Description
Release Date Friday 4th September 2026
All pre-orders will be dispatched/made ready for collection on that day.
First collaborative work from longstanding friends from the Michigan independent scene.
Drift and guitar-born ambient sounds meet electric piano and synth bedding.
Echoes of early Windy & Carl releases as well as early kranky catalogue.
LISTEN : https://windyandcarl.bandcamp.com/album/windy-carl-meet-optigan-conservatory
Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory is a purposefully misleading title for the first collaborative
work from four friends who met close to thirty years prior. All active participants in Michigan
independent music circles since the early ’90s, Windy & 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 & 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 & Carl’s hovering
augmented chord voicings and vaporous guitar drones were electric piano and synth bedding from
Frank & 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 & Carl as well as refractions of the same opacity that
surfaced in the early kranky catalogue.
TRACK LISTING
1. Conductor 2. Coast Starlight 3. Alvin Loving 4. Vellum Paper 5. Apparition on 3rd Street 6. Time
Lines
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