Windy & Carl – Dearborn Heights, Michigan, USA

At the end of September, 2000, I had the opportunity to conduct the following live phone interview on my No Soap, Radio show over WNTI-FM in Hackettstown, NJ. As with many musical couples who are "tuned in" to each other beyond the sounds they create together, you will see that Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren will often complete each other's thoughts or turn to each other for further corroboration and elaboration of details. The pair took time out from their busy schedules (a point which repeatedly comes up in our chat) to discuss the origins, influences and future direction of their work together as one of the preeminent creators of ambient, guitar-based atmospherics in the entire Terrastock Nation.

All settled in? Windy, you got the aromatherapy candles going?
Windy: Who, me? No.

I just thought you'd kick back, you know, pour the wine and get comfy after a long day in the office, which for you is one of my ideal jobs, running an independent records store there in Dearborn, Michigan – Stormy Records. With all your recording and occasional touring duties and also running your own indie label, Blue Flea – what convinced you to try your entrepreneurial skills and open a record shop? Tell us about that?
Windy: We’re ill! We just love records. It’s an illness and we just thought we should do it.
Carl: Windy’s been working at record shops ever since I’ve known her and I know she’s always wanted to do that and we finally had the opportunity.

Is that where you met? At a record store?
Windy: Yes!

What's the local music scene like there in Detroit? When I think of Detroit, I think urban music like Motown and house and hip/hop or the garage-y punk style of the MC5, Stooges and Dead Boys. But recently there's been a burgeoning space rock scene – yourselves, Ebeling Hughes, Asha Vida, Warn Defevre's HNIA to name a few. Could you elaborate a little on the so-called "Michigan Space Rock" scene? There was a nice write-up in Magnet magazine a few years back.
Carl: A lot smaller now than back in ‘94/‘95 when articles were being written. A lot of the bands have either broken up or moved elsewhere such as the West Coast to try and make it big – which is the last place I’d ever want to go. There’s a few bands still around, but as far as playing out, it’s difficult to find places to play because the scene is pretty much as you say: punk rock, techno is very big…the whole dance thing…the whole rave thing is very big here.

You've had Stormy Records up and running for about a year now?
Windy: We opened on July 23, 1999, so about 14 months.

As one of my favorite retailers, I can attest personally to your wide stock of indie, avant garde, experimental and hard to find limited editions, but do you also have to stock (and I shutter to even say this) the commercial stuff: the teenybopper, rap, hip-hop MTV Top 40 stuff in order to stay alive and keep the store up and running?
Windy: (laughing) There’s a store about 4 blocks down the street that sells all that stuff. When all these cute little kids wander in and ask "Do you have Brittany Spears?" I tell them, "No, but there’s a store down the street where you can pick that up." We’re more of a specialty shop.

You also supplement the stock with occasional live in-store performances from artists passing through town on their US tours. How has that been working out?
Carl: We’ve had three shows…
Windy: Misha and Landing played here and the first show went really well; we had about 25-30 people. Our most recent was the CD release "party" for some friends of ours in a band called Harmonic Conversion, which is sort of a spacey, psychedelic band. But I felt really bad because only about 8 people showed up.
Carl: That's what you get for being a local indie band….
Windy: It’s a very sad thing because nobody cares.

You've know each other since the late 80s?
Windy: We met in 1989.

And I understand you were even in a little cover band playing Mudhoney and Sonic Youth songs.
Carl: Yeah, with a bunch of older friends. It wasn’t a band, per se. We’d just drink lots of wine and go in the basement and in 1989 that’s the stuff we were listening to. It was just fun stuff to do.

Some of your earliest recordings were as part of a project called Once Dreamt. The music you did - was it similar to what you’re doing now or more of a stepping stone…?
Carl: Definitely doesn’t indicate where we’re at now or where we’re going. It was more song oriented stuff with drums. It represented what we were doing live at the time.

Have you reworked any of that material for one of your own albums.
Together: No.

Was anything ever released under that name?
Windy: There was just a 12".

Your first full-length was Drawing of Sound on the Icon label….
Carl: Drawing of Sound was the second one. Portal came out first on cassette in 1994.

Sorry. And Ben Goldberg reissued Portal on CD on his label right here in New Jersey….
Carl: Yeah; Ben started up Ba Da Binh and someone sent him 15 seconds off that or played it for him over the phone and he liked that and put it out.

[I mention some of the other songs I played during the opening set:]

"Smeared" from the "Mind Expansion Volume 1" EP, which someone scribbled all over the label in magic marker!?
Carl: Oh, you've got one of those "special misprinted ones!"

And a live version of "Instrumental #2" from your split LP, Noises from the Darkroom with Saddar Bazzar. Was that from the "Instrumentals" EP?
Windy: Yes.

Which was the first release on Burnt Hair?
Windy: Yes.

I also played "Fuzzy," which was the first song of yours I ever heard and I was immediately smitten.
[Windy’s chuckling, perhaps at these obscurities.]
Carl: I almost forgot about that one now that you mention it.

And the furthest I’ve gone for one of your songs was all the way to Japan to get "Green," the split 7" with Hopewell.
Windy: Holy Cow!

It still has the 100 yen sticker on it!
Windy: Awww….
Carl: What does that translate into?

(laughing) I don’t know if I got ripped off or if I paid 12 cents for it, so I guess I shouldn’t tell you.
Carl: You got a good deal!

And I'm playing "Antarktica" in the background, which is a wonderful release and a perfect entry in Darla's "Bliss Out" series, but I was disappointed they didn’t choose anything from the b-side for their Darla 100 comp.
Windy: That’s OK. I didn’t think they were using anything for their compilation.
Carl: I don’t think they did, did they?

No. There wasn’t anything on there. Around this time, you also started your own label, Blue Flea. Tell us about that? Was that simply a vehicle to get your music out rather than shopping it around and dealing with other people and labels trying to fit your releases into their schedules?
Carl: Blue Flea we started for ourselves around the end of ’93. We put out "Dragonfly" which was before the Portal cassette.
Windy: We were listening to a lot of things on labels like Creation. Part of the reason we decided to start the label was so that in the midst of going through the records we owned was so we could say, "Hey, look. We put out a record! Here’s our own record!" It was completely selfish. We took some money I had won at a company picnic…
Carl: …at the record store where she worked…
Windy: …and we pressed this 45. We didn’t feel we could even send it to a record label and have them take us seriously.
Carl: We didn’t know what to do with the song at the time, so we figured that was the logical thing to do.

Was that the only release you've put out so far?
Windy: Oh, no.! The Portal cassette came out on Blue Flea…
Carl: …and the "Left Without Air" song was a co-release, part of Blue Flea. The Once Dreamt record was a Blue Flea release.
Windy: The Drawing of Sound vinyl.
Carl: Yeah. We had two different printings on that. Most recently, we’ve done Through the Square Window, which is an Ochre Records sampler of artists on their label.

Tell us about that.
Carl: Over at Ochre, they put together this compilation exclusively for us to release. Most of it’s current and exclusive tracks by the artists on Ochre.
Windy: Talbot [head of Ochre] is a very nice person and a good friend of ours and we wanted to provide an inexpensive label sampler instead of him having to press it in England and shipping it here and it ending up costing a lot of money.
Carl: Import CDs can be a little pricey and we wanted to introduce people to the bands.

Will we ever see that long promised (some might say, threatened) Blue Flea compilation of your singles and other impossible to find sold out material? A lot of people have been wondering about that
Windy: (sighing) Aahhh…the singles collection. Some day there'll be enough time. We've been talking about it for two years. We have somebody in mind who agreed to do artwork for it and Warn Defevre [from His Name Is Alive] said he would be willing to help us master everything….You know, (laughing) there's just not enough time in the day to do all the stuff that needs to be done! So it keeps getting pushed to the back burner.

You've worked with a lot of labels for compilation appearances, one-off singles and EPs such as Burnt Hair there in Michigan, Earwurm and Ochre in England and Darla in San Francisco for their Bliss Out series and your recent double LP (Depths) on Kranky out of Chicago. Since you've gone through all the trouble to set up Blue Flea, aside from early releases, you've chosen to work with others for getting your music out. Why not release your own stuff on Blue Flea? What are the advantages of releasing so much material on so many different labels instead of using Blue Flea?
Windy: Well, Ben Goldberg called us and he said, "I'm listening to this tape [Portal] and I really love it. Let me put it on CD. And we said, "OK!" And then Dennis Breton from Icon Records…
Carl: He's a really good friend of ours.
Windy: Yeah. And we were working together and he said, "Hey, I've got this label and I've got enough money to put out a CD…" and we said, "OK!" And Larry Hoffman [from Burnt Hair] said, "I wanna start a record label. Would you put out a song?" and we said "OK!" (laughing)
Carl: The same with Darla.

Did they approach you?
Windy: Yes. And then we tried for a long time to get a record on Kranky, because we really loved them as a label.

One of my favorite labels. I've probably got something by almost all their artists.
Carl: Probably in both formats, too?

Yes!
[Windy's laughing]
Carl: Some of us are guilty of that, I'm sure.

Yes. Very important for us fellow vinyl junkies in the house!
Windy: We would send them things and they would very politely tell us it's not exactly what they were looking for…
Carl: …but we'll keep you in mind and keep sending stuff.
Windy: So , when we had a demo for Depths, we sent it to them and Joel called and said, "THIS one we like!" And we had a little party! (laughing)
Carl: We went around screaming, "We're dark enough for Kranky now!"
Windy: It was a dream for us to be able to do a record for them. And the fact that our next record is gonna be for them is (hesitates to find the right words), ah, it's pleasing for us, but, I don't know…it just seems like such a neat thing…. I know they're on Chunklet magazine's Top 100 list of Buttheads in rock and roll… [a reference to Chunklet's "Top 100 Assholes in Rock and Roll" in issue #15.]

How does your arrangement with Kranky work? Are you contracted to them or do they simply have right of first refusal for anything you come up with?
Windy: We did it on a definite on the first album with an option on a second album.

And the new one due in January is that option?
Together: Yes.

Before we discuss your own material, I'd like to touch upon this side project you're involved with called 5 Way Mirror. Burnt Hair has just released a wonderful CD called Transcendence (and I played "Transparent Speech" earlier) with you collaborating with Greg Gasiorowski of Violet Glass Oracle. For fans unfamiliar with this project, I would describe it as a little less ambient – no vocals and a bit of a more krautrock feel like Neu! and Tangerine Dream, mostly due to Greg's sampling and electronics. How did this project come about and is it still a going concern or was that CD sort of an end-of-project retrospective or just a one-off experiment?
Carl: That exact CD is a lot of recordings pieced together from about 3 or 4 years. We'd get together sporadically and we correspond through the mail and we'd get him up here occasionally from Toledo, Ohio. He works midnights, so it's really tough to get together with him anymore. We worked on some material this year, so there is more.
Windy: Greg and I had an enormous amount of parental family problems in the past year and a half and it has caused our creativity levels to be very low. And it has made it very difficult to even make plans, because it seems like you make them and then you're needed for an emergency. But we got together in May and he stayed at the house and we worked on some things for a few days and it went really well. We were very comfortable and (laughing) I'd like to listen to the tapes of what we did, but it's sitting…Life is so busy.

Had you released anything earlier as 5 Way Mirror? I seem to recall something on a tape trade I did with someone….
Carl: There was a 7" on Ochre Records. It came out a few months before the CD.

We talked about Drawing of Sound and I'm wearing my T-shirt that I got from Vinita at Rocket Girl Records. You did her first release as well?
Carl: Yes, the split with Silver Apples.
Windy: (laughing) God, I had forgotten about that!
Carl: (laughing) I gotta start writing all this stuff down.

[Laughing] At the end of the show we'll go over your discography and I'll help fill in the blanks…! Now, Ben put Portal out on CD with three extra tracks. Were they recorded especially for the reissue?
Carl: I believe they're from the same sessions. Windy, do you have any recollection of that?
Windy: I remember Ben calling and saying we could have 70+ minutes on the disk, so if you want to record more material go right ahead. I don't remember when the pieces were written, but I do remember recording them in a studio to put them on the CD.

Were the songs on Portal and Drawing of Sound recorded during one long marathon session and then split up for the two releases?
Carl: Drawing of Sound was recorded in a studio with between 8 and 16 tracks…
Windy: You know, Carl, I remember you playing…I have this marvelous tape…I went to Montana in 1993 for my sister's wedding and I took with me this marvelous tape that Carl made for me and it's all this stuff like Stereolab and The Verve and at the very end of it is a version of "Lighthouse" that Carl had done in 1993. So when we released Portal, there already was a version of "Lighthouse" [from Drawing of Sound].
Carl: That might even have gone back as far as 1992.
Windy: It's "Lighthouse," but it sounds so different. Carl recorded by putting things on a boombox and then transferring them onto a cassette.
Carl: I'd go from tape to tape and I was dubbing, I'd add something and then I'd add something else and there'd be another generation and I wouldn't even know how I achieved a lot of the sounds anymore!

That version was without the vocals, Windy?
Windy: Yes.

That leads to my next question, so you can excuse yourself if you don't wanna answer! Drawing of Sound has vocals (or should I just say "voice"?) on almost all the tracks. As you've progressed (aside from the odd single here and there), the vocals seem to have disappeared. I don't mean this to be derogative, but is that a lack of confidence in your voice, Windy, or have you just been writing more and more material that you feel doesn't need any vocal assistance?
Windy: Uhhh, some of each. Sometimes it's just a matter of listening to a track over and over and not having anything come to me. That's how "The Silent Ocean" [from Depths] was written. Carl asked me for months, "PLEASE write words to go with this." And we were listening with a friend of ours one night and Carl said, "Are you ever gonna write words for this song?" And I looked at him and I said, "THERE ARE NO WORDS!… Wait, wait, wait. I NEED SOME PAPER!" (laughing) So, it's a pretty sporadic thing.

Speaking of the "writing process," could you elaborate a little on that for us? Do your songs grow out of freeform jams – Carl just playing around on the guitar, feeling around for a vibe and then, Windy, you add a little bass on top of it or, do you actually sit down and map everything out before you start rolling tape?
Windy: Nothing is mapped.
Carl: Maybe on the earlier things like Drawing of Sound we worked more at it together. Oddly enough, with a lot of the Depths record, and the new one as well, there's a lot of stuff that we each worked on ourselves with just a little bit of help from each other.
Windy: There are times when we sit down…the "Emerald" 7" on Enraptured is an example…we sat down and these songs just came out! We both started playing and there were these songs! There are other times where Carl will write something or I will write something and take them to the other person who can, but doesn't have to…we find ways to flesh them out afterwards.
Carl: Sometimes they're just plain scraps, too.

You don't tour that much (and I want to discuss the Terrastock festivals in that regard in a minute), but do you find it difficult to recreate some semblance of the sound you get on record in a live setting or don't you bother with that? I'm referring to lugging around effects pedals and delays and worrying about overdubs, etc.
Windy: Well, we went on a five week tour in 1997. Kathy Harr, who we met at the first Terrastock [and who helped promote the second one in San Francisco] said if you ever need a booking agent, please contact me. So we contacted her and said, "Hey, let's do this big tour!" And we drove 10,000 miles in five weeks and we played, I think, 26 shows and we met PHENOMENAL people all across the United States and we saw all these beautiful things that I never knew even existed in the U.S. and, with the exception that I was incredibly ill during that trip, it was INCREDIBLE! It was this epic journey and I loved it. We've also done short tours that were fantastic. But now Kathy's retired and we approached other people about being our booking agents and never gotten a response and now, with the store…we don't want to just leave it….
Carl: (chuckling at the irony) Oddly enough, we get more offers now that we have a store! People call and ask if we want to got out and tour!

Do you do any pre-recording to accompany the live shows or, is it just the two of you?
Windy: (meekly) It's just the two of us.
Carl: The only recording, per se, is on the "Antarctica" song, for example, with that little crunching, rhythmic feel that I'll sample and store in a unit and then play that while we're playing. Other than that, it's pretty much live.
Windy: A lot of people ask us, "Where's the tape player?" There ISN'T a tape player! Carl just runs through two amps and I'll do some bass stuff and some guitar stuff and it usually works out very well.

The results on my end are amazing and I've been gathering and squirreling away stuff for years. One of the more atypical things you've done that is sort of the antithesis of the ambient and drone stuff you normally do is the EP of the so-called "guitar drone summit" from the first Terrastock where you, Carl, collaborated in the "Chill Out" room with the Gibbons brothers from Bardo Pond, Jason DiEmillio from Azusa Plane and Dave Pearce from Flying Saucer Attack. Was that "drone summit" just a spontaneous "kicking out the jams" (to use a Detroit expression!) or did you actually sit down and discuss some direction for what you wanted to do?
Carl: (laughing) Jason was the main conspirator of all that. It all came together real quick. Windy ran up to me and said, "OK, get your guitar and amplifier together" and I said "OK." But there was really no planning other than to try and stay together within a couple of the notes. At the time, I really couldn't hear what was going on because for the most part it was so loud.

Was there more material than what was represented on the EP [which was co-released by Earwurm (10" vinyl) and Little Army (CD) as "Providence"]?
Carl: I don't believe so. That was taken from someone's handheld tape recorder and mastered by Henry Owings [from Chunklet magazine and the Little Army label.]

Then there's that exercise in guitar feedback that you did for the Enraptured label showcase compilation, September 14, 1997.
Windy: They asked us to contribute a track so there would be something to sell to commemorate that day. Everybody sent in a track and we sat in Dominic's [head of Enraptured] apartment and stuffed the inserts and put the stickers on. It all came in pieces and we put 'em all together. Then we played and that was a really fun day. Dave Pearce was the DJ for the day and I remember standing in The Garage [the London club where the event was held] and listeing to Alice Coltrane. It was a very strange time period where it seemed like everyone we knew had just started listening to Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Saunders and we go, "Hey! We've been listening to this and this is really good!" (laughing)

I'd like to discuss some of your influences on your music today. I hear everything from Cocteau Twins to Vini Reilly's Durutti Column and Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine with a little krautrock thrown into the mix for good measure. What were some of your favorite bands growing up and how did they influence your music today?
Windy: (without hesitation) The Cure.
Carl: Yeah. The Cure might be the only band. 'Cause their earlier music I listened to.

The "suicide trilogy" as I call it: Faith, Seventeen Seconds and Pornography.
(Both laugh hysterically at this) Windy: Oh, I LOVE those records!
Carl: Oh, yeah!

Hide the razor blades!
Windy: (laughing) Well….

Your music is a little softer than Robert Smith's. But I hear elements of his music and some of the things Roy Montgomery is doing on his recent release [The Allegory of Hearing] on Drunken Fish. Do you keep track of the current sounds coming out today like some of the acts I've mentioned earlier and does that influence you one way or the other? Either in terms of hearing, say, the new Stars of the Lid record and saying – ah, there's that sound I've been looking for – let's pick up on that OR to go the opposite direction – think: oh, that's the same thing they've always done, let's try and mix it up a little – try something a little different?
Windy: I had a huge problem with the record that's gonna come out soon because of a few conversations that I've had with people. There was an enormous amount of pressure on us to put out a record that people would LIKE. That's not for me; that's not what it's about. I love to do music because I love music. Suddenly these people are coming up to us and saying, "These kid's really love your music and they look up to you and what are you gonna do next and blah, blah, blah" and I went, "Oooh, I don't wanna be there. (Softly) I wanna put out a record that I really love the sound of. But I don't know. I still listen to the Durutti Column. Carl flew me to London and we saw them there and I'd sit down with my guitar and go, "Yeah, I'd really love to be able to play like Vini Reilly, but it's not gonna happen." (laughs) I don't know who else.
Carl: I know for me, since we got the store, I've been listening to a lot of music I wouldn't have otherwise heard and I find myself listening to less and less music that's similar to what we do.
Windy: Like the latest Death Cab for Cutie record we've played a ton.
Carl: The band Tristeza has a new one coming out that's really a great record [Dream Systems in Full Circles (on TigerStyle)].

So you listen to a lot of music that's different from yours to sort of get away from it and clear your head.
Both: Yeah.
Windy: Carl complained recently that there was a time when I listened to nothing but Radiohead's OK Computer, Jeff Buckley's Grace and Jeremy Enoch's Return of the Frog Queen…
Carl: (laughing) I couldn't tell where one began and the other one ended.

I'm with you on that one Carl. I don't know Jeremy, but the others made me cringe as well.
Windy: Yeah, and he's going (imitates Carl in agony), "Oh my God!!" (Pause) And let's see? Belle and Sebastian and the Boards of Canada. We LOVE the new Boards of Canada.

Are they like Belle and Sebastian?
Windy: Oh, hell no!

Your music is what I have referred to as "cinematic soundscapes" and one wag even called it, perjoratively, but pretty accurately as "speaker hum." Have you ever considered or been approached to contribute to a soundtrack recording?
Carl: I know we've always liked the idea of doing it. We've had one or two people offer us something like that in the past few years, but nobody's ever gotten back to us on it. But that is something I'd really like to do at some point.
Windy: I had a long discussion with Will Sargent on that one night and one of the neatest things that happened, for me, is that I've had the opprotunity to meet and talk with some people that I've looked up to for a long time and Will Sargent from Echo and the Bunnymen is one of them. And, to make a long story short, he really LIKES our music! And when he comes to town or we go to London, we hang out together and it's the neatest thing. I would say that he's somebody that we listen to now that doesn't really influence us, but I like the sounds that he's creating. And we've been talking about doing movie music because he's been doing it and he's asked us, "Why aren't you doing this? When I listen to your music and close my eyes there are movies going on!"

He's doing that Glide project now?
Windy: Yeah.

I wish you luck on that because I think it would be a good challenge for you.
Windy: I think it would be fun.
Carl: Definitely!

I don't want to leave you without talking about the Terrastock festivals. What are your thoughts on the vibe at these festivals and how you've seen it change over the past 4 years having appeared at all of them. I'm writing a book on the whole project and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on these festivals
Carl: I have a couple of thoughts. I think with the first one in Providence, nobody knew what to expect, so that made it sort of special. Everything sort of fell into place on its own. The San Francisco one was also put together really well.
Windy: I LOVED the venue.
Carl: Yeah, it was really wonderful. Probably the best part of it for me was to be exposed to a lot of bands that I wouldn't otherwise know anything about.
Windy: I like to meet everybody. It's so fun to put faces with the records you've been listening to.

Especially, since so many of the artists are choosing not to put their pictures on the records or, in the case of Depths, they're so blurred, you almost can't tell who's who up there on stage.
Carl: Yeah, it's a little mysterious.

We wrapped up with selections from the "A Dream of Blue" EP that also featured the additional track, "Hypnos" on the CD reissue.
Carl: Shall we tell him the story behind that?
Windy: That's the first song I learned to use the four-track. I was so proud of myself, I said, (excitedly) "Carl, look, I recorded the whole thing on my own!" (laughing)

And until the CD came out, no one had ever heard it?
Windy: Exactly.
Carl: It was intended as a 7" in Japan, but that never happened.

Can people contact you at the store to get copies of your own music?
Carl: We have just the full lengths. None of the singles or the cassettes.

I guess we'll just have to wait for that singles compilation on Blue Flea? Did you have to change the name of the label? [Blue Flea was named after their dogs.]
Windy: No. You know Blue went to dog heaven; but we're gonna keep the name, because it'll still mean the same thing to us. Our dogs were a really important part of our lives.

And on that thought, we bid farewell. Windy and Carl can be contacted via their store's web site at www.stormyrecords.com.