Out the door, into the streets, gravel crunching underfoot. Yesterday's snow has melted. A few grey thoughts are probably still here. «Only in the distance does the intensity of what I experience emerge.» (1)

The right half of the brain goes for a walk, briefly the left, then back again. You drift slowly through the city, pen and paper in hand, the band plays blues (2), »in front of a fence and behind it everything is broken« (3), you are looking for life, »Everything that repels me at the same time seduces me« (4) and then you keep looking, »searching for solitude in the rush of the crowd« (5), and then you keep looking, you see, like all the days, the man who is different from the others, in front of the bakery (6), you keep looking, boom-boom boom-da-boom goes the bass, goes your heart, the hands clap on the two and four, there is glitter (7) and green light (8), casts »shadows on a wall« (9) – in the park, in the garden, you remember the paths, in the twilight, orchestral movements in the direction of Japan, no not the country, the band, behind it the north of..., sorry, what is the label called again? Europe at least. (10) (11) (12)

»A free Saturday, which doesn't exist for long yet, melancholic feelings after petting, which you already did in the afternoon on a secluded park bench or a secret meadow.« (Olaf Dante Marx) (13)

WINTER 2 are elegiac contemplative reflections on drivingly laconic pop music. The instrumentation is bass, keyboard, guitar and drums, and the music traces movements from the mid-1980s, the moment when pop finally left the rehearsal room. Everything became better. You could program the drum computer in the daylight at the kitchen table, write lyrics in the sun in front of the ice cream parlor, listen to the music loudly in the Toyota Starlet, and learn the interplay on stage in front of an audience. Out of the stuffiness of the unventilated basement, the standing damp mixture of fallen beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays and bricks from next door. Instead, a promise! In the mid-1980s that meant university pop in Düsseldorf, Bielefeld or Offenburg and pushed for some reason towards Hamburg. The attempt to invent another, a new pop music from the three chords and the bulky High German. Nourished from the songwriting that previously splashed across the channel from Manchester and Glasgow, a little London too; so post-post-punk, so new pop, so its quiet thoughtfulness too, in case of doubt in minor, so also the moment just before the end of the 1980s when pop music began to swing more and more.

WINTER 2 goes back to this point and spins this thread anew, looks where you could come with it today. WINTER 2 is the joy of rediscovering the lost favorite tape. »It‘s a start.« (14)

The drums shuffle fluidly, the bass twang!s, pushes itself forward as a melody-leading instrument and entwines the vocals, the guitar, which sees itself as a rhythmic companion, occasionally breaks out into golden-haired jubilation, the synthesizer adds melancholic Juno pads in between and paints hymnic counterfigures to its fellow players. No smearing, no roaring, the production is clear and transparent.

Where the green glow in the sixth title already points so beautifully to it, we take Eric Rohmer as a witness: how he seemed to direct in his later films, with a light hand namely and the dialogues in such a way that they raise the question whether he wrote them, or whether they were conceived in the moment by his – young – actors and actresses, so through WINTER 2 also blows a similarly playful effortlessness. Music and text unite in an impressionistic undertaking, a warming light dances lovingly on the surface, and makes WINTER 2 our summer record.

— ☃☃ —

WINTER 2 was founded in 2020 in Hamburg by Maximilian Wittwer and Christoph Romahn. The album under the same name on ITALIC is their debut.

(1) Sense of absurdity
(2) Broken
(3) ibid.
(4) My answer
(5) Shine of the passages
(6) He meets the young guys
(7) cf. (5)
(8) The green glow on the horizon
(9) cf. (2)
(10) In the garden of paths, the piece, ...
(11) ... Italo Disco the country ...
(12) ... and italic the label. Of course! 
(13) Diederichsen, Hebdige, Marx (eds.): Schocker, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1983
(14) ... says Maximilian Wittwer.

Credits
Text: Andreas Reihse
Image: Lea Franke