WintherStormer - Electric Fairytales
WintherStormer released their second «live-in-studio» electronic album called Electric Fairytales on April 26th 2008. WintherStormer is an unique take on the modern (retro) berlin sound, says positive critiques.
WintherStormer is an electronic band who improvise vast electronic sound-spaces with old analog synthesizers, electronic guitar, percussion and various self-build electronics.
Electric Fairytales is the the third release from WintherStormer, and the second «live-in-studio» album from the band. The music was recorded with an audience present during the recording. On this album the band has broaden and developed their sonic output and creative skills, blending musical craft and spaced-out themes.
Reviews of "Electric Fairytales": http://www.groove.nl/cd/6/63178.html
English press release available for download.
What the fans and critiques say of WintherStormer´s music:
• WintherStormer´s first album was the best album of it´s genre to come out of Norway ever.
• This is terrific stuff and should go down in history as one of the staples of Neo-Prog EM.
• The music is not what you would call smooth, and very demanding – but highly satisfying.
The WintherStormer logo on the CD made by Terje Bakkeløkken.
See the beautiful M42 picture by Trond Ronde from the inside of the cover.
WintherStormer:
terje winther: analog synthesizers, sequencers, keyboards
erik stormer: analog modular synthesizers, sequencers
geir marthin helland: drums, percussion
atle pakusch gundersen: guitar, electronics, vocoder, theremin
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WintherStormer: Electric FairytalesBajkal Records 222018, released April 2008. The second studio CD by WintherStormer. cucumber salad (22:27) all music composed, arranged, performed, mixed, produced and mastered by WintherStormer |
Review from installment 22 of e/i magazine's reviewblog 'audio verité'
Norwegian quartet Wintherstormer must sure as hell make the pillars of heaven shake whenever the electrical arcs of their synths brave the frigid air. Led by mainman synth artisan Terje Winther, this mesmeric group, with a mere two recordings to their credit (minus an official live CDR), are poised to become one of the prime flag-bearers of the aught’s synth/sequencer paradigm. With Redshift on indefinite hiatus, only colleagues Airsculpture and Radio Massacre International can mark out similar territory; that aside, the quartet manage a calamitous, incomparable noise. On Woodwork, synths breathe fire as sequencers tumble down their scored mountainsides like molten lava. A keen experimentalist propensity informs the group’s artistic bent, as vital an element in their make-up as the instruments they employ: “Musical Equitation Extracted from Firelogs” employs weird whispered voices, snatches of synthetic musique concrete, chattering percussives, siren-like synth wails, and demonic bursts of spectral electronic ephemera in a wild concoction recalling David Vorhaus’s White Noise as much as TD’s Zeit. The over half-hour “Monochrome" is a stunning tour-de-force that encompasses Reichian tinkertoy perambulations, morose blocks of synth, weeping mellotrons and processed flecks of errant guitar strain, a bracing display equaling the finest moments of its Teutonic forebears.
The follow-up, 2008’s Electric Fairytales, in many ways betters its predecessor, an often mind-numbing, dizzying spectacle of electronic gimcrackery. “Cucumber Salad” is all sequencer spark and guitar oomph, barreling along fierce frontal boundaries patrolled by klaxon-like modulars and hollering ‘trons. The monstrous deepspace shoals of “Rising Ashes” portends great hostile landscapes where multi-limbed creatures roam, their footprints tactile evidence of electronics reconfiguring alien geography; synths intimidate each other as they circle about, moogs screaming, inimical soundbursts recalling similar flavors cooked up by Pauline Oliveros and Donald Buchla in the mad 60s heyday of experimental synth flight. Temporarily quashing the sequencer pulse, the quartet set off for regions unknown, and we willingly, voluntarily, enthusiastically accompany them. Utterly brilliant stuff, required listening for either the remotely curious or longtime diehard.
Written by Darren Bergstein
Review by Phil Derby from Electroambient Space:
Wintherstormer “Electric Fairytales”
(www.wintherstormer.no, 2008)
4 tracks, 77.16 mins
Wintherstormer is a foursome from Norway with a wide variety of instrumentation, from synths and sequencers to drums, guitars, vocoder, and theremin. The end result is a complex blend of Berlin school electronics with elements of progressive rock and early krautrock. For example, the beginning of the opening track “Cucumber Salad” is electronic noises and knob twiddling like early Klaus Schulze experiments that appeared on his Ultimate Edition box set. It eventually settles down into a chugging bass sequence with a lighter sequence layered over the top of it. A nice soaring guitar lead is added in the middle. “For the Love of All Things Electronic” starts with floating dreamy synths, setting a calm relaxed tone, then another simple bass line is added, and more nice guitar flourishes, with just the right amount of drumming. This is a perfect little track, the shortest at 10:29. “Rising Ashes” starts with “hard” electronic noises again for several minutes until cool sequencing arrives, with solid, non-intrusive drumming to keep the tempo. This one is easy to lose yourself in for its 28-minute course, although various banging sounds and other noises may snap you out of your reverie on occasion during the closing minutes. Last up is the 16-minute title track, which starts with a low sustained drone and a smattering of sounds like a shakuhachi played through a vocoder. This is the most adventurous track, with abstract sounds such that the song seems to start and stop several times. Unlike the others, this one remains experimental, never coalescing into a conventional piece of music, and then it ends quite abruptly.
© 2009 Phil Derby / Electroambient Space
Review by Sylvain Lupari from gutsofdarkness.com:
With Electric Fairytales, WintherStormer redefines the very hermetic and impenetrable style of Woodwork. Recorded live, but in a studio recording, this 2nd opus of the Norwegian quartet offers this tortuous and progressive approach that charmed so much ears fond of sonorous curiosities, but with an approach closer of Berlin School roots. It’s resulting in an album still difficult to tame, but a bit less than its predecessor. A superb musical excursion that allies the Krautrock complexities to atmospheric escapades of EM, but with a zest of musicality tinted with a sensibility which was piercingly lacking on Woodwork.
Noises, heterogeneous sound, rolling in waves in a cosmos sparkling of sonorous limpidity open Cucumber Salad. An intro high in acoustic colors which unlocks eroded hesitations. A sequence which hiccups a tempo to chaotic undulations wrapped of a beautiful fluty mellotron and vaporous keyboard keys which recall the musical years of Tangerine Dream. Once these 3 first minutes gone, Cucumber Salad takes a more accessible musical direction, while maintaining its aura of complexity where a rhythm skipping nervously measures beautiful mellotron pads which float around the lamentations of an electric guitar and twisted synth solos. At once spectral and attractive odes which navigate in shady waters, purified by moments of beautiful hazy strata which sometimes ease sometimes illuminate this pace to abrupt and random beats. For the Love of all Things Electronic present another side of WintherStormer. A WintherStormer clearly more musical and poetic which spreads beautiful ethereal layers from which dreamlike sonorities waltz around soft pulsations which shape a soft languishing pace. An impromptu sensuality which finds refuge in soft strata of a Göttsching guitar, from which solos circulate among a cadence a bit accentuated by the striking of a heavy drum and encircled by reverberating circles, bringing a surrealist touch to a beautiful music inspiring for making love.
Rising Ashes intro is plunging us again into the very psychedelic and multicolored musical universe of WintherStormer. An elongated intro where cosmic tones stream with an acuteness worthy of an anarchical world. At about the 7th minute point, a soft pace pierces this oxidized din to mold a nervous rhythm which rests on good percussions, a strong bass structure and a fusion guitar / synth which elates of ferocity equal to the hammerings more and more punctuated of a drum that’s getting solidarity of this rhythmic whose becomes more and more furious. This psychedelic heaviness crosses less ardent corridors where steams of ethereal Berlin School moderate the aggressiveness of a structure which spreads its striking to the heterogeneous meanders of its intro. A loud track, faithful to Woodwork frame, which pursues its sound imprints on the title track which is a fusion of noises and diverse tones which shape brief musical inserts in a rebellious sound universe.
Electric Fairytales demonstrates the attachment of WintherStormer for music without borders and identities. A music which oscillates between some very daring psychedelic moments and beautiful electronic passages, which are situated in the era of Schulze and Ashra Tempel. An album where the creative paradoxes swim contrary to the harmonious poles, but which is taming a little better than Woodwork. For very curious and risky ears!