Befitting its name, Bratislava based label Warm Winters Ltd is dedicated to cosy and introspective music. Although the label’s releases occupy stylistically diverse forms – from lithe ambient and sunken drones to colourful experimental pop – they are all brought together by a characteristic tenderness that founder Adam Badí Donoval hopes can “help awaken a certain sensitivity in the listeners”.

Donoval established Warm Winters Ltd in 2019, while he was still living in London, as a successor to his previous tape labels, with the idea of running the financial and operational aspects in a “little bit more intentional” way. Donoval relocated to Bratislava soon after, but the ethos of the label has remained unchanged and its output consistent, bolstered by the camaraderie in the local scene and connections with kindred organisations like Mappa from southern Slovakia and Warsaw’s Mondoj.

Despite Warm Winters Ltd’s interest in championing Central and Eastern European artists as well as cultivating long-lasting relationships with musicians, its releases are refreshingly free of rote gestures or elements that, as Donoval says, would sound “exotic... how the Western world perceives Eastern Europe to be”. Instead, they speak a protean language that carries warmth.

Raft Of Trash
“Ozo’s Zone”
From Likeness On The Edge Of Town (2020)

Recorded back when we still associated ‘generative music’ with something other than AI slop, Andrew PM Hunt (aka Dialect) and JC Leisure’s second album as Raft Of Trash, Likeness On The Edge Of Town, collected MIDI data generated while playing the city building video game SimCity 3000 and assembled it into a fascinating abstract world. Here, environmentally conscious spoken word passages inspired by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles guide us through a soundscape of oblique yet exquisite synthesised sounds, field recordings and live guitar, revealing an alien, irresistible vista. Listen closely to the pair’s later solo releases, JC Leisure’s A Courtyard! (2023) and Hunt’s Atlas Of Green (2024), and you might still hear fragments of sounds and sci-fi atmospheres that escaped from “Ozo’s Zone”.

Asemix
“Rehearsal Earthquake”
From Asemix (2021)

The debut collaboration between US musicians Mari Maurice (aka more eaze) and Nick Zanca (aka Mister Lies) is built on continuously shifting expectations and silences stitched together by dreamlike electronics and abstract effects. Meanwhile, passing sensations of shared resonance and glee in the music are spiced up with fragments of worry and weariness. “Rehearsal Earthquake”, in particular, showcases how the pair deploy an arsenal of sound collage and electroacoustic techniques to achieve volatile moods, the noise of EBow-ed guitars quivering alongside wildly modulating frequencies. It’s like tuning in to an alien hits-only radio station.

Tomáš Niesner
“Pod Lipami”
From Bečvou (2022)

Tomáš Niesner’s Bečvou is named after the Czech river Bečva, which in September 2020 suffered a massive loss of wildlife following chemical leaks. Yet, the manifest melancholy that haunts the Czech sound artist and guitarist’s music is not stuck in pathos. Instead, it brims with lyrical agency. As on most cuts on the album, fingerpicked guitar towers over the sonic makeup of the fragile “Pod Lipami”. Yet, its presence here transcends that of a traditional lead instrument. For Niesner, the guitar is a centre of gravity around which he stratifies field recordings collected during a 100km journey along the river, modular synthesizer drones and electronic accents. As he shadows gentle melodies with the gurgle of streaming water and saturating textures, a sort of elusive psychogeography takes form, drawing us in.

Martyna Basta
“Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering”
From Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering (2023)

Opening the title track of Polish composer and musician Martyna Basta’s album Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering, a guitar that sounds like a piano articulates a soft phrase, shudders and disappears. The phrase repeats, disturbing the oily black silence like a prayer in an empty church. A fragmented, half-remembered conversation flocks to it hungrily, as a moth would to an open flame. The voices of a man and a child circle each other, trapped in a moment cursed to echo itself, while slushing and crackling effects deepen around them. The memory comes apart. The song ends.

HMOT featuring Adela Mede
“Qom”
From There Will Come Gentle Rain (2024)

On There Will Come Gentle Rain, Basel based musician and researcher Stas Shärifullá (alias HMOT) embodies the investigation of sonic traditions and their relationship with collective memory in original music of his own, refracting folklore through a contemporary lens. Slovak-Hungarian musician Adela Mede joins Shärifullá on the haunting “Qom”. Her lyrics, which “draw parallels between Hungarian and Turkic languages”, begin as a hum and grow into a compelling invocation whose presence fills the stage, pressed against a sparse background of breathy woodwinds and elastic twangs, at once mysterious and revealing.

Marta Forsberg
“Flowers”
From Archaeology Of Intimacy (2025)

Speaking about his friendship with Polish-Swedish composer Marta Forsberg, Donoval reveals how, “if the collaboration makes sense and if everyone has enjoyed it”, the label can often feel like a network that encourages artists to return. It helps that each of Forsberg’s five releases for Warm Winters Ltd has nourished its own distinctive sound, with this latest album expanding her delicate ambient minimalism and inquisitive compositions towards simpler yet increasingly luminous forms. “Flowers” provides a striking demonstration of Forsberg’s refined pop elegance, with burbling electronics, grumbling pads and a simple rising melody that play counterpoint to the wonder of her silky vocal lines: “Can you smell the sounds?”

Ani Zakareishvili
“Artificial me, artificial you, artificial us”
From Neither in the sky nor on the ground (2025)

With Neither in the sky nor on the ground, Tbilisi based DJ and producer Ani Zakareishvili evaporates her dancefloor sensibilities and mutedly melodic instincts (heard on 2022’s Fallin) into trembling, nebulous music. Originally envisioned as a theatrical live set for Georgia’s TKESHI Festival, the music is stripped down but never bare, filled with rhythmic shapes and synth loops that exist on the outskirts of unravelled (rather than just deconstructed) club music and industrialised, dubby ambient. One of the album’s highlights, “Artificial me, artificial you, artificial us”, is thrust into being by a sequence of subterranean detonations, then enveloped by ruffling textures and slow melodies as it gains composure and a steadier cadence – marching decisively into a post-apocalyptic future.

Read Antonio Poscic’s full Unlimited Editions report on Warm Winters Ltd in The Wire 503/504. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.