Stream: Vinyl Williams, ‘L’Quasar’

Kevin Bronson on July 20th, 2016

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Lionel Williams, who as Vinyl Williams conducts brain chemistry-altering psychedelic pop explorations, will release his third album, “Brunei,” on Aug. 26. It comes via Company Records, the imprint of Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick (who, along with guitarist Ian Gibbs and Medicine’s Brad Laner, contribute). It also comes weighted by Williams’ lofty concepts and incorrigibly adventurous musical sense that encompasses space-rock, krautrock and a few genres nobody’s named yet.

The L.A.-based Williams, the grandson of composer John Williams, was reared in Utah amid “religious and cultural dissonance,” which he has answered by “creating dream worlds of religious and cultural harmony” in both his music and visual art. Each endeavor is thick with symbolism, and for his third album Williams drew inspiration from the appearance of the Brunei dollar, the monetary unit of the small nation on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. It’s a paradoxical country — idyllic in setting, its Muslim citizens ruled by Sharia law.

As for the visual inspiration, the imagery on Williams’ new point-and-click website — which sends users on a treasure hunt to “unlock” the songs — gives you an idea. The song “Riddles of the Sphinx,” Williams told FADER, “is an agnostic plea about humanity’s flaws of knowing. Nothing can be known fully from all angles. Knowledge seems as impermanent as life itself. A few lyrical lines point to ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,’ the anonymous medieval poem that accepts the inability of human understanding when contemplating the divine.” If that song seems to come from another time, the new tune “L’Quasar” seems to come from another galaxy, modulating between star systems and bursting with prismatic synth.

||| Stream: “L’Quasar” and “Riddles of the Sphinx”