Windy & Carl / Landing. Split EP.

I've probably spent more time listening to Windy & Carl than any other band I know. For the last five or six years, each night as I go to sleep, one of their albums has been playing on the little portable stereo by my bed. Consciousness had spun at least a hundred times before I ever heard it all the way through to the end. These days, it's Songs for the Broken Hearted. This isn't to say that their music is boring or sleep-inducing; merely...vast. Unimaginably so, like the way an electron cloud, dust swirling in sunlight, and a galaxy of stars all look the same when viewed from the right perspectives. If Bach explored the music of the spheres, Windy & Carl have set music to brownian motion.

I remember sleeping over at my grandmother's house as a child, and again later as a teenager when my family lost our house and she invited us to move in with her. It was the house my mother grew up in. Now, my sister lives there, raising her own daughter. My room (now my neice's) was right next to the hulking central-air-conditioning unit, hidden in the hall closet. At the end of the hall was my grandmother's bedroom. Teenagers and the elderly tend to nap a lot during the day and stay up late at night, so we were usually on the same schedule. She spent her evenings knitting and watching TV, and I lay in bed reading and listening to old Pink Floyd records. Hours after everyone else had fallen asleep, she would shuffle by and knock lightly on my door to say goodnight. I'd turn off my lamp and hear her adjust the thermostat in the dark. A minute later, with a distant whir and a white-noise hush, cool air would flood the room. Even under a blanket you could feel the air pressure change, and my door would click as it was pushed shut and the brass latch bounced off the catchplate. To this day, the sound of that air conditioner is my favorite noise in all the world.

When my grandmother died, Windy & Carl, Landing, and some of Brian Eno's ambient works were about all I could listen to. Their hovering thrum took me right back to that bedroom, where I lay in the dark, listening to my home breathe, knowing that she'd just said goodnight.

Split

Windy & Carl's official site
Windy & Carl on myspace

Landing's official site
Landing on myspace