The Tender Music of Warm Winters Ltd.
A conversation with label head Adam Badi Donoval on the occasion of the 50th release
Over 50 releases in six years, Warm Winters Ltd. has assembled a stunning catalogue and roster with a focus on the Eastern European experimental music scene.
Founded in 2019 in London, the small independent label is now run by founder Adam Badí Donoval out of Bratislava, Slovakia.
In January 2025, I was lucky enough to witness the label showcase at Berlin’s silent green venue – a night with Swedish violinist and sound artist Marta Forsberg, German synthesist Luka Aron and Polish drone specialist Alexandra Słyż.
Just a few weeks later, I saw Forsberg perform at the same venue in a breathtaking duet with Slovak-Hungarian singer and composer Adela Mede, as part of CTM festival 2025.
These two shows made clear that Warm Winters Ltd. has established a curatorial voice and a distinctive sound that is hard to describe but very palpable when experienced.
Find below a conversation with Adam Badi Donoval about the past, present and future of Warm Winters Ltd., and why it’s “not a classic ambient music label”. In addition, I have selected five of my personal highlights from the label catalogue to dive in.
Where did you grow up, Adam?
In a smaller town here in Slovakia. I moved to Bratislava when I was 10. All my teen years took place here, and my musical interests were formed. I played guitar, took classes and went to a lot of shows in small venues. I was a huge fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers early on, before my taste evolved into more experimental things. Then I went to study to London for five years, and now for four years, I've been back in Bratislava.
What was the Slovakian music scene like when you grew up?
When I was a teenager, there was a cool show every week, or some cool stuff happening, like some post-rock DIY show or whatever. There were a few venues that I used to go to, but they don't exist anymore. I remember this show by this band Pascal Pinon. They're Icelandic twin sisters, and they played in an abandoned central heating building near a highway. I remember paying cash and getting a signed CD when I was like 16. Things like that formed how I interacted with music and what I felt was valuable. At the same time, I would go to a U2 concert with my parents, so the range of what I was experiencing was quite big.
In London, obviously you’d have super DIY shows at Café OTO, which I lived nearby, so there were some defining, important moments in terms of things I saw there. I’d go see Space Afrika quite early on, or Lawrence English and William Basinski, but I’d also go see Tim Hecker in a huge church with hundreds of people in attendance.
What did you actually study in London?
Music for media – it was a course that focused on composition for film, video games, theater, soundscapes for VR environments and such. I became friends with this composer, John, who works as CJ Mirra and had a small label that was very influential for me. He was a few years older than me, and I joined his touring band, and he took me under his wing and let me help with the label.
That’s how I discovered some parts of the music industry that were new to me, and it gave me the courage to start my first own record label, ACR. I did small editions of 10 to 50 tapes, dubbed at home – mostly noise and drone music. It was part of that early DIY scene on Bandcamp, that golden age of tape production. You just put up a tape for €5 and sold 40 of them immediately, that was the vibe.
Did you always feel drawn to instrumental, atmospheric music?
It's an interesting question. My taste is really evolving over time. Warm Winters does have a few characteristics, but it's not necessarily tied to instrumental, atmospheric music. It’s not a classic ambient music label. I just feel like there’s a lot of intention. Instrumental, atmospheric music can be very intentional, so that's one of the things I look for as a curator and as a listener. But I also listen to a lot of pop, I’m really into Smerz and Addison Rae right now. We’re going to be putting out this new Marta Forsberg album, which is kind of an experimental pop record. I mean, they're really strange songs, but still songs. That's something I'm keen to explore a bit more.
Your Bandcamp page bio just says “tender music”. It’s hard to categorize the music you put out, and it doesn’t fit into any specific genre.
It’s not necessarily just that the music needs to feel tender, but it should be evoking tenderness within the listener. Another way of thinking about it is music that fits between places. Within the catalog, there are a few curatorial directions that I explore. One would be acoustic chamber drone music, artists like Alexandra Słyż, Luka Aron, Vilhelm Bromander, or that Danketsu 10 record with Patrick Shiroishi. Another one is this plunderphonic direction, just interesting work with samples. That started with the Kajsa Lindgren album Everything is Here, which was such a pivotal record for the label. It takes archival recordings from Kajsa's grandparents and recontextualizes them in a really meaningful way. Same goes for the JC Leisure record that followed after, but also Nate Scheible’s Fairfax.
That was the one for me, the gateway that really got me into the label.
Yeah, that one is just so unique. I don't know if I've ever heard anything like it since. So these are just strands of sound that I follow. Since I'm back in Slovakia, I focus more on the region, with some of these artists coming from Eastern or Central Europe, like Martyna Basta, Alexandra Słyż or Adela Mede. Marta Forsberg is from Sweden, but she’s actually half Polish too.
5 Catalogue Highlights
1. Marta Forsberg – Light Colours in Jyderup (2021)
A gorgeous longform piece made from vocal recordings, originally created as a sound installation. Sounds vaguely medieval and absolutely spellbinding.
2. Nate Scheible – Fairfax (2022)
Haunting music composed around a mysterious female voice from a thrift store cassette, pairing her vulnerable diary with warped pianos and saxophones.
3. Ani Zakareishvili – Fallin (2022)
Six short but magical piano vignettes, laced with samples from an old interview with Eartha Kitt.
4. Martyna Basta – Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering (2023)
Layers of wordless vocals, guitar and violin, field recordings and synth drones – this ghostly music is about all the things we can’t say easily.
5. Adela Mede – Ne Lépj a Virágra (2023)
Otherworldly vocals over sprinkles of acoustic instruments – accordion, clarinet, and Martyna Basta’s detuned zither on album highlight “Hol A Tavasz”. An austere beauty.
Would you say there is a common thread throughout the experimental music scene in Eastern Europe?
Probably not. There are so many sub-scenes now, and maybe Warm Winters forms kind of a little sub-sub-scene in itself. We recently had a few showcases, one at Cafe OTO in London, one at silent green in Berlin, and one at Fylkingen in Stockholm. It really came to life in that setting, when you got the full breadth of the experience. That's where things started to make sense to me, in terms of how it all works together, not just for myself in the studio, but for other listeners as well.
Warm Winters also has a strong kinship with other labels, and I have a lot of friends who run labels too. I used to joke that Slovakia has a really high per capita record label ratio, especially in experimental music. One is mappa, which we collaborate closely with. Mondoj from Poland, they’re good friends of mine. We feel a lot of kinship with Muscut [from Ukraine]. These are labels in the same world as Warm Winters, not necessarily always connected, and not necessarily doing similar things, but I feel that's the scene I'm part of. And there are many other things going on across the region.
Krakow’s Unsound festival has been an important hub for experimental music in Eastern Europe, and they now run their own label too. Pointless Geometry comes to mind as well, an amazing tape label from Poland.
Yeah, exactly. When I came back to Slovakia, I made this effort to create a network, so there were different initiatives to share knowledge and learn from each other, so that we don’t see each other as competition. I think that was valuable, because it can feel like a race. At the end of the day, it's about the music, so it doesn't really matter. I think we're all big fans of each other’s work, and that helps so we don't feel threatened.
It might be a romantic idea, but I hope that we can keep that competitive aspect out of these spaces as long as possible.
It's hard, because it seeps into all aspects of life, right? We feel it in the local scene too. We organize a label fair, just to bring everyone together before Christmas, with a few concerts to represent the different labels. We're trying different ways to bring people together, even if it doesn’t seem natural in the current landscape and environment.
Is Warm Winters Ltd. still essentially a one-man operation?
God, it's so DIY. It's just me and my laptop. Often people have an impression that it's quite a professional operation, but it really isn't. I work with a UK distributor, Kudos, so they support in some ways, especially with vinyl records. I have a studio in the city for my part-time work, which is mixing and mastering records, and it houses a small storage space. I ship everything myself, and I do all the admin. I write all the release notes. I master a lot of the records. I'm not super talented in terms of the visuals, so I usually work with designers. I'm really neglecting social media, but I'm trying to not use it too much as an individual, so I’m okay with not pushing it too much in that direction.
You're not living off the label, are you?
I earn zero Euros from it. It kind of breaks even to fund the next releases. That's the situation with some records at least, so it balances out in the end. But there's essentially no money in it for me.
For your 50th release, mu tate from Lithuania and Ani Zakareishvili from Georgia each recorded a selection of music from the catalogue for a limited mixtape. Tell me about it.
I wanted to do something interesting for the 50th release. At some point I had this idea to make a mixtape of music released on the label as a kind of retrospective. I really love what both of these artists do, and both also DJ and know how to mix, so that was a nice angle that ties into this concept of collage and plunderphonics. It was a spur of the moment to email them if they'd be interested in doing a mix from the whole catalog, whatever they’d want to play. Both were keen, so we made it happen. I was very happy with the mixes and how the tapes ended up looking. C120 tapes are hard to come by now.
They also tear quickly.
Yeah, the manufacturer warned me that they are quite fragile, but hopefully these will last forever. They came out very nicely.
I loved Ani Zakareishvili’s EP Fallin. What is she up to, is she releasing anything new soon?
Her new record is done. It’s quite different to the last EP, but I love it. It’s more intense, electronic music, but really good. Hopefully by the end of the year it'll be out. That's the plan, so we'll see how we get on with the production and everything. There are some records which we’re going to release before that, like the Marta Forsberg album I mentioned, then a duo album by Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg, and a new Rob Winstone record. That one’s stunning, it’s two hours long. He lives a very rural lifestyle in nature and works in a very solitary way, and he just makes such beautiful, incredible music that no one seems to know about.
You also just released a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided, your second album as a solo artist, on the mappa label. It doesn’t really qualify as “tender music”, does it?
Not really, it's more abrasive, more intense, and darker. My first record [Sometimes Life Is Hard And So We Should Help Each Other] was quite tender, but this one can feel quite overwhelmingly dark, at least to me. I was heavily inspired by the 1980s work of Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. There were some new translations of his work into Slovak that I’d been reading in the last few years, and they had a big impact on my own creative process and thinking about sound. So the music is not actually a reflection of how I feel about the world – it really came out of this relationship with the writing.
Even if you didn't intend it to be a commentary on the current turmoil in global politics, it does seem like an apt statement to me.
I think my issue with that is that I don't want to seem extremely pessimistic about the future. Because I have a lot of hope. Things pass, even despite the challenges; they are more temporary than they may seem. I didn't want it to seem like there was so much darkness inside me that I had to make this record. But I also can't tell people how to interpret it, so in the end, we just decided to put it out, and now it's there, living its own life, which is good.
Adam 🤍