Photo by Ricardo Adame.
Playing older than his 26 years, Eli Winter has long demonstrated mastery over solo guitar composition and performance, with praise from Pitchfork, The Guardian, Stereogum, NPR and others. Winter’s latest album, Eli Winter (Three Lobed, 2022), lives up to the promise that is inherent within the mere construct of an eponymous album - a statement, a reinvention. Assisted by a murderer’s row of peers and contemporaries including Cameron Knowler, Yasmin Williams, David Grubbs, Ryley Walker, Tyler Damon, jaimie branch, and others, Eli Winter showcases a compositional depth and authoritative skill only hinted at on Winter’s rightfully acclaimed previous work. Is it folk? Rock? Jazz? Something simply “other”? The answer to all of these questions is “yes." The result is the sound of an artist escaping any lingering shadows of his primary influences and coming into his own.
Eli Winter (b. 1997) is a musician and writer based in Chicago. A self-taught guitarist and native Houstonian, Winter has been praised as a "generational talent" (NYCTaper) for his instrumental music, which has received praise from Pitchfork, The Guardian, Stereogum, NPR, the Chicago Reader, the Sydney Morning Herald and others. Three Lobed Recordings released Winter’s self-titled, third solo album on August 19, 2022.
Winter’s first album, The Time To Come, recorded in Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, uses a deep study of American experimental guitarists to grieve a close friend and cope with the collective trauma of natural disasters. On the strength of this album, The Guardian featured him as an artist to watch for 2020. His second album, Unbecoming, reaches from the guitar music pantheon to composers Pauline Oliveros and David Grubbs, considering extremes of duration, timbre and recording fidelity, and engaging with writers of the AIDS crisis Tory Dent and Eric Michaels, from whose work its title derives. Anticipation, an album of acoustic guitar duets with Cameron Knowler, weaves disparate musical idioms with gorgeous melodies, nodding to its forebears while staking out its own ground. Controlled Burning, a collaboration with Jordan Reyes, features eclectic, exploratory duets for guitar and synthetic instruments.
Winter has performed at Primavera Sound Festival, Frequency Festival, Hopscotch Music Festival, Constellation and Logan Center for the Arts, among many others. Collaborators include the aforementioned, Daniel Bachman, jaimie branch, Isa Burke, Tyler Damon, Annelyse Gelman, David Grubbs, Whitney Johnson, Tara Jane O'Neil, Sam Wagster, Asher White, Shovel Dance Collective, Maxwell Sterling, Ryley Walker and Yasmin Williams. Winter has toured the East Coast, Midwest, Texas, California, and Europe, and maintains a regular performance schedule in Chicago.
Winter received the David Blair McLaughlin Prize in Nonfiction from the University of Chicago. His essays and criticism have been published in The Economist, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Texas Highways, the Brooklyn Rail, Chicago, Expressionless Objects and elsewhere. He was a 2024 Ox-Bow Resident and 2022 Ragdale Resident, and is a 2021 Luminarts Fellow in Creative Writing.