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New Music Mondays: Don Dewulf promises full prog on new solo album, but doesn’t skimp on the riffs

His solo prog rock act The Wring debuts is a solo project at this point, Dewulf brought in seasoned studio musicians to help him out and hired a publicist

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series called New Music Mondays, where we feature new music by musicians from the Greater Sudbury area on Mondays. If you’re an area musician and would like us to profile your work, email us at [email protected]. ​​​​​​​

The Wring might have started out as a band, but it has evolved into a personal project for Sudbury’s Don Dewulf.

The progressive hard rock band formed in 2015, and “we played, we jammed, we recorded a record, we released a record, did some shows,” but as many bands eventually do, it eventually lost steam.

But Dewulf, who had written the band’s self-titled 2017 album himself anyway, said he hadn’t lost enthusiasm himself.

“I wrote another record, and I looked locally again, and didn’t really have a lot of success, so I went out to the world,” he said.

On May 28, Dewulf releases his latest project under The Wring name, ‘Project Cipher’.

To help support the solo project, Dewulf tapped some seasoned studio musicians, including Marc Bonilla (Keith Emerson Band, California Transit Authority, Glenn Hughes), Bryan Beller (Joe Satriani, The Aristocrats, Dethklok, Steve Vai), Thomas Lang (Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Williams), Jason Henrie and Jason Sadites.

Because the majority of albums are made using multitrack software these days, it doesn’t matter where individual musicians are located.

Dewulf is the sole songwriter of the project and he takes up guitar duties.

He said it was expensive to hire the musicians, but not as expensive as he’d expected — because of the pandemic, they don’t have as many gigs as usual, and they just love playing.

Dewulf raves about some of these musicians, including Lang, who has recently graced the cover of Modern Drummer magazine.

“He was amazing,” he said. “Just very down to earth, very interested in the project. And in fact, when he recorded the drums, he said ‘I want it to sound like a band, not like a session,’ so he actually learned all the songs, and played them front to back, which is very unusual for a studio situation. I felt pretty good about that.”

Dewulf’s promotional material said the album has “enough proggy stuff for the geeks, but still plenty of melodies and rock riffery for the regular heavy music listener.”

A single from the album called “The Wring” has already been released. You can check out the video below.

The album has been attracting a lot of international attention. Dewulf said that’s probably because he hired a professional publicist, Jon Asher, to help him this time.

“I’ve had interviews with guys in Italy, literally all over the world,” he said. “There’s an audience for this type of music.”

Dewulf, who works for an insulation contractor here in Sudbury, said he’s been into music since he was a child of seven or eight years old, when he started playing the guitar.

“I have a job and a family,” he said. “Music is a passion. I do it for the love. I chickened out a long time ago and decided being a career musician is risky and it’s hard to feed yourself, much less a family.

“I went the safe route of taking business in school and all that and working. Now I have the chance to dial it back a little bit on the work side and spend a little more time on the music side, and this is where this is all coming from.”



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Heidi Ulrichsen

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