Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory

Windy and Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory is a purposefully misleading title for the first collaborative work from four friends who met close to 30 years prior. All active participants in Michigan independent music circles since the early '90s, Windy and Carl are well-known for their foundational contributions to drift and guitar-born ambient sounds, with songs characterized by deep connections to the natural world and a hard to pin down yet impossible to miss emotional vulnerability. Optigan Conservatory is another duo, made up of Frank Rotondo (leader of Detroit area free music ensemble Laughing Gas) and Fred Thomas (songwriter and producer most often associated with his band Saturday Looks Good To Me), who have been making minimalistic and time-defiant electro-acoustic sounds since 2016. The album came together almost effortlessly in a very short timeframe, but the idea had been building steam for many a year.

In the last days of 2024, Windy and Carl and Optigan Conservatory got together, falling into a mode of sound creation that was almost hyper-natural. Without any discussion outside of the usual stream of jokes and chatter, the quartet set up and started communicating. Added to Windy and Carl’s hovering augmented chord voicings and vaporous guitar drones were electric piano and synth bedding from Frank and Fred. After the initial sessions, all involved parties took time to consider what they’d made, adding new layers and editing the pieces into more definitive articulations. A beautiful and hermetic energy larger than the sum of its parts is captured in the process. There are echoes of the earliest releases from Windy and Carl as well as refractions of the same opacity that surfaced in the early Kranky catalog.

Somewhere between dark, deep space droning and science fiction soundtrack, the music begins to haunt itself. After the album was mixed and edited, it was clear that there were sounds and textures there that no one remembered making. Ghostly voices had joined the conversation. Whether this was just what rose out of this particular group consciousness or some kind of otherworldly intervention, it resulted in something darker than any of the players had made before. Aaron Mertes’ photo that became the album cover is a perfect expression of this strange current; an abandoned storefront somewhere, the anonymous and overgrown decaying of something that once existed in dimensions that now seem unreachable.