“Hello. I’m Dr. Richard Stillwell, president and CEO of Windstar Enterprises, here to welcome you to the Windstar family.”
That is the message that plays automatically when you open a copy of “Windstar Solutions,” a new 1980s-themed concept album from Simon Adler, a senior producer for WNYC’s “Radiolab” who hails from Eau Claire.
Adler told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that he thinks of it as “a large performance art project with sound at its center.”
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“It’s also potentially the most elaborately packaged self-released album of all time, with screens and MP3 players and cassette tapes,” he said. “It’s sort of a ‘choose your own adventure’ in everything from how you conceptualize it to how you engage with it.”
The album is a throwback to the sights, sounds and textures of 1980s media, with vintage fonts and graphics, a website that looks like it was created on an Atari computer and musical flourishes like jaunty synthesizers and smooth saxophone solos, played by Adler himself.
“Windstar” is also inspired by self-help tapes that were popular at the time, realized through the invented character of Richard Stillwell, “a global leader in self-improvement,” as Adler described.
Across the album’s 12 tracks, hypnotic self-help messages are interspersed with Eau Claire news footage and other sound bites to create what Adler calls a “sonic hall of mirrors” experience.
“I think there are probably somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 media fragments bound up in the record itself,” he said. “When you put those headphones on and close your eyes, I want you to have a technicolor sonic experience. Flipping through the album book, I want it to evoke physical sensations of what media used to be.”
Adler will be performing a live version of “Windstar” on March 14 in Eau Claire and March 15 in Madison. He talked with “Wisconsin Today” about the origins of the project and why he was inspired to revisit the Eau Claire of the 1980s and ’90s.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
KAK: Where did you get the idea to put something like this together?
SA: For “Radiolab,” I spend hours and hours of my day taking hours and hours of interview tape and turning it into these collage documentaries. The question that prompted this was: “What if I took those skills and that practice but unbridled it from any sort of journalistic responsibility?”
And so what that looked like was I got my hands on probably 20 cassette tapes from a couple different hypnosis self-help gurus from the ’70s and ’80s. I digitized all those tapes and then transcribed them and realized that out of these hours and hours of hypnotic utterances, I had a library of about 4,000 different words these guys had said. I could begin mixing and matching and reordering and refocusing the words in whatever way I wanted, creating sort of an instrument out of their voices and playing them like a piano.
I just started experimenting with that, started putting sound behind it, started realizing as I was doing it what the project was, what it was about. And “Windstar Solutions” was born out of that.
KAK: I was haunted by the track “The Source” in particular: “Find peace knowing that nothing lasts forever” — I jotted this down — “that nothing is ever the same again, that to recall is to create.” What did you find so enthralling about these sayings?
SA: At the heart of this, I was taking these little fragments of audio and refocusing them and reordering them. What I wanted the project to both be of — and be about — was that idea of recontextualizing, reordering, remaking.
If I’m taking self-help tapes and reordering them and remaking them, I wanted the idea to then be like: What happens if you do that to your own mind, to your own fragments of memory? And what does that do to you? Born out of that came this sort of strange pseudo self-help practice that Windstar is offering to people.
To be clear, I don’t purport to believe that you can reprogram your memories with our material, but I like to live in the fantasy world that the album and the project creates around that.
KAK: So there are the multimedia components of the project, but it’s also so musically rich. Tell us about the second track, “Oakwood.” Is this real news footage?
SA: It’s recreated news footage. One of the goals of the project is to create this hall of mirrors where you don’t know what’s authentic, you don’t know what’s synthesized.
I took about 15 minutes of news footage that WEAU TV 13 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has archived from the opening of Oakwood Mall in 1986, and we stitched it all together in different ways and played with it and then recreated all of the news footage — including, in one case, actually finding the original news anchor who read those lines back in the ’80s and getting him to reread them now.
KAK: Another track on this album with a lot of Eau Claire history is “Uniroyal,” about when the Uniroyal tire plant closed in 1992. Why does it work for this concept album? What inspired you to include it?
SA: Early on in the record, there’s this track about the grand opening of Oakwood Mall. This is a place that’s supposed to last forever. And then this track “Uniroyal,” about a place that was supposed to last forever coming to an end.
The record is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also deeply hopeful that you can get past these terrible things that have happened to you. What feels like it may be the defining moment of your life, for a person or for a town, eventually becomes just one sentence in the history of the place. If you look at Eau Claire right now … it is a deeply different place. It is, I would argue, a far richer place in terms of culture, in terms of the diversity of people and experiences that live there.
The closing of Uniroyal was not the end of Eau Claire’s story. If anything, it was just a moment in time that the community was able to grow past or grow out of or grow with.
KAK: What have you learned out of this experience, out of this project?
SA: It was an attempt to understand what it means to be alive right now, insofar as we are all being bombarded with decontextualized media and information all the time. That media, that information, we are either self-selecting, curating — or, more and more, algorithmically is being curated for us — and our sense of reality, our beliefs about the truths of the world are dictated by that act of curation.
I walked away from this process, having spent a lot of time very intentionally curating, refocusing, recontextualizing information, with a deeper belief than ever that we need to be very cognizant of this process that we are partaking in every moment of every day, if we want to have any hope of keeping our feet on the ground or maintaining any sort of shared reality.
