Exclusive: A Conversation With WINDS' ANDY WINTER And CARL AUGUST TIDEMANN

By: Scott Alisoglu

The music of Norway's WINDS is not something that is easily classified. What one can say about it though is that it is magnificently composed and breathtaking in its delivery. Challenging, yet often soothing, melodic, yet unconventional, WINDS' combination of classical music, progressive rock and metal, and dark melodies was brought to the fore in a big way on 2004's "The Imaginary Direction of Time". The quartet of vocalist Lars E. Si (AGE OF SILENCE),guitarist Carl August Tidemann (TRITONUS, ex-ARCTURUS),drummer Jan Axel von Blombeg, a.k.a. Hellhammer (ARCTURUS, MAYHEM, DIMMU BORGIR),and keyboardist Andy Winter (AGE OF SILENCE, SCULPUTURED, ex-SUBTERRANEAN MASQUERADE) have grown by leaps and bounds on the soon-to-be-released (on The End) "Prominence and Demise". With help from the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and special guests Agnete M. Kirkevaag (MADDER MORTEM, FRANTIC BLEEP),Lazare A. Nedland (BORKNAGAR, SOLEFALD),Oystein Moe (ULVER, ex-TRITONUS),and Dan Swanö (EDGE OF SANITY, NIGHTINGALE, ex-BLOODBATH),the act has made the most adventurous album its career. And yet it is one that will be completely recognizable to the diehards as quintessential WINDS. I spoke to Andy and Carl about the band's eclectic and stunning compositions, as well as the new masterwork.

Q: If I were to describe the music of WINDS to someone, I'd have to say something along the lines of classically infused, progressive, melodic kind-of metal/kind-of rock. What do you say when you get asked that question?

Andy: [laughs] Well, it's our favorite question to answer because it's kind of like we're not really in any different position than everyone else, trying to put words to what we do. It's a difficult thing to do because it's a blend of a lot of different things. Like I heard some people say crossover between a lot of different things. We have some classical elements and progressive elements, and fusion and jazzy elements as well. It's really a melting pot of a lot of different things.

Carl: Most people refer to it as progressive dark metal…

Andy: Or classical dark metal

Carl: [laughs] yeah because if you just say progressive metal everyone is going to think about DREAM THEATER and SYMPHONY X and everything, and it's nothing close to that in any way.

Q: Right, but are you comfortable including it within the realm of metal?

Carl: Yeah, I don't have a problem with that.

Andy: No, I don't either. Some people have said in the past about some of the older albums we've done, "is it metal or is it not metal?" My answer to that is "does it matter?" But with this specific release I'd definitely say it's a metal album.

Carl: This is the most metal album we've ever done.

Q: I was looking through all the news posts on your web site, oldest to newest, and I found it interesting that you were issuing studio updates on the new album from as far back as 2004.

Andy: [laugh] yeah, it was quite a while. That was probably a big mistake because people have been anticipating the album for so long. I've been feeling like people have been impatient for us to finish this and to me it was all about being sincere and honest and forthcoming about the fact that we've started working on something now, but we're not in a hurry to finish it. And it's going to be a drawn out process, but people seem to be impatient. So in hindsight I'm thinking that maybe I just shouldn't have said anything.

Q: Did you expect that it would take this long though?

Andy: Well, I sort of did.

Carl: I didn't [laughs].

Andy: I knew because going back to our other albums they've always been a year and a half to two years in the making, and this is the album with the longest playing time of all the records. I was hoping maybe we could have had it finished a little earlier, but looking back at it, why did it take as long as it took? I wouldn't call it a delay or anything; it's just the time that it takes to accomplish getting there basically.

Q: I know Carl suffered a shoulder injury and I'm assuming that had something to do with it too.

Andy: That did delay things for a while as well.

Carl: Yeah, a few months, but nothing more than that. The way we work, it takes time, going back and forth between Andy and myself, and things going to Lars for writing strings. We don't spend time in the rehearsal room working on songs like most other bands, so it takes more time.

Andy: It does take more time, and even when we have everything planned it's all a matter of scheduling the actual recording. Like I remember when we were doing the vocals and the strings that maybe at the end it was a matter of scrounging and trying to get everything done. But I think we were pretty much on the ball around September and then we did it in December, so that's three months of planning and booking flights and getting everything arranged. So time flies. And we're also quite thorough with everything and we wanted to be this time especially thorough. You can call us perfectionists I guess.

Carl: We didn't exactly take the easy line with the material though. Some of it is rather complex in the arrangements, so it's not something that you spend five minutes making some of the riffs and some of the arrangements and whatnot. It does take a lot of time to get all these pieces together and still work on the harmonies and rhythms and everything.

Andy: And it's also like a maturity process where the material that we wrote three years ago is… I wouldn't say it's nothing like what we ended up with on the record, but it is quite different. The compositions sort of evolve and grow, and there are many parts that I played and that Carl played that never ended up making the recording and we wrote new parts along the way in order to get where we ended up.

Carl: If all my parts were on the recording, there would be no space for singing [laughs].

Andy: [Laughs] And that's the way we ended up on this one as well. We did many alternate takes and all different versions; versions of solos, versions of vocals, versions of piano, we did a lot of different ones. Instead of writing just one thing, recording it, and putting it out, like maybe a lot of bands do, it's more of a process of picking and choosing on this one. When we were in the creative process it's sort of a matter of pushing all the creativity that we had inside ourselves out right there and then, and not being so judgmental about it and not sort of filtering everything. Instead it was just going back later and just getting a perspective on it and going, "Well we did this and we did that. What would work best to make this song the best and to make it stronger." And we decided we'd use this part of that and then we'll add something here. It's really sort of a dynamic working process.

Carl: And even up to pretty close to the mixing we added new stuff to some of the songs. I remember Andy had been listening to one of the songs and he figured out that it needed an additional solo. That was a year after I'd done all the solos. That's kind of the way it works. And it's the same with some of the vocals; that's something that came along pretty late in the process.

Andy: We had done two or three of his [Lars] appearances and then we decided to put him in a different place, and we found out that would be suitable. That was much later and the same with my piano parts. I had composed a lot of ideas for piano and then I went and changed them. I recorded everything and then I went back and re-recorded a lot parts; not as many as I expected to, but I did re-record a lot of parts and I wrote some new parts as well. It's a bit of a chaotic working process for sure.

Q: Do most of the songs begin on your piano?

Andy: No, not necessarily. I think when I write song ideas it can be on any instrument. I don't necessarily write it just on piano. I write some ideas on strings and I write some ideas on piano and I write some ideas on guitar. The first guitar solo on the record, I pretty much wrote that, and then Carl made it better. Carl also writes a lot of the guitar parts where we just have open parts or a lot of the ideas even on the tracks that I composed he's done so much to them that it's more like that they are definitely written together. And then on the basic ideas that Carl had on this record and that Lars had on this record it went into that same process of everybody putting their minds to it. And it ends up being what it is in the end.

Carl: This is different on this record than the other ones because this time around both Lars and myself brought basic ideas to the table. On the other albums Andy made most of the basic ideas and then we just put our efforts into it later on.

Andy: I think on the last record we had one song that was pretty much written completely by you.

Carl: Yeah and this time around I think it's more of a collective effort on also the basic ideas. He even wrote the guitar solo for me to play and I basically just added some more runs and harmonies to it and it turned out great. It's not something that I would have probably written, but it was great.

Andy: We were more involved in each other's parts this time, as far as giving input on each other's ideas. We've always kind of gone more and more into that. The first record everyone just kind of did their own thing and that was it. On the second we all contributed some ideas, and on this one we almost, with some of the things, we worked quite collectively on.

Q: As for as the involvement of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, I know you've used them in the past. How does that work in the overall context of the studio experience? Do you bring them in at select times? Do you try to bring them in to do all their parts at once?

Andy: Basically, we write all the arrangements and stuff; Lars is basically in charge of that. And then we have them in and usually they do all their parts in one day. It's like a really intensive day in the studio. But this time we actually did those recordings in a church, not in a recording studio. So it was a little more stressful because everything was done in a mobile setting and we had to bring all the equipment ourselves, and we had the producer/engineer who came in and helped us and set everything up.

Carl: It was the first time we ever did location recording. It was different for us.

Q: What made you decide to record in a church?

Carl: [Laughs] I think basically we had the opportunity to work in a church with really, really good acoustics, which is usually something that is going to cost you quite a bit of money to get to do. But this time we were lucky enough to both have the facilities and the producer on hand to do it at a very, very low cost. So we wanted to give that a try and it turned out great. He's a famous Norwegian producer known for jazz and whatever else, music that we're not necessarily too much into, but we know that he really knew his way around string recording. He's also done several big orchestras in Norway. It was cool to see how a guy like that would work in an environment that was so different. And the results were so overwhelming in the way of sound quality.

Andy: For sure. There are always things that you can go back and say this could have been different, and this and that… It was definitely an interesting experience to do the location recording in a church. It was very stressful, like you're fighting against the clock with the timing.

Carl: It's not necessarily what we're going to do again [laughs]. But it was really cool.

Q: What church was it?

Carl: It was a local church where I live. I had basically done the sound installation there because I run a company doing audio equipment. I was impressed by the acoustics and I asked if there was any possibility for us to do some recording there and they said, "of course."

Andy: It's a wooden church, a timber church from the 1800s, so it's very old. So it's a cool environment to do a recording in for a popular, modern music production

Carl: If we're going to do it again some time, we're going to do it in the summer time and it's not going to be in one day [laughs]. It was in wintertime and it was very cold; there was a lot of tuning going on [laughs].

Q: Before I listened to the new album I was still thinking about "The Imaginary Direction of Time" and remembering it being more of a soothing album in a sense. The first time I listened to "Prominence and Demise", it was not a jolt, but certainly one with more textures and heavier parts. There is a significant edge to this album and the flow is considerably different.

Andy: I don't necessarily listen to people's criticisms a lot, but what has been said is that it is they felt "The Imaginary Direction of Time" and "Reflections of the I" were too similar, although I disagree completely. To me, they are nothing alike, but maybe that's a perspective thing and I certainly won't say that can't be true. But we definitely wanted to sort of not make another album that was just the same again, so we decided to do a little bit more of an edgy and a heavier album. It's quite a bit more dark and grim than the previous one. When we wrote the concept and the music we wanted to put it together in a way that it complements itself. It was a natural step to go. There are certainly differences between this album and the last one that are not only noticeable, but quite substantial. It's probably the most different album and the biggest change that we ever done.

Q: What about the concept?

Andy: Well, it's quite difficult for me to discuss the concept. It's something that I hate doing and it's difficult for me to give any enlightening responses to that; it's just something that needs to be read and something that needs to be listened to. There is not much I can say about the concept really. It's not like you hear bands doing a concept album and now we're going to sit you down and we're going to explain what the concept is about. That's not what my concept is about.

Carl: We can say it's not about goblins and dragons though [laughs].

Andy: It's about pretty big, universal things. It's quite philosophic in nature. It's not like a fantasy concept in a sense, but it also is in a sense. You can maybe tie some definitely resemblance to… I'm not going to compare my writing skills to John Milton's "Paradise Lost", but it's not totally off the mark. It's written in a much more modern, linguistic style, of course.

Q: Going back to the recording for a minute. You mentioned recording in the church, of course. But you recorded it in various studios in Norway, mixed it in Vancouver, and mastered it in New York. That sounds like a rather involved process.

Andy: Most definitely. It's a lot of work in a lot of different places, and a lot of traveling this time as well. It was just a matter of using the places that we felt were going to produce the best results, and also a little bit of a convenience factor. For example, we did the drums in a studio in Oslo. We rented the studio there, but we ended up bringing in a lot of our own gear for the recording. The same thing in the church as well. We've been involved in kind of sculpting this release, not only from composing the songs. We pretty much wrote it, produced it…

Carl: Even selected the microphones [laughs].

Andy: Yeah, totally. We did pretty much everything. We engineered it, we wrote it, and we recorded it. Pretty much everything on this record was done by the band.

Q: You've also got several guest musicians on the album, people you can hear on songs like "The Grand Design" and "Where the Cold Winds Blow". Talk about the selection of these very special guests.

Andy: Starting with the female vocals, which we've never done before in WINDS, Hellhammer has been saying all along that he would like to hear some female vocals in WINDS. I haven't been really open to that.

Carl: I wanted it too.

Andy: [Laughs] Everyone wanted it, except for me, but this time I actually wrote the concept for it. We've known Agnete for a long time. I haven't actually known her for that long, but everybody else has. Lars and her know each other quite well, and Lars is a big fan of her singing. He was really into the idea and she thought it was really cool. She just came up and we had no plans, really nothing arranged ahead of time. We just went into the studio and started putting our minds together, worked out a lot of arrangements, and we just recorded a lot of stuff, and just kept on recording more and more and more until it ended up being what it is with her contributions. It's quite substantial on this record.

And then going into the part with Lazare, he did pretty much just a couple of lines on "When the Dreams of Paradise Died". We were working on an idea where Lars was singing and he thought it would be cool to do something similar to what Lazare does in AGE OF SILENCE. And he just said why don't we just get him to do it then. So we did.

With Dan, I've always liked his stuff. We e-mailed a little bit about some stuff before. We got along quite well and I thought his voice would suitable for some of these parts that I'd written as well. And I asked him if he'd do a small contribution and he said, "Sure, I'll do as much as you want; just send me some parts and I'll see what I can do." So we got it back and it sounded really cool, and we were really happy with it. So then we thought we'd use this style a little bit more, so he just kept using these four different types of vocal styles; like a dark growl, metal voice singing, and the lighter singing, and the whispering, and did those throughout the album.

Q: "The Grand Design" has the most startling vocal differences compared to prior albums.

Andy: That's the one where he uses the four different vocal styles of his in one section.

Carl: Yeah, that's the coolest part.

Andy: He catches you off guard. It's quite unexpected and that was sort of the point to throw the listener off. It is very in your face and he's very loud as hell. He was really happy with it. I would certainly be very honored to work with him again in the future. Hopefully there will be another contribution, but nothing is planned of course.

So moving on to the bass on this record with Oystein, the music being as technical as it is in a lot of the parts on guitars… Lars did some bass recordings initially and I guess he felt like he wasn't sure if everything is the way it should sound because Lars is a great bass player, but he's not used to playing as technical, like these really fast runs on the bass. Oystein has played with Carl in his other band for many years and has more of a progressive and technical side to his playing, while Lars' is more about feeling and kind of the jazzy things. So we decided that we'd invite Oystein to do the fast parts and somewhere along the line we said he's doing a very good job so we'll just invite him to play on the whole record for this one.

Q: Do you have any favorite tracks or perhaps ones that have special meaning?

Carl: Well, I think it's difficult to pick our favorite tracks because I'm fairly happy with the whole thing, but if I had to pick out some, I like "Universal Creation Array" a lot and "The Darkest Path", and also "The Last Line". My favorites change week to week. I've been listening to the album for two months every day when I go to work [laughs], so to me it's not nine songs anymore, it's an album. It all blends together so well to me.

Q: And that's a good point to make about a WINDS album; it is not something where you say, "I feel like listening to track three today." It's an album that you play and listen to in its entirety, and if you don't you kind of lose part of the essence of it.

Andy: I agree. To me it's not really important to distinguish between tracks here. I couldn't really care less to be honest, but I am a little bit more comfortable with the song separation on this album than I've been in the past. But I think the one thing that made me very happy when I started reading reviews, even though I try not to pay too much attention to that, is that people are commenting that they feel the songwriting is quite strong. That makes me happy because that's an area where as a musician, personally, I felt maybe I have room to improve myself. So for me that's a rewarding thing.

Carl: And of course there are favorites as far as my own playing. There are parts on the record where I'm very satisfied with my own work more than on other places. There are certain solos or arrangements that you are really, really happy with what you create.

Andy: Or if it is something that you'd been trying to pull off for a long time.

Carl: Exactly. You get that kind of release that you finally did it.

Andy: If you flip that to the other side of the coin I would say that there are no songs or no parts that I'm unhappy with or wish we had done it differently.

Carl: This is actually the first WINDS album that I feel that way about. On "Reflections of the I" and "The Imaginary Direction of Time" I just wish that we had done all the songs equally well because to me those albums have some really strong songs and some that, in my opinion, are not that great. But on this album we managed to pull off nine equally great songs. They're different, but they're equally great.

Andy: I agree with Carl on that. That has been a progression that we managed to improve on each album. On the last album I don't really feel that there are any weak songs, but maybe there are some songs that stick out more. But on this album, to be quite honest, all the songs on this album I'm satisfied with and I don't think any of the songs are bad or fillers. If you listen to a modern pop record there are maybe one or two tracks that sound really cool and then the rest are just garbage. I don't listen to a lot of music, but I'm very open to listening to different kinds of music. I can appreciate anything pop to jazz to whatever it is too. And I feel that as far as writing strong compositions in modern music, I think it's something that is quite lacking. There may be some really good compositions out there, but on the same album you never really get what you paid your money for. This record is the one that I'm most happy with when it comes to the songwriting.