Vinyl Williams
With spring on our doorstep, Warmest Chord have the pleasure to release Ultimate World, a six-track EP and limited screen print release from the wonderful Vinyl Williams. A craftsmen of both image and sound, he is otherwise known as LA-based, 21-year old Lionel Williams.
The music of Vinyl Williams is not easy unassuming music to ponder your lot to. It is not music to be played ‘in the background’. His songs do not have their feet firmly on the ground. Instead they spill and soar, with layer upon layer of cascading kraut jams, walls of noise and atmospheres that thicken with delicious melody and oracular vocals.
He writes with an energy that emanates from the dawn of the very first sound that you hear. It courses through space rock jams that give way to waterfalls of blissed out tremelo and infinite prisms of sonic intensity. This isn’t song writing, this is deep sea diving, space exploration, astral projection. There are no guidebooks issued here.
It seems that Vinyl Williams’ intention is just that. To transport. For this he embeds himself into long hours of solitude and saddles up his imagination. He invites and welcomes the listener in, his intention to elevate the spirit and to envelop. Tellingly he chooses not to over think the structure and composition beforehand, instead he prefers to follow his own musical intuition like a hungry animal onto the smell of a fresh kill. This is explorative song writing; brave, bold and expansive.
Play the Ultimate World EP as it was meant to be heard, as one free-flowing composition that reinforces the feeling that you are embarking on a journey, travelling. You start somewhere and end up somewhere very very different. There’ll be bracken at your feet, leaves caught in your hair and you swear you can hear a parakeet somewhere off in the distance.
Just as his music has a very vivid aestheticism, he creates similarly expressionistic worlds in his collage and video work. The Ultimate World screen print is a cacophony of colour, life and energy. He layers, builds and creates an epic fantasy realm strewn with mysticism and religious iconography. An almost sacred place where there is only optimism and the open arms of possibility.
The Vinyl Williams Ultimate World release is a welcome departure from the norm. Six free radical songs that sing of adventure, and a piece of collectible screen printed art. Both born from a fertile and psychedelic other world where intuition finally out-runs rationality.
We care not that we sound like tripping hippies coming up, come visit the land of Vinyl Williams…
