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Windhand

Ryan Wolfe

About

Paiste Artist Since
May 2017

Nationality
United States

Main Affiliation
Windhand

Ryan Wolfe

Setup

Biography

Not many people can say they’ve been touring since the age of 16, let alone booking those tours as well. Ryan Wolfe was reared in the womb of the underground punk and metal music scene and his drumming style is as dynamic and versatile as the many genres of heavy music he has played in. Ryan Wolfe got his start playing drums at 15 years old in Goldsboro, North Carolina when a friend of his dads set up his drum set in the store front of his garage/gas station. He would then spend hours practicing there after the gas station had closed. Unexpectedly, he told Ryan to take the kit home to practice and to call him in a month to jam with his country band. He set the kit up in his older brother’s empty room and proceeded to bang away while listening to Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, The Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, and Nirvana on his Walkman, slowly beginning to forge his own style. Within a month he had formed a band with some friends from school which would lead to him playing country barns, pizza parlors, skating rinks, coffee shops, and warehouses, all within a year. By the time he was 16 they were playing every weekend all across North Carolina and by the time he was 18 he had already begun touring up and down the east coast. In 1998, he joined what would be his first professional band, Facedowninshit. They went on to sign to Relapse Records and over the course of six years they had toured both nationally and internationally. During that time they also released three full length records and a 10-inch. Showcasing his adaptability of style, he went from playing with the heavy hitting sludged out riffs of Facedowninshit to joining Attitude Problem, a spastic punk thrash band who has since been described as “Math-Sabbath”. On the total opposite end of the spectrum, he later joined a band called Might Could (signed to Small Stone Records with members of Alabama Thunder Pussy and InterArma), which was steeped in whiskey bent southern rock with hints of punk and metal and straightforward, hard hitting rhythms. He toured the U.S. and Europe multiple times over with each of these bands and released a full length album each. In 2010 Ryan Wolfe then went on to join Windhand, a doom band who’s heavy melodic songs “traffic in measured, unhurried riffage” embracing it’s influences of 70’s heavy rock and 90’s grunge. Ryan proved to be the missing piece of the puzzle. His artistic and tasteful rhythms which somehow manage to be concurrently heavy, interesting and bone bracing, were the refreshing backbone that Windhand needed to support its own weight. His background in the honest, straightforward, emotionally driven rhythms of the classic country music that he grew up on found a truly animated, if unlikely place, throughout the weighty currents of Windhand’s soulful droning march. They soon embarked on their first East coast tour and shortly after recorded their first album, which later came out on Forcefield Records. It was not long before they signed with Relapse Records, for whom they have recorded a split with fellow label mates Cough and two critically acclaimed full length albums, Soma and Grief’s Infernal Flower. During the past 7 years they have toured the U.S. and Canada extensively, done multiple European tours, and two tours in Australia and New Zealand.

Setup Cymbals

2002 Heavy Ride

2002 Crash

2002 Power Crash

2002 Sound Edge Hi-Hat