The winter season has always been a source of inspiration for songs and sounds of all kinds and types. A classic trend is that of acoustic “winter songs”, bare ballads, often ghostly or desolate, the genre of which Leonard Cohen is the undisputed luminary and which over the years has been carried forward by multitudes of disciples, represented here by top-class authors such as Nick Cave, Bon Iver, Vashti Bunyan, Marissa Nadler, Bill Callahan, Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Sarah McLachlan, Balmorhea and our own Fabrizio De André.
But the fairy tale (more or less Christmassy) is also a winter classic, immersed under thick layers of snow, like those of nostalgicFleet Foxes, of the harpist Loreena McKennitt and the tightrope walker Kate Bush, included in the lineup alongside her brilliant student Tori Amos, who dedicated one of her most beautiful and poignant ballads (“Winter”) to winter.
Even the darkwave scene, naturally, has found fertile ground in winter, chilling and desolate atmospheres, through champions such as Cure and Sound, Italian disciples such as Diaframma and subsequent projects with dark hues such as Lycia and Jesu.
But not even (sophisti)pop remained insensitive to the winter melancholy, from that of the Eighties by Aztec Camera to that of the following two decades, ideally represented by refined groups such as Belle & Sebastian and Broadcast.
Then there are those who have approached winter themes only sporadically but with excellent results, such as the Rolling Stones of “Winter” and U2 in the Christmas version of the cover of “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” by Phil Spector, but also Enrico Ruggeri of “Mare d'inverto”. And finally there are those who, in a perpetual frozen winter, live for geographical reasons, expressing in their art all the poetry of the arctic lands: from the Icelanders Bjork, Sigur Ros and Ólafur Arnalds to the Norwegians Bel Canto and Susanne Sundfor.
To unite the entire collection, like an ideal red thread, the rarefied electronics of Netherworld, aka Alessandro Germans, one of the protagonists of the polar-based compilation “Cryosphere” which marked the debut of his Glacial Movements label.
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Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
