Grey Windowpane – “Ice The World”
Across the Atlantic in Brighton, UK Grey Windowpane is forging something special. A stalwart contributor to the avant-garde Ma Turner (AKA Brown / Mazozma) has been delivering innovative compositional sound-work for over two decades. As the founding member of Kentucky’s noise rock terrorists Warmer Milks (whom he toured the United States and Europe extensively with throughout the early 2000’s) Ma went on to record and perform as a solo artist, releasing numerous full length LPs, cassettes, compact discs (and a twelve cassette box set) on labels such as Sophomore Lounge, Feeding Tube, Crash Symbols as well as on visual artist and musician Robert Beatty’s AHEM Editions label and numerous one-off private press labels of Turner’s own. (Currently coined) Brown is now further cultivating his reputation on the frontiers of fringe music with Grey Windowpane (under the umbrella of GWPEOPLESFRONT WORLDWIDE). After leaving his home of Western Massachusetts last year for the UK, Brown has been collaborating with an international cabal of outsider artists to produce Grey Windowpane’s newly anticipated full length album “Ice The World”. The songs were written, arranged, recorded and mixed over a span of months between studios in the UK, US, Singapore and Sweden.
Long running underground music rag Blastitude had this to say about Grey Windowpane’s first four EP’s (all digitally released in 2022 on the GWPEOPLESFRONT WORLDWIDE label):
“This is very consistently and completely zoned-out music. I’ve been listening to it all, all day long, and I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s like it wipes my brain blank as it plays. My daughter’s boyfriend (born circa 2005) walked by and said it sounded “industrial,” how about that? He’s 100% not wrong (and I often think about what post-industrial as a music means, how it means so much more than Neubauten and Skinny Puppy, how it means any post-punk experimental work of any kind, the entire 1980s cassette culture experimental music movement, the entire worldwide noise scene as we know it today)! He also compared it to house music, and yeah, Grey Windowpane does have some beats, here and there, but it’s just as much sound effects, and tape-loop experiments, and washes of noise, and who-knows-what else. And when I say “who-knows-what-else,” I mean “music from the Empty Quarter,” which Bruce Russell defined in his 1994 manifesto “What is Free?” as “an area between other forms of music where all of the ‘rules’ which hold them apart cease to apply.”
Proceeds from the double cassette release of “Ice The World” benefit GREAT FALLS BOOKS THROUGH BARS a volunteer group in Franklin County MA that sends free books, resources, and reading materials to incarcerated people.