Teresa Winter Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 2 Items

Cultishly adored artist Teresa Winter fesses up a supernaturally compelling, definitive opus with ‘Motto Of The Wheel’ - a life-giving bounty of warped ‘90s rave mutations, dream-pop and ambient noise, enchanted by ohrwurming vocal hooks and saturated in ravishing colour and frontier air A festive tribute to life in a seaside town, ‘Motto Of The Wheel’ is Teresa Winter’s most accomplished and significant album since she debuted in 2015. Its richly layered and psychedelic nature speaks lushly to Teresa’s experience of growing up in Bridlington, on a key liminal zone of the East Yorkshire coast, where she was just as inspired by formative studies in classical music as the dance-pop tunes blasting from arcades and a fairground by the beach. With the benefit and gauzy fidelity of hindsight, Teresa typically draws on her nostalgia with a mix of raw nerve, penetrative observation and careful emotional intelligence to create her most spellbinding, personalised and expansive record; one adorned with artwork by her father, beautifully hung in place by Rashad Becker’s exquisite mastering, and cut to 2 x LPs.Like a palimpsest of memories smudged with sun, salt, and sugar, the baker’s dozen songs to ‘Motto Of The Wheel’ follow up on Teresa’s non pareil, inspirational reputation with a mix of ravishing ecstasy and end-of-earth melancholy that only she could pull quite off like this. Her kaleidoscopic influences from overripe ‘90s rave-pop to Eastern European folk and the post-industrial occult remerge in abundant variegations, entwining her trade as musicologist with her reading of radical love, and the tarot card for Goddess Fortuna, into a celebration of seaside life’s chance, ephemeral joys and belly aches - artfully identifying the way it plays a crucial, almost parasitic function or counterpoint to ideas of “urban” and “pastoral”, or “bright” and “bleak” in British culture - a site of escape, transformation/transgression, and flux. Since her earliest works, Teresa’s practice poetically absorbs from myriad sources, and never more so than in ‘Motto Of The Wheel.’ From its introductory jungle-tekno headrush to passages of wind-whipped romance and headfreeze ambient beauty, Teresa’s poetic arrangements of vocals and sound design surely achieve a new high water mark in her catalogue. The street soul swoon of ‘Emptiness Is An Excess’ and spine-tracing extended melody of ‘Does He Love Me?’ are instant anthems, while her devilish playfulness bleeds thru in samples of kids tombstoning off Bridlington’s harbour wall into the cold North Sea, and the cosiness of UK TV gold, all gilded with original vocals that range from wind-wrenched, shoegaze-like to ecstatic, each blessed with her patented form of emotional punishment at its most pop-wise yet uncompromising. For purposes of disambiguation, the motto of the wheel is ““WEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!”

Circular patterns morphing through time, loop and ritual form the fabric of Proserpine, the latest work by Leeds-based musician, Teresa Winter. Recorded from a summer to a winter through 2021 and 2022, Proserpine is Winter's most cohesive, focused music to date: confidently revelling in space, fixating on isolated sounds and giving way to satisfying, swirling waves of vocal and electronic buzz. Proserpine is Teresa Winter's debut recording for Glasgow-based label, Night School.

On Proserpine, musical patterns revolve and intersect with each other, transmogrifying the music's narrative. Over-arching themes emerge: continual change, elusiveness. Insubstantiality emerges into concrete reality in the form of recognisable field recordings: the purring of a pet cat, the hum of a live cable. The loops and patterns are sometimes just out of sight, the click and whirl on Child Of Nature is the backdrop to hymnal vocalisations by Winter, who intones spell-like text in conversation with herself. On opener Circles, Winter's vocal is pre-linguistic, detached syllables falling into flowing streams, before Plume's field recordings seem to juxtapose nocturnal and diurnal wildlife. "You said I was a Flower Of The Mountain" sings Winter, as James Joyce's Molly Bloom does but the carpe diem desire in Ulysses is dissipated here, spread out by gauzy, droning organs. Here desire is blown up and out, changed into something undefinable but no less powerful.

Change is at the heart of the album. The Roman goddess Proserpine, herself a reimagined version of the earlier Greek goddess Persephone, is always between: between summer and winter, the land of the living and the underworld, constantly emerging into new states of being. It's a fitting metaphor for Winter's work. Like an Apple feels like it soundtracks this in-between state, long, trailing reverb smudging synth keys and Winter's achingly beautiful vocal performance. The effect is stirring but flitting in and out of perception, sometimes Winter's presence feels of this world, of musical instruments and practises and at others it feels like the music is about to phase into a different plane, a different universe.

While Proserpine references the myths and cults of the classical, pre-Christian era, Winter's restless preoccupation with the mechanics of religion informs the album in other ways. Ritual is present through out, either in the mantra-like vocalisations or even the private rituals we are invited to witness: on Fireworks the listener eave drops into the protagonist's private bonfire. On the stunning Lamento, layers of Choral vocal interlock in celestial patterns that recall catholic mass: it's an overt effect that simulates the ecstasy of religious fervour and also reminds the listener of the use of vocal that runs through Proserpine. Winter's vocals often echo with the euphoria of obliteration, of disintegrating in an awful bliss. It's an effect achieved with finality by the closer New Water as the piece begins with voice before burning up in the atmosphere of elegiac violins and enveloping undertows of whirring synth patterns and ghostly pads. Proserpine is forever turning, changing, always elusive and quietly revelatory.