Last year, Samira Winter unveiled her album Endless Space (Between You & I), a masterful and wholly unique record combining dreampop and blissful psychedelia that put her on the map as one of the genre's most exciting new forces. Now, she's back with another single for venerable indie label Bar/None Records.
"Violet Blue" is a heavenly slice of shoegaze. Where her album invoked Melody's Echo Chamber and the Cocteau Twins, the new track mines the gauzy bliss of My Bloody Valentine. The product of a collaborative relationship with indie pop alchemist producer Jorge Elbrecht, "Violet Blue" will be followed by "All I Know" in March.
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.
On Endless Space (Between You & I), her forthcoming and debut LP for legendary indie label Bar/None Records, 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 Moi, Washed 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.
Listen here:
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