Fires Were Shot

Solace

BY Eric HillPublished Jun 1, 2004

The best practitioners of ambient or drone music usually come from geographically open and big-skied places: Australia’s Roy Montgomery, Iceland’s Sigur Rós, and Texas’ Stars of the Lid. Fellow Texans (and Austin home-towners) Fires Were Shot are guitarists John Wilkins and Clay Walton. Unlike SOTL’s pedal-softened electric opuses, Fires Were Shot have a more acoustic and miniaturised approach to their music, though no less thoughtful or richly atmospheric. Indeed they manage to layer an incredible amount of harmonic energy into their (mostly) under three-minute tracks; a firmament of analog tape hiss carries aloft slightly distorted drones atop of which crisp acoustic finger picked strings are free to ring and echo. The duo is careful not to over stack the elements and create a spacious rather than claustrophobic geography of their own.
(Asphodel)

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