It’s hard to talk about the evolution or history of Ambient music without mentioning American duo Windy & Carl, or indeed their long-time supporting label Kranky.
With releases dating back to the early 1990’s, Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren’s sound can be the purest of textured ambient music, layered with reverb, delay and effects. And then as albums progress, you may find yourself pushed into the Space Rock/Experimental spectrum with their instrumental and guitar-heavy approach coming to the fore instead of the background. At times, oven the course of their ~30 year career, the dreamier (Pop) side of music can even be heard, citing massive 80’s punk and rock influences, and the rare vocal additions that float in and out of their discography.
With such a history, and only so much an intro can do, I took the time to send over a few questions to the duo, with the hope of shedding some light on their inspirations, sound and thoughts on Ambient music in general. Read below for an insightful interview with them both.
This mix comes as a perfect soundtrack for our time, in both this moment and indeed today’s world, where we’re treated to a simple, yet blissful curation of textured music, much akin to the infamous Windy & Carl approach. From the duo’s heavy influences in Durutti Column, to label-mates Labradford, and legendary compositions from Aphex and Suzanne Ciani. Float away with some gentle tones that have inspired Windy & Carl.
The new album by Windy & Carl titled Allegiance and Conviction is out now on Kranky.
Tracklist:
1- Durutti Column - Sleep Will Come
2- Stars Of The Lid - Porch (edit #28)
3- Suzanne Ciani - Paris 1971
4- Aphex Twin - Rhubarb
5- Thomas Koner - Kanon (Part 1: Brohuk)
6- James Leyland Kirby - So Pale It Shone In The Night
7- Aphex Twin - Blue Calx
8- Labradford - Air Lubricated Free Axis Trainer
9- Bark Psychosis - Pendulum Man
10- Fennesz - Liminality
11- Arthur Russell - Sketch For "Face Of Helen"
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Interview with Windy & Carl Feb/March 2020
ASIP - As a band that traversed many years and ‘fashions', I’m interested to know what you think of ambient music today and it’s apparent big media ‘revival’ we see year-on-year. You guys must get bored seeing that pop-up again and again over the years given how long you’ve been a part of it?
W - Ambient music - that’s funny. I can't tell you how many people went gaga for those Numero and Light In The Attic comps, and then decided they too had to make ambient music, especially with keyboards. And no - we don't fit into that scene nor have we ever really been invited into that scene. We seem to somehow be eternally our own floating orb in this world, and that is fine.
C - I have been enjoying that there have been a lot of re-issues and collections of Ambient artists who were doing this long before the big media revival which has been taking place during the last handful of years. I'm not bored with it at all, but I do find it very curious that people we know who were once in rock bands (Indie Rock, Garage Rock, etc) that are now 'Ambient artists' all of the sudden.
W - When we started, we listened to a lot of sub pop bands - Codeine, Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney - and groups like Sonic Youth, Neil Young, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Opera and Country and a million other things. We started recording songs and they were songs - short and rather formulaic, and one of our very first reviews said we sounded like the Durutti Column.
As we started making longer form pieces, we had reviews that mentioned Brian Eno. so 1) we have not done a thing that is even close to being Brian Eno worthy as a reference, and 2) the only Eno we had EVER listened to was Roxy Music and the Baby's on Fire album. so we were just plain confused. How the hell was what we were doing in long form pieces like Antarctica any relation to Baby's on Fire? We did not get it at all, until a handful of years later we heard Eno’s Ambient albums. I still don't really feel that what we do is in that realm - we certainly don't use a million effects or computers or processors. What you hear on our records is what we played to begin with, and we don't use a computer to change anything. We have some pedals and a few rack delays, but it's not anything like the set up I see others using. Our music is far more about the technique of playing it - of making it happen - not some kind of studio wizardry.
Sometimes I feel as if our purism (meaning lack of wizardry) in creation sets us apart from so many others, and keeps us from being a part of any scene or movement. Our music comes from inside us, and from this incredible channeling that happens when we play - music that comes through us from somewhere else. I guess I often do not feel as if we are a part of a scene, but I do love being part of the Kranky family of creators, even though even in that world we are unknown in my eyes. Part of my feeling of being left out of everything else is how many years we have run our own record store, and how many people have come in and talked about Ambient music and wanted Tim Hecker or Grouper or Sigur Ros but not had any clue who we are or what we have done. In our eyes, no one knows us. It's weird, its a weird place to be.
So yeah - these pop ups of "new age" or "ambient" cycles come and go and pass us by while we are just doing our own thing.
“We make music because we cannot help ourselves. It has to happen.”
20+ years is a hell of a run for musicians still releasing great records. You had a break in-between and now eight years after your last full length album. I don’t like talking about what’s long or short periods of time as it’s subjective, but are you a band that likes to take your time with music?
W - Well, we have not had an album on Kranky in 8 years, but we released a handful of seven inch singles, 2 different cassette tapes, an almost hour-long piece to help raise funds for our friends who own the UFO factory [BELOW] (their bar was damaged and we made music to help them pay bills while they had to reconstruct the building), so we have not been unproductive at all. Our output has simply been in different forms. We have also been recording that whole time, and we currently have 3 or 4 other full length projects that need to be finished up and then released, including a Jazz album, a tape that will feature 2 tracks of 30 minutes or more each, an album of very dark harsh guitar work, plus more. we have been busy recording and releasing, but not a full length "proper" album on a label.
C: I would rather be able to have albums ready to go much more often that it has been taking us. Since the last W&C album 8 years ago, we have been recording a lot of material during that time. As far as the new W&C album goes, we eventually decided which pieces of music worked well together. Once we had the instrumental songs sorted out, Windy worked on the vocals & concept for the project. We spent a lot of time together mixing the album. We put a lot of time and effort into it, much more than we ever have. The songs we chose were recorded over a period of 6+ years. There is a lot of material we still have to work with. A lot of it does not sound like our typical style. There are some strange jazz-like experiments, some fun synth based songs, some really heavy loud dark stuff too. It was just a matter of time until we assembled the songs for the new album. We have had a lot of fun recording during these past handful of years.
It’s easy to reference you as one of the pioneers of ambient music and on the surface the absence of drums in your music would mean many people automatically put you in this genre, but your sound is much more than that. Do you set out to make “Ambient”? How do your records normally come about?
W- There is no normal with us. There’s a series of events that can happen for us to be making new music. One of us writes, the other listens and offers a layer. Sometimes we play and it just happens.
Antarctica just happened. I hooked up the keyboard to a pedal and pressed a key. I heard Carl running through the house and down into the basement where he hooked up the cassette 4 track we used at that time; then he plugged in his guitar and started to play. I taped down the key I was holding with electrical tape, and picked up my Bass and we simply played. It was spontaneous. Sometimes our music simply happens - it is channeled from somewhere outside of us and is then there coming out of us. Other times, we each have parts that we combine. And sometimes, like in the case of Carl's solo album; I had no ideas; I had nothing to add; because the tracks seemed perfect on their own. (Do you know that Carl has a solo LP? it came out in 2014, and has one of the most beautiful pieces of music on it I have ever heard, and it was so perfect on it's own there was literally nothing I could add to enhance it or to not ruin it.
C- I've always felt that we've never quite been in the Ambient scene or the Dream-Pop scene. There are elements of ambient music in our sound, but we are not just simply ambient. We have much more of a song structure to what we do. Way back in the early years of W&C we thought we needed a drummer to be able to create music. Before we put out our first single in 1993, we auditioned a drummer I knew from a previous band in the late 1980's. We got together one afternoon and improvised together for a couple of hours. We thought it sounded really good & that it might be our way forward. The guy left his drum kit at our house & we didn't hear back from him for about 6 months. It was really disappointing that we never worked again - maybe this is the reason we went ahead without a drummer for the majority of time since then. Sometimes our music comes about from a couple of ideas from either one of us. Sometimes they happen by accident. I think the harder we specifically try to do something, the more time it takes & the feeling of the initial ideas become less interesting. On ‘Depths’, Windy plays most of the main guitar lines and obviously she writes and sings the words. On our new album, I wrote and recorded all of the music myself. There is no formula for each album, we just work with how we feel it should be.
What keeps you going all these years?
W - The same thing that made us start in the first place - an insatiable need to create music. We love music. We hate music. We are huge critics and lovers at the same time.
Before we ever met, we had these intense relationships with music that gave us the longing to be able to create music ourselves, and when we ended up together, it all came to fruition. We were the catalyst we each needed to let out this lifetime of day dreams and emotions and waves of sound. somehow, we seem to only be able to do this together. Yes, we each have solo albums, but we have found that the only way we really feel connected creation wise is when we play together, even if that means one of us starts a piece and the other joins later.
It's too hard to work with anyone else. It's too soul-baring. Making music is hard, and it's really hard if you are shy or nervous or have apprehensions about whether or not what you are doing is any good. We work well together and can actually work on things and find ways to make them better or as good as we can hear in our heads, but need time to figure out. We play and record a lot, and only sometimes do not have the drive to be making music. It's like our own personal illness or demon or addiction or love affair - we make music because we cannot help ourselves. It has to happen.
“This album is a departure in a lot of ways, and we wanted the first track to have an impact and atmosphere that were not our standard style.”
Your new record on Kranky ‘Allegiance and Conviction’- I’m intrigued by the opening track, it was very unnerving but ultimately made the rest of the album feel extremely soothing. Was that the intention?
W - Why do what you always do? Why repeat yourself?
On this record, Carl wrote all the music. I’ve managed to convince him to record more of his playing, because he sits and plays often but does not always record it. This means that in the past chunk of years, he has recorded more than he previously did. As he filtered through recordings, he collected the tracks we used for this record. They spanned about 4 or 5 years. He gave them to me to see what I had to add, and I ended up contributing some samples for track 5 and then vocals for the rest. I wrote song six first, and realized it felt like a story ending, so I wrote the previous tracks as a story and track one is the beginning of the story. The first mixes sounded very much like a typical W&C song, and that just did not feel right. This album is a departure in a lot of ways, and we wanted the first track to have an impact and atmosphere that were not our standard style.
The words and the singing, they took me two full years to do. Two years. I wanted these songs to be better than what I usually do and i was on a mission to sing in tune and in key and to have my voice heard. I know the vocals are a bit louder than on our other records, but I am proud of them and also wanted the story to come through, and you can't hear the story if you can't hear the vocals! While I am normally intensely nervous about my voice - I am very happy with my singing on this record.
It's all sort of a spy story and I wrote it in a way that you can see it from the point of view of either male or female - there are no mentions of gender identification really. I saw it as from a woman's point of view, but it can be from any point of view. Go somewhere foreign, meet your asset, do the job and watch your ass, but find that you have fallen in the old trap - you've fallen in love, and let your guard down, and then been abandoned and in danger.
The end? She gets away, she gets through the forest and to the designated place, but does she live or does she die? You decide. I left it wide open. So in reality - the beginning - it's a feeling of unease is really telling of the rest of the story.
I can hear your aesthetic strongly throughout the mix you provided. Gentle lulls, colors and a focus on some instrumental elements. What was the intention or inspiration with the mix?
W- The mix could have gone in 20 different ways. 1) Other than some old school Kranky cohorts, we stayed away from including friends. 2) We wanted to showcase pieces we enjoyed but that did not have too much movement, and found that most of the Biosphere and Arovane we have was a bit too busy. And so staying away from busy we also had to cut out Charlemange Palestine (whose work I love) and some shorter pieces by Tangerine Dream and Talk Talk. We went for cohesion, a smooth transition from song to song including the texture and tone and frequency of the sound, and then for something relaxing. It does get a bit dark at times, but it's great music for turning off the rest of the world and finding some peace, which we all need these days.
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