Sodium Pentothal is a heavy, badass barbiturate. It’s been employed as an anaesthetic, a “truth serum”, a dissociative – to treat phobia and trauma – and, until it was banned, as a state-administered lethal injection. In compliant countries it’s still used in euthanasia. One of those countries is Belgium, where New York-born musician / composer Adam Wiltzie now resides. In 1993, alongside the sadly recently departed Brian McBride, Adam formed the seminal, celebrated Stars Of The Lid, and with Dustin O’Halloran he still works as A Winged Victory For The Sullen. Creating elegant, often elegiac, minimal music. Frequently scoring for film and theatre. His fourth solo record, on the surface, seems to be dedicated to the drug. In an accompanying press release he’s quoted as saying “I always wished I could have some”, as a means of relief, to escape what he calls life’s “daily emotional meat grinder.”

The set, a synergy of orchestral, symphonic strings and treated guitar textures, does indeed evoke / invoke an air of chemically-enhanced forgetfulness. Sedated near slumber. Not sleep, but a purposeful temporary shutting down of the senses. Driven by a need to stop thinking. Searching for a space between life and death. Not moving, only breathing. Preferably pondering nothing. However its delicate drones, like a distant, echoed ringing, sometimes suggest waning memories. Wistful remembrances of calm caresses. Warm, but still just memories. Its stretched, sustained shimmer like a flashback to sun breaking cloud, or the smile of a now absent lover. Listening I was thinking if the past is the place where you were happiest, is it wrong, unhealthy to live there? Must you go forward when it takes you further away? A sadness seeps in as these images, with the music, fade.

Stock Horror is a fug / fugue fashioned from glitched fizz and fractured feedback, that feels like a hangover from a horrible night before. Waking with a fuzzy head, blurred vision, and the strong suspicion that mistakes were made. Bridges burned. A realisation that this time you fucked it, for sure, and a self-loathing you won’t out run. Similarly Pelagic Swell could be a cinematic cue for a difficult / painful decision. In contrast, the kalimba / sanza sounds on Dim Hopes recall childhood’s cheerful music box chimes, and the epic As Above So Perhaps Below is akin to experiencing an epiphany. Acknowledging a light in your tunnel. That an end is also a beginning. This is how the record spins. Spiralling between highs and lows – bowed buzzing fanfares, big tremolo’d arcs, and tiny microtones, twisted together in aching melodies – as it summons yesterdays, and spectres, in a deep, dream-inducing drift.

Written on a 6AM shinkansen out of Tokyo…

Adam Wiltzie’s Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal is out now, care of Kranky.