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LP
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12XU 172LP
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$24.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/9/2026
"'So, how did this band even happen?' That's the question most often asked of Winged Wheel, a creatively and geographically scattered collective who have somehow congregated to make a noise that's unexpected but undeniable. The band includes Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint, co-owner of the dream venue Tubby's), Matthew J. Rolin (solo guitar wizard and half of the Powers/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack, and Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek), each player living in a different city and bringing their own unique element to the group's chain reactions. Early long-distance file-trading between a few members yielded 2022's No Island, a debut album that was accidentally really good. Good enough for the band to expand their membership and meet in person for the sessions that became 2024's Big Hotel, a surgically-assembled murk of high energy kosmische rock with jammed-out tendencies. Fast forward just a little and all of a sudden the band that started out as a passing idea has completed multiple tours, become a taper's dream with sets that drift through structure and improvisation, and ridden the momentum to places unforeseen on their third album, Desert So Green. After a run of shows across the Midwest in the spring of 2025, the group settled into a studio on the outskirts of Chicago to track their next record. Full-blast, krautrock-informed jamming took a backseat to deeper experimentation, and the band found new dimensions, different atmospheres. The arrangements are still dense with layers of synths, noisy disruptions, and glowing orbs of alien sound, but every shift is considered and intentional. It's an album that spends its duration struggling to balance a scale with excitement on one side and anxious tension on the other. While Desert So Green is defined by a newfound restraint, there's also an intensity that never lets up. Desert So Green represents yet another transformation for Winged Wheel, one that takes them into a space of sharpened dynamism and more nuanced expression. The energy that arrived all at once in loud explosions on earlier albums is refracted here, and all the more powerful when broken down. It's a set of strange songs that demand close inspection and reward this attention with a clearer view of the band's individual personalities, and the separate alchemical presence that emerges when these personalities come together."
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LP
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12XU 160LP
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"Big Hotel, the sophomore effort of Winged Wheel, is an evolutionary document. Core members Cory Plump (Spray Paint, Rider/Horse, Expensive Shit), Fred Thomas (Tyvek, Idle Ray), Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Damiana), and Matthew J Rolin (Powers/Rolin Duo, solo) expand their lineup to include Lonnie Slack (Water Damage) and Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), and instead of the entirely remote method utilized to create their 2022 debut No Island, the far-flung party convened in person in Kingston, NY for a long weekend of live studio recording. The results are undeniably compelling. The band's signature cyclonic energy is simultaneously augmented and refined with the approach of real-time collaboration. After tracking three days' worth of group improvisations, weirdly-born songs, and other spontaneous creations, the hours of material were edited with a similar intensity. Half-hour jams became three-minute ragers and fragments were looped into infinity, calling on the same spliced aesthetic as some of the most adventurous material by Can, Faust, or more recently the experimental production of the International Anthem camp. The stereo field has been torn apart and sewn together again, rerouted with strange and mesmerizing left turns. Vignettes of ambiguous construction, both tightly coiled and exploding, revolve around themselves, gathering intensity and mass, coalescing into something greater than the sum of its parts. Where No Island was born out of distance and murk, these songs breathe and erupt in close quarters. Though the band isn't necessarily concerned with finding new levels of clarity, there's a newfound power in the steady drive of Shelley's unmistakable rhythmic style, and the unexpected interplay that builds on this foundation. Big Hotel is the sound of what happens in the rare and intriguing moments when Winged Wheel are all in the same room." --Jen Powers
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LP
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12XU 134LP
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"Winged Wheel is made up of four musicians whose worlds have intersected for years without them ever all being in the same room. Cory Plump (Spray Paint, Expensive Shit), Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Damiana), Fred Thomas (Tyvek, Idle Ray), and Matthew Rolin (Powers/Rolin Duo, solo) have been longtime participants in various diy communities, crossing each other's paths through shared gigs, working on releases, or taking the stage at Cory's small upstate NY bar. Each player has developed their own personal practice of improvisation and home-recording, and Winged Wheel began by chance when Cory asked Fred to send over some rawly recorded drum loops to jam over. Cory tracked rangy guitar and bass parts over these repetitive loops and songs slowly started taking shape. Matthew's guitar layers took these foundations to a whole new level, and Whitney's submerged vocal tracks solidified everything, elevating the project from a soup of partially formed ideas into something intelligible. The entire album was written, recorded, and mixed in remote collaboration, eventually turning into a balancing act of precisely arranging sonic details and maintaining the formless excitement the music began as. This paradoxical process can be heard in the final form of the album, a continuous zone that manages to be strange and amorphous while still carving out space for four distinctive musical personalities. It's a sound that hovers and stumbles as often as it takes declarative turns in unexpected directions, the circles getting smaller the closer you zoom in."
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