Winter Flowers - Biography
Winter Flowers is a mystic folk trio based out of Los Angeles, California, which uses renaissance and medieval musical influences to inform a benevolent folk sensibility. Begun by Gavin Toler (guitar/vocals) in Seattle, Washington in the early 2000s as a romantic form of easy-listening soft rock, Winter Flowers took bloom with the addition of Christof Certik (vocals/guitars/woodwinds) and his baroque aesthetic. Together they put together their positive art visions in creating a variant in the realm of new folk—the primary goal being uplift. Since the group’s inception, it has released one full-length album—a self-titled effort released on Attacknine Records that came out in 2006—an EP on Manimal Vinyl, and has relocated from Seattle to San Francisco to Los Angeles. As Toler has described Winter Flowers’ music in an interview, it’s “music that moves within music, notes that talk to each other.”
On the debut album, Winter Flowers—also joined by core member, Astrid Quay, who handles the female vocals—put down 14 tracks, which recalled for some the Laurel Canyon sound of the 1960s, bands such as Crosby, Stills and Nash (particularly on the track, “Hey Ho”). Noted as a meditative or healing brand of folk music, Toler mostly wrote the sunshine-inducing tracks, and Josh Schwartz produced the album. Los Angeles-based musicians such as multi-faceted artist Mia Doi Todd, Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark and esoteric singer-songwriter Miranda Lee Richards all cameo vocally on the record. The track “Isle of Islay” is a cover of Donovan’s original, and others—such as “Christ Bird” and “End of the War”—recalled the heydays of folk revivalists Pentangle and Fairport Convention, whom integrated old music into contemporary styles in much the same way.
The band toured the West Coast and played regular stops at Silver Lake’s iconic venue, Spaceland. On one such occasion they played with hard rock band, Dead Meadow, whom has said of Winter Flowers that they are the opposite side of the same coin musically. Asked to contribute to the charity record that would be a Madonna tribute that same year, the band recorded a version of “Live To Tell” on Through the Wilderness: Tribute to Madonna (2007 Manimal Vinyl).
