Windy & Carl

Carl Hultgren (hailing from Detroit, Michigan) began in 1993 to pursue the thread of ultra-psychedelic bands such as Spacemen 3 and Flying Saucer Attack. He quickly understood that the secret lay in producing �cosmic� sounds with his electric guitar, and around this intuition he built the sound of his group. He entrusted Windy Webber with the bass and the (rare) vocal parts. In 1994 their two other companions left to form Fuxa, and the duo simply baptized themselves Windy & Carl.

The cassette Portal, self-produced in 1994, was reissued on CD with three (long) additional tracks as Portal (Ba Da Bing, 1995). The mix allows each track to fade into the next without interruption. The music, hypnotic and dreamlike, owes much to 1960s psychedelic rock and something to 1970s German rock.
Preparation has something of the suspense of Astronomy Domine (Pink Floyd), but without ever taking off into lysergic flight. The feedback coils in on itself, marked by an unsettling acoustic guitar pulse. Ode To Spaceman has the intensity and majestic stride of a religious hymn, driven this time by the spatial swells of the synthesizer, something halfway between Popol Vuh�s Hosianna Mantra and Laurie Anderson�s electronic theater. Firebursts stands out for the way its pyrotechnic, high-pitched guitar sounds (on the edge of Hendrix-like glissandi) are harmonized in an almost celestial manner.
Sound Ignition intensifies the cacophony, turning the poetry of earlier pieces into slabs of amplified interference, a terrible soundtrack of urban civilization. Hultgren thus breaks into avant-garde music.
The turmoil subsides in Approach/ Descend, reduced to background turbulence, a boiling magma at the bottom of a crater, while Webber begins to declaim in the gentle tone of a female Donovan. In Exploration the guitars drift into extragalactic reveries, into �om�-like chimes, again with a quasi�new age aura. Perhaps because of the presence of percussion, Gravital Loft feels like a return to a more human, almost ethnic dimension.
The fourteen minutes of Glowing, with its oceanic surges rising into monumental spirals of feedback, and the twelve of Through The Portal, with its calm wash settling into supernatural echoes, crown this long, exhausting journey that is at once cosmic and psychological.
Meanwhile, the singles Instrumentals (Burnt Hair, 1994), Water Song/ Dragonfly (Blue Flea, 1994), and Emerald (Enraptured, 1995) were released, on which their almost mystical trance stands out even more clearly.

On Drawing Of Sound (Icon, 1996), containing only five tracks, the duo sharpens their art of trance for hyper-distorted guitars. Hultgren has grandly refined his guitar technique and judiciously learned to construct delicate electronic arrangements. The sound is even softer and more subliminal. On You (the only short track) the arrangement is a long drone in slight crescendo.
Awhile (ten minutes), with its hallucinogenic drowsiness of smoothed-out reverberations and its ending of threatening electronic clouds, is emblematic of their way of conceiving the song as a drift of distant melodies, like a blurred and faded echo of a song sung millions of years ago in a galaxy millions of light-years away. Their pieces are not songs, they are cosmic background radiation. Webber merely parts her lips, lulled by the otherworldly tones of the guitar. Her words last only a few seconds. Before and after, the human voice is silent, and sensations reign supreme.
The chimes that carry the fragile harmonic raft of Whisper (the closing eleven minutes) give the album an epic and poignant sense, as if a sorrowful universal message had been swallowed by a vast black hole. Windy & Carl recover the sense of rock song, but infuse it with the desperately heroic climax of the previous record. They stand to Mazzy Star as the early Pink Floyd stand to the Beatles of Sgt Pepper.
Lighthouse (nine minutes) overwhelms even that boundary and unleashes one of their most spectacular maelstroms: the arrangement is polished and majestic to the point of baroque, the rhythm slowed down into narcosis, the singing whispered in an archaic Nico-like register. The epic atmosphere and viola-like distortions give the impression of a slowed-down Velvet Underground hallucination.
The instrumental Venice (eight minutes) is one of the �ambient� peaks of their career, a dense tinkling of chords over an irritating background hum.
In parallel, the cassette Dragonfly (Blue Flea, 1996) was released, containing five long live jams.

On the three lengthy tracks that form Antarctica (Darla, 1997) Windy & Carl took inspiration from German "kosmische musik" of the 1970s. Demoting the guitars to the background and promoting the electronic keyboards, the duo weaves thin, ethereal, slowly fluctuating texturess.
The 22-minute title-track is the perfect soundtrack for a sea documentary, soothing melodies refracted and dilated with a technique that is not too different from Terry Riley's classic Persian Surgery Dervishes, just a lot slower. After ten minutes, the piece enters a state of frantic resonance and then slowly fades away.
Traveling crowds space with warm harmonics and the effect is even more "cosmic". From the floating debris of sound, a melody materializes in the fog, but then gets stretched in all directions by galactic drifts.
Sunrise is a humbler piece, the intense strumming of the guitars creating the feeling of a hymn or prayer worthy of Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra.

The Michigan duo, consecrated by the superb Portal (Ba Da Bing, 1995) and Drawing Of Sound (Icon, 1996) among the classics of trance music for guitar and electronics, arrived at Depths (Kranky, 1998), a seventy-minute album that aspired to express their highest ambitions. Having said that the salient fact is the length of the pieces, and not the stylistic turn hinted at by the previous year's Antarctica (Darla, 1997), what is sometimes missing is that indefinable quality that transforms monotony into spectacle. Hultgren and Webber (now jointly responsible for the music and guitar parts) certainly poured energy and thought into the composition and recording of these organic masses of guitar noise (never so dense and swarming), but perhaps forgot to leave the listener some clue as to the meaning of the whole and of each piece. One proceeds blindly through this forest of lacerating feedback and dizzying distortions. One understands their desire to stun and astonish by making music out of so much chaos, but beyond the harmonic acrobatics very little remains. Thus Sirens inspires respect for the sound wizard, but does nothing more than erect wall upon wall of the same sound.
In nearly twenty minutes Depths certainly paints an imposing and menacing landscape, not only through its long and clamorous free-form drones, like expanding shadows of flocks of predatory monsters, but also through the spectral tolling of bells hidden in the mix, and perhaps redeems the monolithic architecture through the feverish stasis of the whole, yet it does not take advantage of this to articulate even a minimal drama. It recalls the early Irrlicht period of Klaus Schulze, purged of Wagnerian debris and revitalized with tons of explosives. The quarter-hour of Aquatica is even more merciless, intent for half its duration on perforating the eardrums at the most impossible frequencies, and only toward the end collapsing into mantric undulations (though even these diluted into cold minimalism).
Surfacing (thirteen minutes) closes the album under the banner instead of the more naive but also more human sound of the first album. An organ chord left ringing for an eternity while the guitar poetically dallies, then a riff that opens Webber's psalm, and everything fades into nothingness. "Hosianna mantra," as the Popol Vuh used to say.
Hultgren's perpetually moving beehives represent (for better and for worse) the baroque dimension of this ambient music for guitars.

An almost new age feeling has taken over Hultgren's rock symphonies. Consciousness (Kranky, 2001) is not a departure, but a natural continuation, a growing up of a creative spirit who is leveraging on all he has experimented with before. The short The Sun that opens the album is an impressionistic masterpiece: the guitar's frenetic strumming (Windy Webber on guitar) dissects a peaceful melody and bestows deeper meaning to it. Even more paradisiac is The Llama's Dream, a braid of slower tempo melodic figures. Hultgren's kind of counterpoint relies heavily on thick textures achieved by overflowing the sonic space with cascading, twitching tones and interweaving melodic patterns.
The drawback is that sometimes nothing happens: Hultgren does not play music, but merely projects a photograph. The wallpaper of Balance is a multiple refraction of the low-pitch fluttering buzz of a helicopter. The track is eight minutes of fibrillation.
Elevation, that stretches over ten minutes, is a more interesting experiment in classical minimalist. A Terry Riley-like wavering pattern shifts into a Steve Roach-like revolving galactic cloud.
Inevitably, as Windy & Carl's sound cools down and glides towards fabled edens, the compositions transpire more spirituality. The transcendental peak is Consciousness, the longest track, the most relaxed, fluid and free-form. The closing Resolution is basically a coda to Consciousness, an "om"-like instrumental prayer of languid drones that recalls Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra. Windy & Carl now share with Flying Saucer Attack a flair for luminous frescos and the limitation of tedious repetition. Add another fault in Hultgren's program: Webber's vocals. Regardless of their technical merit (dubious at best), the vocal parts detract from the atmosphere. They ground songs back in the tradition of rock and roll, but one hopes that this is precisely what Windy & Carl are "not" about. Luckily, Webber sings only two tracks, Consciousness and The Llama's Dream. May instead Elevation and The Sun be the future of the duo.

Windy & Carl & The Lothars (2001) documents live performances with the quartet led by Kris Thompson and Jon Bernhardt.

Introspection (Blue Flea, 2002) is a triple disc of singles, EPs, compilation tracks and assorted rarities.

The EP Dedications to Flea (Brainwashed, 2005) contains two lengthy pieces (19' and 18') dedicated to their dead dog. The first part of guitar doodling is a nice simple requiem, while the second part, that uses recordings of the dog, builds up with the apocalyptic intensity of the pipe organ of a cathedral, contrasting the dog when it was alive and the sense of eternal death in an intriguing way. The effect can also be amusing (probably not the musicians' intention!).

The Dream House (Kranky, 2005) contains the two parts of The Dream House, only vaguely related to LaMonte Young's static, droning minimalism of the 1960s, as Windy & Carl's version grows in volume and density to acquire an extragalactic quality more akin to Klaus Schulze's kosmische musik, and then fades away in a gentle tinkling of bells. The shorter second part is even more romantic, revolving around a Tibetan-style melodic languor. The CD version is packaged together with Dedications to Flea.

Songs For The Broken Hearted (Kranky, 2008) was a lame collection of regular songs (with lots of singing, which never was their forte).

Instrumentals For The Broken Hearted (Blue Flea, 2009) collects unreleased instrumental versions of songs from Songs For the Broken Hearted.

Windy Weber debuted solo with I Hate People (2008).

We Will Always Be (2012) is the mere routine of two skilled veterans who can craft classic-sounding music virtually blindfolded: the hypnotic, cathartic, skeletal 19-minute Fainting in the Presence of the Lord, the tender eight-minute The Smell of Old Books and the glacial twelve-minute Looking Glass are technically redundant but physically impeccable; whereas Remember demonstrates their craft in the shorter format.

Blues for a UFO (2017) contains three lengthy compositions: the 47-minute Blues for a UFO, a requiem of sorts for a historical Detroit venue, the UFO Factory, that was to be demolished, which begins with a ten-minute ethereal dirge, followed by ten minutes of a robotic drone, followed by ten minutes of a slow build-up, followed by ten minutes of anguished distorted variations; the gentle dense instrumental Zen-inspired droning filigree of the nine-minute Watching the Stars; and the melancholy slo-core hymn-like chant of the eight-minute A New World in the vein of Low.

Carl Hultgren debuted solo with Tomorrow (2014). Rather than the droning pieces and the melodic pieces, the most interesting moments come with the the rocking riff of Ledge and the Ennio Morricone-inspired Evening that rely on intricate guitar patterns. The centerpiece, the 18-minute Transparency and Light, is a gently rolling guitar dronescape that affords magnificent views on a mysterious land. The eight-minute Invisible combines that oneiric atmosphere with piano notes so that the cosmic yearning weds a sense of intimacy. The album closes with the more obviously cosmic panorama, Found My Home. There exists also a 19-minute version of Found My Home.

Six years in the making, Allegiance and Conviction (2020) veered towards more conventional "pop" songs. Nonetheless, Recon is more notable for the ringing guitar tones that drown the singing than for the melody itself, just like the nine-minute Moth to the Flame is mainly notable for the fluttering instrumental coda. A loud droning distortion blankets Alone, perhaps the most emotional piece. It is a very minot work.

Heavy Early & The Creation of Venus (2024) is a two-hour album containing the 52-minute Heavy Early, the 54-minute The Creation of Venus, and the ten-minute Heavy Creation.