Windy & Carl

Dearborn

Carl Hultgren and Windy Weber formed Windy & Carl in 1993 and released their first single, "Watersong" with "Dragonfly", on their own Blue Flea imprint. Carl wrote most of the early pieces and taught Windy bass. Their sound is built from guitar-derived drones, using delay, reverb and an E-Bow, with no synthesizers or drums. They also ran the Dearborn record store Stormy Records from 1999 to 2021, and photographs by Christy Romanick appear on their albums and in their live projections.

Portal (1994, Ba Da Bing!) and Drawing of Sound (1996, Icon) preceded the Antarctica maxi-EP (1997, Darla) and Dream of Blue (1997, Ochre). Depths (1998) and Consciousness (2001) came out on Kranky. They toured Europe in 1997 with Silver Apples, toured the US in 2001 with Landing, and played the Detroit Institute of Arts with Terry Riley that year. After a quiet spell they returned in 2005 with The Dream House (Kranky), followed by Songs for the Broken Hearted (2008), We Will Always Be (2012), Blues for a UFO (2017), Allegiance and Conviction (2020) and Heavy Early & The Creation of Venus (2024). They scored the film August Evening in 2007 with Mono and others, and Third Man Records included their "Instrumental #2" on Southeast of Saturn in 2020. They resumed live shows in October 2024, and setlist.fm counts 36 setlists.

In a Perfect Sound Forever interview from 2013 they named Codeine and Labradford among influences, and later Alice and John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and free jazz. Wikipedia lists Landing, The Sight Below, White Rainbow, Growing and Yume Bitsu as groups they influenced, and AllMusic called them a leading light of the Michigan space-rock scene.