"fairy tale surrealism"
I remember seeing and speaking briefly with SamiraWinter after she had stepped off a small outside stage at Viva Pomona, in Pomona, California. That was back in 2014 and as Winter, maybe, her most well known track (at the time) was the dream pop laden Aligator. At Desert Daze, 3 years later, in 2017, that same song shifted slower and more dreamy with bit more psychedelic reflections. Now, six years from my first introduction toWinter, on her single, Say, from her new album "Endless Space (Between You & I)" her sound has metamorphosed from bohemian dream pop to a more shoegaze, sort of Beach House affectation bathed in dazzling synths and an overall hush of dreaminess. What hasn't changed is the acute effect she has on her fan base and those sure to become one if they see her live. There is something so utterly real, unaffected and loving about her performances and I distinctly remember boys and girls both looking up and swooning beneath her. How organic or non organic the rest of the album is, is yet to be seen but rumors suggest that the album will have a diverse range of Winter sounds including Samira in a bilingual duet called Bem no Fundo with Dinho Almeida from her native Brazil and from the psyche pop band Boogarins (who I first saw at Burgerama in 2013). Both Winter and Boogarins kind of started their US (psyche / dream pop) journeys around the same time. I always look forward to the art that Samira Winter makes.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
Winter - Endless Space (Between You & I) - Bar/None Records
There's a make-believe, fairy tale surrealism that sets Winter's blend of dream pop and shoegaze apart from her contemporaries. Growing up in Curitiba, Brazil, Samira Winter’s Brazilian mother filled their home with the gentle melodies of MPB (música popular brasileira), while her father introduced her to the distorted sounds of American punk. It’s this melting pot of sonic influences that informed her singular style, pulling from disparate sources to craft something wholly original.
At 18, she relocated to the US to study at Boston's Emerson College, where she first released music under the Winter name, though it wasn’t until the band relocated to LA’s Echo Park that things began to truly take shape. Operating on the fuzzy border of the burgeoning garage scene, Winter built a cult following with a stream of bilingual releases and national tours opening for artists like Broncho and Cherry Glazerr. The bands stateside success took them to Mexico, Europe, and South America, where Samira bonded with kindred spirits in the psych-pop outfit Boogarins.
Fall 2019 saw her sign to Bar/None Records (Yo La Tengo, Of Montreal) and release an EP of lo-fi, diaristic sketches more akin to Red House Painters and Sparklehorse than the dream pop grandeur of her past releases. The stripped back songs provided a clear vision of an artist coming into her own as a songwriter, and set the stage for a new chapter.
On Endless Space (Between You & I), her forthcoming and debut LP for the label, Winter presents her most realized vision yet, drawing inspiration from Broadcast and Melody's Echo Chamber for a glorious, 3-D journey into her world. Invigorated by a rediscovered bedroom demo, Winter built out her unfinished songs with the help of multi-instrumentalist Ian Gibbs, who engineered and produced the 11-tracks before passing them off to Pat Jones (Toro y Moi, Washed Out) for fine tuning.
The resulting album is a masterclass in attention to detail - flickering guitars sputter in reverse, panning from left to right in perfect synch, while snippets of field recordings are delicately interspersed throughout. On lead single “Say”, the deluge of synthesizers is carefully managed, their ebb and flow building momentum without ever overpowering the song, highlighting the tightly wound drum and bass groove. “Bem no Fundo” sees Winter and Boogarins vocalist Dinho Almeida in a bilingual duet, their pauses punctuated by stabs of fuzzed out guitar and glistening keys.
Thematically, the album is deeply introspective, turning inward to examine Samira’s esoteric world. On “Here I Am Existing”, inspiration was taken from the Mary Oliver poem “I’m Feeling Fabulous, Possibly Too Much So. But I Love It”, which explores the feeling of being in natural harmony with one's surroundings. Those themes are reflected in the reverb soaked samples of bird sounds, and the airy refrain of “take me to the forest”. In the otherworldly visual for the title track, the odd movements of time lapsed nature scenes lend an alien quality to the songs warbly arpeggios, setting the scene for a record that barely feels tethered to earth.
On Endless Space, Samira Winter has truly arrived, a technicolor daydream in aural form.
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