North Wind is the 7th ION album from Giannis Papaioannou, the main force behind the industrial outfit Mechanimal. His new album is based on a series of field recordings originally captured near Jukkasjärvi, Sweden. It started as a long-term concept album when all these real windy sounds were first manipulated through granular texturizers. Αs a whole, it was completed in summer 2019 with collaborations from two cellists and one guitarist.
ION uses his intense and climactic walls of chords and experiments with classic minimal drone styles to express his world of arctic memories. Occasional long passages of cello, played by Henrik Meierkord and Nikos Veliotis and e-bowed guitar textures by George Theofanidis add a welcome inclusion to the monumental dub drones of "North Wind".
«The idea of this album, when I first started drafting it, was to continue what once struck me as an interesting, yet simple, idea: a long, almost permanent, night on the Swedish North. Listening to the wind in the vast arctic landscape and thinking what the absence of natural light means physically as well as symbolically to all of us. The night is the mother of dreams, the wind is her song. North Wind can be a powerful wild force, sometimes a metaphor for suffering in the world, but it can also be a mysterious natural way to alarm our senses, depending on how ready we are, to help us "become who we are».