Winter by wixel

Hello,

Welcome to the first edition - January - of my awesome and/or stupid 2009 project. It’s a project in which I force myself to record and release a record within each month of the year 2009. There are certain rules and guidelines which I must obey. You can find those at the wixel website. Due to the limited time of recording, and the constant output, this thing will feel very much feel like a personal journal. I have no clue whether it’s going to be interesting or not. It will just exist, I guess. Some months will be more interesting/better sounding than others. I’ll always explain in these liner notes what’s going on each month.

For the first record my setup included nothing but an acoustic guitar, a microphone and the ableton live software used as a traditional multitrack recorder. No fancy effects, nor fancy plugins. Just the basic controls of recording, cutting, pasting and adjusting the volume. I thought a constraint in options would result in getting more out of less, and at some points I did come across some marvelous sounds. ‘Melsbroek’ for example is nothing but a few hundred recordings of various singles notes, with the volume turned down at each beginning, then slowly turned up while all notes are placed in a way so the guitar starts to sound like an organ. I quite like the effect.

The record is titled “Winter” because I feel it could be a nice compagnon for the “Herfst” ep I did with Wixel a few years back. The pictures included were all taken during the month of January. It rarely snows this much in Belgium. I like winter.

Wixel is the musical outfit of Wim Maesschalck. Founder of the slaapwel records label, which only releases music dedicated to fall asleep to. The music of wixel has often been described as melancholic winter music - a warm and organic mix of acoustic instruments and gentle electronic treatments with a lot of care for detail.