Ancient Winds - New Vision

Fuck yes. This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for when I wanted to blog about the Old Lady CDs. Independently pressed tourist purchases that have obvious flaws and secret bangers. There’s no label on the booklet, but there’s a faded “Saucisa Production’s” (sic) on a sticker. Incredible. The pictures all over the CD are of a little boy holding various musical instruments with varying strengths of grip. Ancient Winds is a family band, and this is their baby boy. No lyrics means no lyric page, so the interior booklet is very clean and surprisingly well designed.

Naturally, the winds are the stars of the show on every song. The flutes (traditional Inca panflute, end-blown flute, and side-blown flutes are used) are cloaked in enough reverb to give them body. The guitars and charangos drive the songs forward, and the kick drum and occasional p-bass help provide a foundation for everything else. Straight off the bat, the first song sounds like a dead ringer for Dragon Roost Island from Wind Waker. The next one sounds like something out of Monkey Island II: LeChuck’s Revenge. Both are unexpectedly uptempo, melodic, and balanced.

There’s a decrease in quality in the middle of the record, almost always because of weird tonal quirks. The synths on track 8 are quite welcome, because they’re not overbearing and the rest of the song is easygoing and calm. A similar tone on track 4 is less enjoyable because of how it sticks out on top of the four on the floor pseudo-reggae track. The weird whistle thing on track 6 makes the track genuinely difficult to listen to. Fortunately, from track 7 to track 9, the standard rises back up again, but track 10 is goofy with fake rainstick sounds and other stuff like that.

This doesn’t quite serve its purpose as white woman background music, because it retains too much Equadorean character and is too upbeat and melodic. It genuinely grabs me, despite the simplicity. I wouldn’t have picked this out off of a shelf in a record store, but I’m glad it made its way to my collection. Half of a melodic and confident record, and half of a perplexing, but still interesting one.

New Vision by Ancient Winds is a bad record, but I like it.