[Interview conducted February 2004]

Much like the natural force of their namesake, the organic music of Winds is vital, unpredictable and ultimately compelling.  Symphonic string arrangements and elegant piano melodies are woven together with progressive guitar explorations and clean, strong vocals for a sound that is unique and very rich, with each successive listen exposing new layers.  The four Winds - vocalist Lars Eric Si, guitarist Carl August Tidemann, pianist Andy Winter, and drummer Jan Axel von Blomberg - are as distinctive as the music they create, each with his own history in the extreme and progressive metal scenes in Norway.  Currently residing in Washington State, Andy called in to fill in the details behind this unusual creative union as well the other musical projects he is currently involved in…

What brought the four of you together - was it more of the musical talents of each member or a personal thing?
Well, if you start way back, I always for a long time had known about our singer Lars and had seen him perform many times with different acts, so I had him in the back of my mind that when I do Winds, he would be the right guy for it.  Because it has to be somebody who can sing melodic singing without coming short in the theoretical department, being able to do all the different vocal lines and harmonies and things like that.  As far as Jan Axel was concerned, it was a friend of mine who owned a studio and had talked a little bit to me and I said, 'I'm not really sure who is gonna be the drummer in this.'  And he said, 'Well, there is really only one guy who could be the drummer in this.' (laughs)  So that's when he said Jan Axel and we spoke about that and that happened.  Toward the end, the bass player who played in the band at the time had grown up at the same place as Carl and he suggested Carl and that's how he came into the picture.  Of course, later Carl became like one of the people who are actually writing the songs with me.  So instead of like on the first EP we did where he came in at the very end, he's there from the beginning while the people who brought him and I together are all spread out now and not even involved in this anymore.

Do you guys get together at all to work on material?
We usually do it separately.  So far, I've been doing all the major song writing, but for the latest record we've been doing things together more or less.  I've been coming up with basic ideas for the beginning, Carl has come and done guitar ideas based on my ideas and based on what he's done, I've changed a lot of stuff that was there to begin with.  And Lars has been fine-tuning some of the string ideas that I write, kind of re-arranging those parts, and Jan Axel has always been in the studio with me.  So we work together in the studio and there can be like 2 or 3 people there.  Rarely the whole band because there's just no reason, plus getting everybody together at the same time has proven to be somewhat difficult.  But in the studio, we work really well together.  Like for this album, when we did the vocals, Carl and I were there with Lars the whole time, and we worked together on all the vocal arrangements and threw ideas together.  My experience from the past is usually that way of working doesn't really work, but it seems like we've found a unique combination of people who work well together and who are also talented and can bring out the best in each other.  So when we mix the album, this time around for example, it was Carl and me together, whereas the first one was Lars and me and the second one was just me by myself, so that was also something new this time around.

I understand the production was handled differently.
To begin with, Jan Axel used a different drumkit and the drum sound is, I feel, far superior this time around.  The guitars are different - last time we used a different set up altogether.  I felt like we got more of the right sound for the band this time around, as far as the guitar sound goes.  We also got some equipment that we didn't have last time.  The piano sound, there is no comparison - this time around it is so much better.  So on an individual level, I feel like even the strings are much better, the way they were recorded with more expensive microphones.  We used a vocal microphone that costs over $7000 compared to the last time where it cost maybe $1000, so we were able to use much better and nicer equipment, which is again going to produce a better result.  But mainly, the place we mixed it and the mixing console there.  Getting into more technical things, we used a mixing console that is really old, from the 70s, it was a vintage Neve, so it's a completely different league than the kind of stuff we were working with on the last album.  And that has to do of course with money and budget, that we were more able to do what we wanted to do this time around.  Now we felt when we were mixing it, everything kind of fell into place right away and you didn’t have to struggle to get everything to come out and it sounds more open and airy.

One thing I like about the new album is the songs aren't these ten-minute sprawling arrangements, they are very concise.  Is that something you keep in mind when you are composing?
It's always been really important to us to not - in all modesty, being musicians who have a certain level of talent - to not be showy or to show off the talent just for the sake of doing so, you know?  It's more important to us to do what suits the composition and suits the music at any given point in time.  We have at certain times modifying things and thinking, 'Hey, this is a really cool guitar solo,' or 'This is a really cool piano solo, but the song doesn't need it, so there's no point in just throwing it in there.'  Plus we have a lot of that stuff already, so there's no point in going over the top about it.  As far as the arrangements, at least how I feel about it, individually we are okay as musicians - the thing that we have grown on with this album and can probably grow more in the future is arrangements and compositions and song structure, stuff like that.  And that comes from working together more and learning to know each others' strengths and weaknesses as musicians and trying to focus on things that make it work.  Up until this point, I feel like everything has been something of an experiment and going into this album, we kind of knew more than we ever have before at least, what it is was going to be like and how we wanted it to turn out.

Does your classical background help with the arrangements?
Probably.  I mean we feel that we have somewhat of a control over the result and how we make the arrangements and what we choose to do and what we choose not to do.  You can hear on a lot of albums, particularly in the metal genre, people who have really great ideas but sometimes it lacks a little bit on the music theory so you'll hear there are a little bit of mismatched chords and things like that.  We try to stay away from that kind of stuff because we know what we are doing (laughs) and so sometimes we'll have pretty heated discussions in the studio about what we're doing, if this is actually correct. (laughs)  Because one person has done something and the other person has made something on top and sometimes it can be, at least with a distorted guitar, a little difficult to hear exactly which notes are played all the time.  So I might be playing an inverse chord or a variation of a chord that makes it very close to being outside of the range of the song, but at the same time it can work.  So it's not directly wrong, it's just kind of unusual.  But that's part of what makes the songs and the compositions more interesting, that there are some unusual chord progressions that you wouldn't hear that much in metal music.  I feel that is one of the things that we've done with this record that we've made a jump in the right direction from the last one.

Does Lars write all the lyrics?
No, actually I do.  I've always written all the lyrics and will probably continue to.  I came up with the lyrical concept of Winds because Winds has a lot of concept themes, even the whole band is like a concept theme.

How does the album title relate to the songs?
I came up with the album title pretty early in the process, even before all the lyrics were written.  If I were to try to explain what 'The Imaginary Direction of Time' means, it's kind of like the idea of, like you hear about the fourth dimension principle.  It's about how time is linear and the theory of somehow being able to break away from the linearity of the time.  The story, as with all of our albums before, this person or entity, the person who is the 'I' in this one, it is kind of tied into the last one, the Reflections of the I.  Before we made this album, I had kind of made up my mind that it wouldn’t be a flow-through concept, but it ended up being that way anyway.  That's just how I like to write and I think it makes the whole picture, the whole album, more interesting, rather than just 12 random songs about everything.

Do you discuss the ideas and concepts behind the lyrics with the other guys in the band?
I usually don't try to sit down and try to explain it to them, as I don't really with anyone.  That's kind of the beauty of it, I don't really have to.  The funny thing is, most people in the band come from a place of not really caring so much about lyrics.  Carl being a guitar virtuoso, his main focus is on guitar stuff - what the vocals and the lyrics are about isn't so important.  Same with Jan Axel, he's this great drummer who is very focused on drum techniques and also how the music is, but the lyrics have never really been that important to any of them.  One day we sat down and were working on the album and everybody went out after the studio and sat around in a bar and both said to me, 'You know, we've actually been reading your lyrics and I never really do that,' so I took that as a compliment.  I think I have pretty much full confidence in that department.  It was gratifying to hear that because lyrics are probably the most difficult thing that I do with everything in Winds.

I've got to ask about the song "Infinity" - what inspired that?
It's kind of like an internal joke, like I always have to have the last word. (laughs)  But on the last album, too, I did kind of like a piano outro and also a piano intro with the strings and this time I didn't play on the intro.  Basically I have these small little piano pieces in between the songs and here and there.  I sat down and played with some ideas and thought this was a piece that really suited the end of the album and I felt it belonged there from the start.

The End is really good home for you guys because most of their bands are pretty unique.
Yeah, and they have everything from the really heavy stuff to stuff that doesn't even use guitars.  For us, it's the best place to be musically-speaking and to be recognized as something that's not locked into just one category.  Plus at the same time, the reason we would be on The End is because they're the most professional and excellent record label that I've ever worked with.  Andreas is very determined on making the band happy, it seems like he's in this industry for the right reasons.

Can you tell me a bit about your background, both in terms of classical music, progressive rock and metal?
I come from a family that has a musical background.  I have on my mother's side, my mother and her two sisters were all trained classically on the piano since they were very little.  My mother and one of my aunts ended up not doing music at all after the time they grew up, but my one aunt she is actually a very famous jazz piano player today.  So when I was growing up, when I was about 9 years old or so, I took piano lessons, which I did for some years.  But I left because I felt that what they were focusing on was so much outside of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be playing.  So I did it for a few years and then I quit and didn’t really play music at all until I was in my teens and started getting into Metallica and all that kind of stuff.  I saw Cliff Burton play and started playing the bass guitar.  I wasn't very good at it back then (laughs), but you do your best and try.  I did a couple of different things, picked up the guitar after that and tried to focus on that, doing different projects and playing with different guys and stuff.  Then the time came I wanted to change my efforts back to the piano thing, though at that time it was of the keyboard thing really, playing with different kinds of sounds and all the stuff you can do with the keyboards and synthesizers.  When the time came around and the ideas started developing for Winds, you see a lot more of that kind of stuff on the first Winds record because I kind of changed my focus more into being strictly a classical piano player.

That's one of the things I like best about Winds, you don't have all the different synth sounds, and it's focused just on the piano.
Yeah, (laughs) [the synth sounds] are very overused in progressive metal.  I mean cheap, crappy synthesizer sounds that sound like an old Casio in a band that sells 200,000 records, it's kind of misplaced.  So I made a very conscious effort of trying to avoid those things and integrating real strings, that is something that we just need to have there at the same time as piano and acoustic instruments instead of just synthesized sounds.  Which is cool for some things, but for what we're trying to do with Winds is more like an organic approach.

Do you have any other musical projects that you work on outside of Winds?
I'm really glad you asked actually because I'm working on something right now and ever since we finished the Winds album, I've been in and out of the studio working on this and it is called Age of Silence.  It has been announced and is also on The End Records.  The whole recording is completed except for my stuff, so it's really up to me to get my behind going and get it done.  Basically, it's a completely different deal altogether, much heavier than Winds.  I can tell you who is in its first.  It's myself and Jan Axel, on drums, the guitarist who did the first Winds album, Lazazre from Borknagar and Solefald is the vocalist.  Who else… we have more… oh yeah, Eikind, he used to play in Khold, he plays bass guitar, and there's another guitar player who is pretty much an unknown guy, he's also a friend of mine.  The music is a lot heavier, there is hardly any guitar soloing or anything.  It's like a more compact, hard-hitting sound.  It's more modern sounding, with more keyboard sounds.  Still the weird arrangements and very unique still.  It has a sound and a packaging, there's a lot going on, sometimes there are like 8 different melody lines on the vocals at the same time.  I can have like 4, 6, 8 different guitars at the same time… basically a very full and compact t sound.  I haven't done any interviews for it yet so I haven't found the formula for how I'm supposed to present it yet. (laughs)  When I went into this, I was very focused on the fact that I don't want it to sound anything like Winds or even be associated with Winds, and I was very concerned with coming up with an individual uniqueness that would have it stand out.  To say the least, that has become a non-issue.  The way that it sounds is quite different than anything else.  Whether people will like it or not, at least it is going to be something that is very original and different than anything that has ever been done before.  I'm also working on a solo album, which Carl is also doing in our band.  So both of us have a solo album in the process.  That is something I've had in mind for a while, but has been put aside for other priorities, but I will probably finish that this year, if not put it out this year too.  I also did a guest appearance on something called Subterranean Masquerade.  It's Tomer from The End Records, it's his band with some other people - the bass player from Agalloch, the vocalist from Novembers Doom…

All good bands.
Sure…  I haven't heard them. (laughs)  I have heard Agalloch but haven't heard Novembers Doom.  I didn't mean to sound negative - I'm sure they are great bands, I'm just really uninformed, I have no idea.  I was not involved in this whatsoever, it was just something that came up way towards the end because Tomer asked me before if I could contribute to it and it kind of faded away because I had no time to even look into it at that point.  When they had finished everything, everything was pretty much done, we got in touch and I said, 'How's it going?' and he said 'Yeah, my project's done' and I asked him to send it over because I'd like to check it out.  I heard it and immediately thought, 'Oh, here are some great ideas' and I put some melotron on two songs, just some small parts to give him an idea. So I just ended up doing a couple of things and he really liked that.  I was actually very surprised because when he sent me the basic ideas, I liked it and everything, cool enough, but the way that it turned out at the end it was something again that stands out as something quite musically original.  It is reminiscent of a mix of Arcturus and Opeth almost, musically speaking, but still more in the vein of progressive rock, not as heavy.  I found it to be quite original, which is why I decided to participate.

What is your solo material like?
It is much more acoustic.  I've been doing some acoustic guitar and electric guitar with a clean sound.  I basically recorded all the guitars for it and the drums were again Jan Axel, and that's pretty much what has been done for a while.  I haven't started doing anything as far as keyboards yet.  I haven't really thought about what I’m going to do with the vocals, whether I'm going to do some myself or whether I'm going to collaborate with somebody.  But the music is going to be much more calm and mellow compared to what I'm doing, but still kind of intricate and with a drive, so I think it is something that I'm going to be looking forward to doing as well.

[Check out the April 2004 issue of OUTBURN magazine for the rest of this interview]

http://www.winds.ws

http://www.ageofsilence.com