(Last Monday I had the rare opportunity to see Stars of the Lid perform live. Because I apparently can’t let a beautiful musical moment stand on its own without documenting it exhaustively, I came home and wrote this review.)

During the first true spring rain of the season, an eclectic array of people—hipsters, the art crowd, older classical-music aficionados, season-ticket holders, and everyone in between—crammed themselves into the tiny seats at the Southern Theater, not quite sure what to expect from the Wordless Music Series‘ Minneapolis stopover. While the artists currently showcased in the series do happen to traffic in instrumental music, the “wordless” component of the name probably refers more to the eschewal of genre tags as outlined in the series’ mission statement: “The various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today … are in an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”

Perhaps in this spirit of thwarted expectations, the stage at the beginning of the evening looked like an avant-garde musician’s romper room: a smattering of laptops, amplifiers, guitars, keyboards, chamber instruments, and even a desk with paints on it. The first performer, Christopher Willits, used a guitar, samplers, and customized software to create improvised, loop-based compositions that synced up with the photography projected on the screen behind him. His sonic constructions were generally ambient—reminiscent of Kompakt artists like Klimek or Donnacha Costello—though they did have a pulse, especially one syncopated piece whose gamelan-like cadences resembled the eighties output of King Crimson or the Talking Heads. New York cellist Eric Jacobsen was next, accompanied by guitarist Kyle Sanna and visual artist Kevork Mourad, who used the aforementioned paints to sketch impressionistic tableaus that were subsequently projected onto the screen.

In near-literal adherence to the series’ name, the only words uttered onstage by Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie were “Hello Minnesota. Thank you for coming.” With that, he and partner Brian McBride—accompanied by a violinist, violist, and cellist—launched into their first piece. (Though “launched” really isn’t the best verb to describe the playing of a sustained organ note.)

If any of this generation’s avant-classical musicians deserve to inherit Brian Eno’s mantle and use it to send the Pitchfork set off into a blissful otherworld of drone-based soundscapes, it’s Stars of the Lid. The duo eschews beats and grooves completely, using guitars, samples, and orchestral instruments to generate infinite sonic loops and minutes-long notes and chords. Since forming in Austin fifteen years ago, they’ve cast a haunting millennial sheen over the genre Eno is generally credited with inventing, or at least overhauling, in the 1970s. Consider also their obvious affinity for Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki, along with Wordless founder Ronen Givony’s assertion during his introductory remarks that, “had these guys been around in another century, they’d be contemporaries of Schoenberg,” and you begin to get a sense of their expansive pedigree.

Take, for example, the Stars’ final piece, “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface,” whose fifteen minutes were devoted almost entirely to a single sustained chord whose constituent parts were manipulated so that certain notes and frequencies swelled and ebbed, grew loud enough to shake the walls of the Southern before descending into a nearly subsonic growl, and then were gilded by the string players’ carefully placed legato figures. On Stars of the Lid’s recordings, the music is undoubtedly amorphous, and until last night it was difficult for me to conceive how it might be reproduced by a live ensemble. But onstage at the Southern, the musicians bent to their instruments at precise intervals; there was a method to the rapture. Wiltzie and McBride, their guitar tones rendered unrecognizable by effects processors, cued each other and the string players by swooping or lowering the necks of their axes.

Meanwhile, the onstage visuals completed the music’s overall effect of core-shaking, sky-splitting gandeur. Halfway through the gorgeous “Requiem for Dying Mothers,” when Wiltzie began the piece’s chilling four-note closing sequence, abstract galaxies bloomed and flowers supernovaed behind him. At one point, a saturated photo of the Minneapolis skyline even appeared. Meanwhile, the guitar necks and the violinist continued the seemingly impossible task of conducting an ambient music ensemble, somehow finding the beginnings and endings of notes whose attack and decay were nearly imperceptible, lost in the blissed-out sonic wash.