A Winged Victory for the Sullen

A Winged Victory for the Sullen comprises Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and film composer Dustin O’Halloran. Danny Turner speaks to Wiltzie about the duo’s latest theatre production score, Invisible Cities

- Danny Turne

When Adam Wiltzie put the skids on ambient band Stars of the Lid back in 2007, fresh inspiration arrived almost immediately following a chance backstage meeting with prolific Emmy Award-winning composer Dustin O’Halloran. Combining Wiltzie’s ambient guitar drones and O’Halloran’s sparse piano, the duo recorded their eponymous debut album in a variety of large acoustic spaces in studios across Europe.

The duo then took their sound into a more electronic-oriented direction under the guidance of Wiltzie’s long-time sound engineer Francesco Donadello, releasing further ambient albums Atomos (2013) and The Undivided Five (2019). In-between, the collective have scored two movies (Iris and God’s Own Country) and more recently worked with video designer Leo Warner for a theatre production at the Manchester International Festival. Titled Invisible Cities, the original score has been condensed to create a richly expansive ambient album.

Did you pause Stars of the Lid because you wanted to spread your wings and collaborate?

“We’d have to go back to around 2007 for the last Stars of the Lid record. I was a little burned out having done this project since the early ’90s and didn’t consciously take a pause, I just felt like branching out and doing something different. I was playing with a band called Sparklehorse and the Winged Victory for the Sullen thing happened around the end of that tour. We were down in Bologna, Italy and our sound engineer brought Dustin O’Halloran to the show. We just clicked – it’s really easy to write music together.”