Nobody actually plays an Optigan on Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory. It’s just as well—the early-’70s keyboard instrument, widely fetishized among gearheads, is infamous for its finicky pitch. But the moniker that Detroit music-scene lifers Frank Rotondo and Fred Thomas have taken for their ambient experiments, Optigan Conservatory, speaks to a fascination with physical objects, the peculiar noises they make, the way they age into strange functions not intended by their makers. Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory is a celebration of the sound and mechanics of instruments: the rosy plink of an electric piano, the wheezing of an ancient organ returning to life after so many dormant years.
The approach might seem like an odd fit for Windy & Carl, the husband-and-wife duo from Dearborn who’ve been making pristine guitar drone since the early 1990s. Windy & Carl’s music has very little to do with the physical sounds produced by instruments. Windblown albums like Depths and Songs for the Broken Hearted are case studies in sounds “alienated from their labor,” as Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen snarled when explaining his disdain for reverb. There’s often more reverb than guitar audible on their recordings; it was a little shock on 2012’s comparatively stripped-back We Will Always Be to hear the individual strings of Carl Hultgren’s guitar being plucked one by one and assembled into a lattice.
No score yet, be the first to add.
On a blind listen, you might not even guess that Windy & Carl are involved here. Rather than guitars, the bulk of the droning is done on dark-hued organs. That’s the first sound we hear on opener “Conductor,” with no apparent trace of stringed instruments whatsoever. It might at first seem like the record is a coup by Optigan Conservatory, but the couple gradually emerge from behind the drones as the record goes on, culminating in “Timelines,” one of those breathtaking, gold-tinted guitar meditations they have done better than anyone else for over 30 years.
Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory runs through six tracks in 38 minutes, the same proportions as Windy & Carl’s last Kranky release, 2020’s Allegiance and Conviction. But more happens from minute to minute on this album than anywhere else in the duo’s catalog. The chief appeal lies not in the overwhelming blur but in the curious individual noises the players produce, not least the way “Apparition on 3rd Street” emphasizes the ungainly sounds the keys of electric pianos make when insufficiently amplified. This music has less in common with the Terrastock era than the ambient music made by Brian Eno and Harold Budd when the style was still emerging from classical minimalism.
One sound we don’t hear much of is the voice of Windy Weber, whose near-subliminal crooning is an essential element of most W&C projects, either singing candidly about married life or allowing her words to be subsumed into a roaring sea of guitar noise. Early Windy & Carl albums aimed to evoke the vastness of Antarctica or the ocean, but once Weber started singing more, it became harder to separate their practice from the personal and professional ups and downs she’s chronicled candidly both on her blog and in her liners. Without her voice tethering their music to earth, it can’t help but feel like it comes from a different planet—one colder, more windswept and less hospitable.