PRE-ORDER - EXPECTED END OF OCTOBER
Double LP
Wild that it took so long, but some 30+ years on we’re finally served a first vinyl pressing of Windy & Carl’s debut long player, originally issued as a tape via their own Blue Flea imprint (so named for their dog Flea, who, sidenote, later appeared posthumously on a couple of recordings dedicated to his life…). Three songs in there’s a track titled ‘Ode to Spaceman’, so there was really no mystery as to where this venturing pair were taking their sonic queues from, but they really did do it very well and absolutely instantly. If the influence of their British forerunners (Spacemen 3 of course, but also Loop and MBV) is clear, then the hypnotic grain of their unmoored, drifting compositions was distinctly theirs, a vortex of whirring organs and delayed guitar that’s entirely immersive. Their grasp of the possibility of drone was there from the get go, a dense mass you can almost step inside, like, as the album title describes, a portal. Where to probably depends on how narcotically altered you might be at the time, though the understanding of noise dynamics and ambient sound certainly plays well to the dissociative effects of certain substances, I’d guess, so I’m told… In 1994 guitar music was mostly turning in a different, more retro-active direction, but alongside the likes of Main, Flying Saucer Attack and Roy Montgomery, with Portal Windy & Carl were pushing sound into lesser charted waters, observing their own liminal spaces before that was even a phrase anyone would utter. In 2026, it sounds in no way diminished or less ambitious, and is probably right on the zeitgeist in actual fact. Ahead of their time (behind on their rent). Same as it ever was.
FFO: Spacemen 3, Loop, Flying Saucer Attack, Bowery Electric, Roy Montgomery
