Music Review: "Portal" by Windy and Carl

50s Science Fiction soundtrack in the best way

"Portal" album cover

On their newly reissued album “Portal,” Windy and Carl make ambient music that feels like it should only be listened to on the set of a black and white movie, blending vintage-inspired synth sounds while keeping a fuzzy backdrop.

Windy and Carl have been putting a new spin on ambient music since the mid-90s. Even if the music is layered and fuzzy overall, a lot of ambient music, to me, has a sort of melancholic tinge to it. Windy and Carl challenge this notion by creating ambient music that often feels brighter and sun-kissed.

The band recently reissued their lesser-known 1994 album “Portal” for streaming and Vinyl LP for the first time, and I firmly believe it’s the most unique album in their discography that I've heard so far.

The album immediately brings you into the scene of an old science fiction movie. The first song on the album, “Preparation,” opens with spirally sounding sounds close to a theremin, while the rest of the song has an acoustic guitar playing a moody instrumental in the background, aided with tape hiss.

The rest of the album sounds like the soundtrack to venturing deep into an alien planet. “Ode to Spaceman” takes place in space the most obviously, with a lot of the pulsating and warping of the instrumental sounding like you’re looking out into the wide expanse of space. There’s also narration throughout, which kind of makes it sound like the person inside the spaceship is taking an audio log of what happened that day, even if it was a little enveloped by the droning instrumental.

“Sound Ignition” sounds like an extremely distorted and bitcrushed version of a song from a movie memorializing a loved one. The noisy guitar throughout sounds like distortion appropriating tape hiss into whatever form it pleases and almost making it sound like a far-away monster.

This tape hiss only allows the faintest bit of melody to seep through, bringing in a sad horn-like sound. The sound that seeps through allows the listener to feel the message of the horn that it may have been in a previous life but as its own sadness as the tape hiss eats the melody.

The most hopeful of the regular tracks is “Exploration,” which has some anticipatory guitar throughout with a slight buzz alongside the music, which could be the spacemen trying to transmit information back to their home planet. The whole song sounds exciting through the guitar as well as through the shifting synth-like bits and bobs in the background that accessorize the guitar overall.

The bonus tracks (taken from the 1995 release after the original) sound closer to the Windy and Carl we know today. Both “Glowing/Colorful” and “Gravitational Loft” are long, broad sketches of life in space that I would personally expect from the duo if they were trying to rerecord the album a couple of years later and wanted to get in the mood of how they played previously.

“Through the Portal” is most definitely immediately foreshadowing what’s to come, though. The guitar here evokes music they would eventually make in the 2000’s “Consciousness,” feeling like you literally stepped through the portal from the planet you were trying to explore and breathe in fresh air on a nice fall morning. Windy and Carl show on this track that they would become the masters of building a hopeful mood instead of building environments that feel hopeless and desolate.

I would recommend this album overall, especially to people who are fans of 90s space rock already. If you enjoy this album, I recommend you listen to their album “Depths,” which is more aquatic themed and doesn’t feel like it’s exploring just the deep areas of the ocean, even if the title insinuates otherwise.