“I play guitar to hear Carl play guitar—and that still holds true. the sounds we create and the way they intertwine and swirl together brings me an incredible amount of joy and satisfaction. our connection when we make music together is otherworldly, an expression of love and intimacy. It is why I play guitar. for as much as I love to hear other people's music, and as much as I truly love guitars, the music I love the very most is the sound of carl and I playing our guitars together”
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writer’s note
I recently had the sincere pleasure of interviewing the astonishing duo, Windy&Carl, a shoegaze band based out of Michigan, who have been active since the early 1990s. nearly 35 years of partnership between them, the seasonal wear and tear over the years has glistened some of their edges in ways so rich, their personalities developed, softened, sharpened by each other and by themselves. I've tried my best to piece together our conversation in this feature, and I've felt quite sentimental along the way. happy to present their story in their own words, and a note from me in the end.
for a full immersive experience: I do insist that you listen to their NTS show from 2020 while reading this feature. a chance to heighten those emotions.
play: The Silent Ocean from the album depths (released 1998)
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the music Windy&Carl make is emotionally lush. a poignant reflection of the undeniably strong connection between the two.
this could take a chapter in a book.
says Windy
we met in a record store I was working at, and we bonded over The Chameleons. Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Mudhoney, The Byrds, Sonic Youth, Tad, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, The Durutti Column, The Orange Roughies. Alien Sex Fiend, The Cure, The Cramps, The Smiths.
a million records, music on all the time.
we had started dating in the late summer of 1989 and by march of 1990 we lived together in an apt even though I was still in high school. we bought a house in the summer of 1990 and listened to music all the time.
I worked in a record store and Carl worked in a machine shop, nasty hard dirty manual labor, but it paid the bills. what records made us want to create? all of them, but I very specifically remember a few songs by The Chameleons that still fills me with that my-heart-is-gonna-burst feeling.
Windy
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Windy's recollections of days past remain vivid and dreamlike. they are tinted kaleidoscopically and abstractly, much like the paintings she continues to create in her free time. when Carl shares his thoughts with me, I can tell from the nature of his responses that he is both emotional and technical. he responds functionally and instinctively to Windy.
to me, the beginning of us realising that we felt a musical connection to each other was when we picked up a couple of delay pedals, I found a way to use them together to create a celestial sound with a few guitar chords. her (musical) writing is in a different style than mine and I was happy to colour in sounds over her guitar playing and it allowed me to evolve in my own playing and style.
Carl
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I can remember it being 1993 and I was turning 21, and so many of the bands we were listening to were about my age, a lot of the British shoegaze bands, and I said "if they can do it, so can we. " and we did.
so Carl was writing pieces on the guitar and he started teaching me how to play bass. my first ever song was Mudhoney's Touch Me I'm Sick. I do vividly remember Instrumental 2 as the first song where my brain really clicked into the feel of the notes and it was easy to play and remember my parts. except that I have the most debilitating stage fright, and I could not even sing in front of Carl to record. we would go into a studio and someone really lovely like Jay Kuehn who recorded a lot of our early stuff for us, he would run a super long cord down the hall and set up a microphone so I could be super far away and imagine no one was listening. His studio was in an old school and there were lots of long hallways!
Windy
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we also became very inspired by artists like John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and Alice Coltrane in 1997 which changed our approach and the way we composed our own music. their music is very beautiful, in both intensity and meditative quietness. it made us realise patience and the reward of slower, moving, extended compositions. Carl
play: Set Adrift from the album depths (released 1998)
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"we are both very emotional people," Windy&Carl's answers overlap when asked about the evolution of their relationship over three decades—from lovers to a married couple. they discuss how the stages of their intimacy and experiences have influenced their musical bond and, subsequently, the albums they have released.
we met in mid 1989, and started making music in 1993. so we have been together 35 years and been creative partners for 31 of them. we are also very emotional people, and that can make our art that much more vivid, but also amplify the hardships of family deaths etc.
when we are happy we are on cloud nine, and when things are tough, they are very tough.
I have written several songs about how, to me, Carl is the rock in our partnership, and I am a floating cloud. I am anchored to him and he keeps things balanced and moving forward. even after all this time, I would say that same thing holds true. our ups and downs show in the music, but not always how you would think or expect. life experience is hard to put into words and sounds that you will be sharing with others, maybe with listeners around the world, and so I don't often write straight forward words to tell a story.
I write a lot about dreams. can you tell i'm sort of skirting your question?
we are the most comfortable working with each other. we are very competitive and are not the best with constructive criticism, but it is always to make a piece of music better. even when we are having troubles, we feel safe in our creation with each other and that helps balance out all the other stuff.
Ballast is about Carl being the anchor. it's a very pretty song. it was from a single. I have been waiting to hear your voice is about how after my mom died I could see her mouth move in dreams but never hear her speak, and since we had talked on the phone several times a day for the whole decade after I had moved out of her house, it was very hard for me to not hear her. for most of the rest of our recordings, I will let the mystery stay as it is for when and what has happened between us. I really don't want to lay it all bare.
Windy
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Carl tells me he hasn't read any of the answers that Windy has written for all the questions I've asked. yet, Carl's thoughts mirror Windy's, and vice versa. a similar sense of established harmony or equally synchronised dissonance has them edging and flowing in their rhythms alongside each other.
we've gone through a lot of really great times together and some that were not very good at all. we're both very emotional people. we both prefer somethings to be done our own way.
I can't say for sure that still creating music has kept us together. without it I'm not sure we would have made it through everything.
we rely on each other for so much. there are some releases that do point directly to certain times in our lives together. Windy needed to make I Hate People & I think it's a great record. I wish she'd do another album of her own but I don't want to be the source of inspiration in a negative way.
my 'solo' album (TOMORROW) from 2014 was only the result of Windy listening to the recordings I made and feeling she couldn't add anything to it, and convinced me to do it alone.
every intention originally was for TOMORROW to be the next W&C album. our albums that have a lighter feel are the result of us being in a good place together. the heavier darker ones also reflect on things happening in our lives. we always have a sense of great relief once we're finished with a project, it gives us the chance to keep moving forward both musically and personally.
Carl
play: Instrumental 2 from the album Introspection - singles & rarities 1993-2000 (released 2002)
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beneath the surface of their goldmine of sound, sentiments simmer. shoegaze, space-rock, dream-pop, and acoustic ambient all serve as wells of sincere emotion.
I'm not the most word-eee person, expressing myself though music is very rewarding for myself. and to be able to have someone who is like minded and understands what I am trying to do means the world to me musically.
making music for myself / us is the biggest reason why I have done this. meditation though music comes very easy and creating my own is a personally rewarding, even if nobody else was going to hear it. sound and textures of ambeint / shoegaze / experimental put me in another place. I still enjoy listening to music as much as I enjoy creating it. discovering John Coltrane & Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders in 1997 opened the door to new ways listening and creating.
Carl
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we like to be lost in a drone.
the way sound can surround your body and ease you out of your mind. music creates a space to be in, and I can remember how Codeine's Frigid Stars and Labradford's first LPs made me feel, how tracks on the Teenage Filmstar's LP and the early Spiritualized, made me feel. creating music that had a similar ability to lift you up and out of your body was attractive to us, and we had the right tools to make it happen (I have a saying that in our house guitars, amplifiers and records are always welcome and we spent all our extra money in those days on guitars etc.)
the music we make is also akin to painting—forming images through sound. creating a world around us especially with guitars. I love guitars. I love that we can perform and sound like so many more people than just the two of us.
we played once in Berlin, at the Berlin opera house, and the sound man walked around us in circles over and over. he finally started asking us where the tape machine was, and became angered when we told him there was not one, and he told us we had to have one because we could not be doing what he was hearing without backing tapes. I enjoy making music that other people find magical and cannot figure out. that sense of wonder is very important in life.
Windy
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even being part of certain scenes we have always felt outside of the circle. not necessarily us against the world but sort of us on an island and we watch others sail by and wave. we make jokes about how we are the same person, that we are never alone in our own minds because we have been together for so long. since 1997, we have worked, lived, and created together, so generally all day every day. or mostly, anyhow. it does sort of put us in a place where we are in a bubble, and we communicate with each other in a language all our own with references no one else would pick up on, nicknames for everything, and lots of silent communication.
on songs for the broken hearted, well my story on that is when my mom died I had a dream where she told me what it was like in heaven, or where ever it was she was. it was one of the only times her voice was audible in a dream. as I heard her words, they appeared in my dream in her handwriting, around the edges of a beautiful image of the forest. years later, as we were finishing songs for the broken hearted, our friend, Christy Romanick, sent a photo that she had taken thinking we might like to use it (we love her art and have used it on many of our album covers), and it was the image from the dream years earlier of my mom speaking from the other side. this beautiful set of trees in a forest, and when you really look at it, a number of them are dead, having been killed by the very colourful ivy growing on them. that photo is such a perfect metaphor for that album.
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play: Lipskin (Version #2) from the album Unreleased Home Recordings 1992-1995 (released 2020)
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with Windy&Carl, I find each curve and edge of their tunes a ticket to slumber in the sun, or the rain within their universe. since the start, their numerous trajectory releases have been immensely admired, some of their shiniest being Antarctica, Depths, and the recently reissued Consciousness by the Illinois-based record label Kranky. while Antarctica was a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment session recording, Depths emerged from a compromise between the two artists, finding their tones and timbres in sync, meeting somewhere in the middle. perhaps, it is this slight disruption in creative thought that sets this record apart as a timeless classic.
when we first started out recording in 1993, most everything we recorded was already written before we would go into a proper professional recording studio up until Antartica. once we made Antartica at home on the 4-track, we realised that we had more time convenience than a proper studio, where we always felt like we were 'on the clock' and had to have everything rehearsed and made quick recordings.
After Antartica, Depths felt perfectly natural and gave us new ideas for sound exploration (darker). MUSIC is the healing for us, both individually and as partners. It gives us the sense of time in our everyday existence. We don't have kids, just us and our dog(s) and being able to create gives us the sense that time exists and not just a-floating-along-do-nothing feeling.
Carl
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Antarctica was a spark. I started playing the keyboard and carl came running through the house to record me. then he plugged in his guitar and started playing. I taped down the note on the keyboard and picked up my bass. it all happened at once. spontaneous.
Depths came from a whole series of events. several years of events. Carl had wanted a fender jaguar for years and I managed to buy one for him as a surprise at a guitar show. it was his christmas gift in 1994 or 1995. and then the next guitar show came, and we bought a beautiful vox pacemaker amp and a space echo. I started playing guitar. Carl started playing even more than he had been. it was a period of constant creativity. I'd lay on the wood living room floor and feel the notes through the wood, and I'd just play. and we were both writing songs but not together, when it was time to combine them, we both took a stand and said "you can't play on my pieces" which is pretty ridiculous but for as much as we work well together, we can also be very stubborn and aloof and independent.
neither of us felt our songs could be any better with someone else on them, but then how was it gonna be a windy and carl record? it took a LOT of work to agree on how to share our tracks, and how to keep the original feeling of them but have us each present. it took a long time. eventually, we COMPROMISED. take two very headstrong individuals who drew a line in the sand and have them eventually find a way to work it out—that is our album Depths.
Windy
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writer’s note
I've heard some of the most exquisite guitar work on a few Windy&Carl records. a good chunk of them are tastefully combined in the NTS show from 2020, shared at the beginning of this feature. that's also how I discovered the duo on a random spring evening when it was slightly warm and cloudy outside my window, and I was lying flat on my bed. I had it playing in the background for a good 15 minutes and was suddenly overtaken by a soaring sensation inside me. it pierced through me, and I sat up straight, quickly picking up my phone to surf the internet for what I could find about them.
I have that feeling sometimes, very rarely, when I listen to something and an emotion stirs deep inside with a little 'this cannot be real,' like a witness to a spiritually higher experience. I've played the show over and over again, and each time I'm left feeling the same way. it soundtracked most of the curating process of this written piece. it's especially the understanding and belief Windy has in Carl, and equally Carl's response to her in the 30+ oddball years, morphing into reciprocating sound signals, either trenching deep or mildly effervescent, that has me rolling in the pit.
moving in flux through phases of constant creativity, debilitating anxieties, brief separations, only to reunite in the future, always. a connection intensified by coarsely tumbling through time. in the two out of three decades spent together, Windy&Carl also ran a loving record store in their hometown of Michigan called Stormy Records, still active online. collecting records, playing music all the time, taking care of their dogs, and growing beefy tomatoes in their backyard, when not making music. this autumn will see Windy&Carl on stage after six whole years (details mentioned below) and exciting new releases in the horizon.
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Windy&Carl are back on tour this autumn, their first show in the last six years. Kranky showcase: October 25th, Trinosophes, Detroit and November 7th to 10th, Durations Festival, New York City.
love to Windy&Carl for taking the time out to chat with me, letting me swim with their thoughts a little bit, love to Brian Foote for connecting us. all images sourced from Windy&Carl.
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