The Windmill_______
Mischievous otters, trees with feelings and 70s-style prog rock epics: welcome to the ever so slightly wacky world of Norwegian proggers The Windmill…
This Swedish sextet and their new album The Tree are none more prog…
It may seem as though human beings are increasingly incapable of agreeing with one another on anything, but one indisputable, unifying truth remains: prog rock fans absolutely bloody love an epic. With that in mind, there is no excuse for not lending your ears to the astonishing opening track on The Windmill’s new album Tribus, The Tree. With The Tree, this fervently old-school sextet have conjured 24 minutes of sparkling, symphonic majesty that instinctively taps into the spirit of prog’s greatest sprawls. It also adheres to the largely unspoken rule that the best epics usually clock in somewhere around what we nerds refer to as ‘the Supper’s Ready mark’; filling up one entire side of a shiny, vinyl LP in the process. With a sound that strikes a sublime balance between new school clarity and oomph and the reassuring, woozy gloss of flutes, Mellotrons and Moogs, The Windmill almost seem to be striving for some new, unassailable form of total prog and, for the thus far uninitiated, The Tree is a startling calling card.
“The Tree is basically an abbreviated story about a tree growing up,” says Morten Clason, one of several multi-instrumentalists in The Windmill. “Basically, we’re expressing some imaginary thoughts that this tree might have when it’s experiencing what’s going on around it. I guess we assume that a tree can’t see much – although we really don’t know that, do we? But we just have to imagine that it might somehow feel what’s going on. The intro is a musical expression of how a seed would begin to gain consciousness while lying in the dark soil. We hope we’ve achieved the kind of feeling in the music that this particular seed tries harder and harder to grow and finally breaks through the surface of the earth and starts its lifelong journey to become a fully grown tree.”
As any Rush fan reading this will already have noted, this is not the first time that progressive rock has told a tale about trees. But this may well be the first time that any band have pulled off such a refined version
of that old interpretative dance trope of becoming a tree. All joking aside, The Tree is simply an exercise in classic prog storytelling, and one that sparkles with the same kind of gently subversive mischief that informed, amongst others, Gabriel-era Genesis. Eccentricity is an undervalued quality, and The Windmill have it in plentiful supply.
“While growing up, a couple of interesting things happen and we have tried to express the tree’s experiences purely musically,” says Clason. “Our hope is that people will understand a bit of what’s happening by listening to the various parts in that particular piece. For instance, for the part we call ‘Otto sneaks back from town’, we hope we’ve achieved a feeling of an otter having a slightly bad conscience about visiting the big town and getting up to some mischievous activities! This is, of course, something that a tree would instantly recognise, as the otter is passing. In the end, it has grown to be a youngster, full of confidence, who’s riding off whatever winds or storms coming its way.”
If the story of The Tree strikes you as slightly ludicrous, you may be reading the wrong magazine (or have some weird problem with otters… come on, they’re cute!). This is prog rock in its natural state: bold, preposterous, intricate and purposefully obtuse. It’s a vehicle for enlightened metaphors but also for a musical ethos that knows no limitations. There will always be an ongoing debate about the differences between genuinely progressive music and archetypal retro prog, but to hear the genre’s original, questing bravado reborn in the 21st century with so few traces of mothballed nostalgia is an undeniable thrill. The way Clason explains it, writing Tribus was about finding the magic that happens when music is plucked from the ether and does exactly what the story requires.
“The album starts with a seed and it ends with fire,” states Clason, somewhat cryptically. “As far as the music is concerned, we all worked together as we came up with all the different parts and the arrangements of the various themes. We worked until we found what we felt was
“We were all inspired by bands like Camel, Alan Parsons, Genesis and Jethro Tull, and basically the whole 70s progressive scene.”
truly reflecting our intent and also what, in our opinion, sounded the best together. The opening theme is repeated in various forms to signify the different stages of [the tree’s] growth, but I think the lyrics are selfexplanatory. The whole story could be transposed to be the experience of a human being growing up, but that’s up to the listener to interpret it that way.”
There is something deeply impressive about the ensemble performances on Tribus: clear evidence of a chemistry that has evolved between the band over the last 17 years, albeit with a few obligatory line-up shuffles along the way. First formed in 2001 by keyboardist/vocalist Jean Robert Viita, The Windmill have been far from prolific, with only 2010 debut To Be Continued and its 2013 follow-up Continuation (see what they did there?) to their credit so far, but it’s hard to think of another contemporary band that straddle the divide between old and new with such meticulousness and grace. With material that ranges from The Tree’s hefty sprawl to the sparkling brevity of the closing Play With Fire (as featured on a recent Prog CD!), Clason, Viita and bandmates
Erik Borgen (guitar/vocals), Stig André
Clason (guitar), Arnfinn Isaksen (bass) and Sam Arne Nøland (drums) are not reinventing the wheel, but they’re giving it a damn good polish.
“We started up in 2001 but we went through a few different line-ups before we became more serious in 2005,” Clason says of the band’s early days. “When we became a steady line-up, we started to create our own music, which was always the intention from the very beginning, of course. We were all inspired by bands like Camel, Alan Parsons, Genesis and Jethro Tull, and basically the whole 70s progressive scene. But I think what makes us unique are the melodies and the sound of six different musicians playing organ, flutes and guitars with our specific sense of harmony.”
Digging into the rest of Tribus, it’s clear that The Windmill are highly adept at ticking every conceivable prog box. This is an album that flows beautifully from start to finish; a conceptual piece that promises to take the listener on a magic carpet ride, with just the right blend of the familiar and the alien to keep everyone happy. The stunning artwork notches up extra old-school prog points, too: created by Kirsten Viita, wife of keyboardist Jean, it’s a wonderfully surreal piece that may or may not be connected to the album’s title. Intriguingly, Clason isn’t giving anything away. Or at least we think he isn’t.
“We are lucky to have Kirsten. She has created artworks for The Windmill from the beginning, and her ideas and our music have been like a married couple from the very start,” he says, admiringly. “The artwork has improved alongside our music, we hope. But as for the title? Tribus could mean different things. In one sense, it made sense to call it Tribus because of the way we think as a band, as a related group of organisms. We are not just a single tree! All of the members, the branches, are active.”
They do it all in such an unassuming and naturalistic way that The Windmill’s skilful blending of prog’s past and present would be possible to miss among the many and varied splendours of Norway’s flourishing scene. Luckily, the band’s assault on hearts and minds is two-pronged, as Clason is not just flying the flag for symphonic indulgence as a musician. In addition, he is directly involved in supporting both homegrown and international prog talent from within, via the We Låve Rock festival which takes place for the second time in May 2019, in the flautist’s home town of Hurum.
Run by Clason’s own Hurum Progrock Society and boasting a line-up that includes indigenous adventurers Wobbler, Arabs In Aspic and Pymlico alongside the nonNorwegian likes of Threshold and Magenta, it’s the kind of humble but ambitious and community-spirited event that speaks volumes about the sincere enthusiasm of everyone involved, from organisers to fans. The Windmill, as you might expect, performed at We Låve Rock in 2018 and Clason admits that the experience has encouraged his band to be more active than ever before. UK fans won’t have too long to wait to catch The Windmill either, as the band are due to perform at our own Summer’s End festival in October 2019.
You can bet that they will be treating punters to a full rendition of The Tree. And it doesn’t get much more epic than that.
“We hope to fill our time with a lot of gigs and festivals in between now and Summer’s End,” Clason reports. “The goal is to be able to play across Europe, in venues and at festivals, and to continue to create good music and make more records. We hope that our live show mirrors our musicianship and hopefully shows that it is our true pleasure to perform.”
“The intro is a musical expression of how a seed would begin to gain consciousness while lying in the dark soil.”