Rhyme Report

Published on February 21st, 2020 | by Guest Contributor

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Winter Announce New Album ‘Endless Space (Between You & I)’

“Arpeggiated synths and a driving bassline act as a backdrop for Winter’s brittle yet determined vocals, combining to create something truly alive” 
The FADER

The first single off Samira Winter’s forthcoming album for Bar/None Records is available via The FADER today. It’s a dense, darkly irresistible groove that see’s the LA based artist honing her vision and delivering her best work yet.

Bio

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 TengoOf 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 MoiWashed 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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