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Winged Wheel: From Remote Collaboration to Grounded Sonic Exploration
Origins and Formation
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth - arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular – certainly bolsters that designation. But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent.More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
the band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump, who played in Spray Paint and ran the multimedia record label Monofonus Press before moving to Kingston, NY to help launch the esteemed venue Tubby’s; Cleveland’s Matthew J. Rolin,who releases solo guitar music and teams wiht wife Jen Powers in the Powers/Rolin Duo; and Detroit underground lifer Fred Thomas,whose many entanglements have lately included Tyvek and Idle Ray.
Musical Evolution: From No Island to Desert So Green
On their 2022 debut album No Island,that foursome channeled decades’ worth of kosmiche,post-punk,and psych into searching,meditative music with kick. It was an album built on trance-inducing repetition yet still grounded in decisively human force, the space-age surrealism of it’s droning synthesizers beautifully interacting with the scraping immediacy of its guitars and drums. Despite ostensibly working as zone-out music, it had a sense of embodiment that flew in the face of streaming-era passivity.That physicality intensified on LP2 when they added Shelley and Lonnie “Palmtree” Slack from Water Damage,an Austin combo who let their hard-crashing apocalyptic grooves spiral out into infinity.
Desert So Green, their third album, drops this Friday. It trades out some of the blustery, noisy tendencies of Big Hotel in favor of something a bit more pensive and reined-in. Winged Wheel began playing live shows in the summer of 2024, and rather than ramping up their aggression, performing together seems to have grounded and focused them. The arrangements unfold more quietly and patiently, as if they’re zooming in on details within their vast creation rather than giving you the widescreen view. It’s a fascinating and unique evolution, the sound of a band discovering its inner workings and moving with purpose.
Album Comparison
| Album | Year | Key Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| No Island | 2022 | Meditative, trance-inducing, kosmische, post-punk influences. |
| Big Hotel | 2024 |
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