their author has embedded magic in them, even using such simple, blunt linguistic tools. Working in a similar vein, Stars Of The Lid put on the least visceral show I have ever seen, but seeing them live, you can’t help but feel that you’ve found something wonderful hidden in the drabbest possible packaging.

Ken Reaume isn’t a pure minimalist like the other two acts on the bill, but his melancholy folk songs were nonetheless drawn with tiny gestures. Distracted by the two string players accompanying him, it took me a full thirty seconds to notice that Reaume wasn’t idly plucking at the nylon strings of his guitar, he was fluidly fingerpicking complicated patterns. Where some singer-songwriters rely on wordplay or vocal immediacy to carry their compositions, his guitar’s shimmering harmonies sometimes outshone his quiet, halting voice, which made watching the Toronto native pleasant but not quite the arresting experience it could have been.

You wouldn’t take Christopher Willits for an avant-gardist from his skaterish outfit (a long-sleeved shirt under a t-shirt) or his banter (“you Canadians are really nice!”) but his intentions were entirely serious. Armed with a guitar, a laptop and a synth controller, Willits laid down a bed of rounded guitar tones over computer-programmed blips and barks. Though his lengthy pieces were evidently conceived with form in mind, his sounds felt overly processed and his major-key harmonies didn’t add much in the way of tension or drama, leaving his set feeling flat. Even when it’s put together properly, a lot of serious computer music never approaches the innovative side of commercial dance music in terms of inventing new textures. It often has compensating qualities that dance music lacks, but you sometimes find yourself wondering, “you have a near-unlimited amount of sounds you can conjure, and this is what you came up with?”

For a group whose career has been the definition of extreme minimalism, the initial part of Stars Of The Lid’s set was something of an emotional rollercoaster. Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride (manning guitars and banks of electronics) and their accompanying string trio creeped into their set with a series of funereal, harmonically simple minor chords, while clouds of light purple were projected onto the wall behind them. It was, well, dull — until the clouds turned into Star Trek-style  projections of the cosmos, an obvious but still exhilarating reminder that the place a lot of us first heard this kind of music was in sci-fi movies. Suddenly the music seemed less dull than merely slow-moving, and losing yourself in it was a tantalizing possibility.

A word about drugs: if you don’t dig minimal music, there’s a vocal camp who always suggest you try getting high. Your mileage will vary, but as a sober person who had trouble getting absorbed in this music until I made one crucial decision, I’d say that’s a partial solution to a bigger problem. Being in a state of concert-ready alertness makes you focus on the musicians’ playing, specifically on their decision making, and while watching musicians play a limited series of basic chords very slowly teaches you a lot about the infinite patience needed to play this stuff, it involves you too much in the details of the performance. You can’t see the forest for the trees, and in Stars Of The Lid’s music, the forest is everything.  

Getting high will help you lose your ability to focus on the details, but it also dulls the human aspects of the whole experience — the players’ occasional tentativeness, the wobbles in intonation that become so thrilling in music with limited harmony. So, after some minutes of boredom and frustration, I closed my eyes. And when I finally did during their last piece, “December Hunting For Vegetarian Fuckface,” not only did the arrival of every note and chord become surprising, I somehow slipped into a half-awake dreamscape, finally able to feel all the tiny details that had eluded me as my eyes had flitted from player to player to projections and back again.

SOTL’s last piece was their most visceral, and noisier minimal works are always easier to get into, because noise is inherently more confounding to the ear, and thus more interesting, than consonant chords. But as it turns out, their more delicate qualities were just as accessible. You just have to drown out the noise from your eyes to get there.

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