Vinyl Williams

LA-based Lionel Williams is an internationally exhibited visual artist and musician who’s been releasing music under his Vinyl Williams alias since 2010. As a result of experiencing religious and cultural dissonance growing up in the state of Utah, Williams reacts by creating dream worlds of religious and cultural harmony. It’s through his art—both musical, visual, and the music videos he’s directed for bands like Tears for Fears and Unknown Mortal Orchestra—that Williams projects himself well beyond the stasis of his youth, his metaphysical dream worlds in constant forward motion, with ancient mystical symbols, utopian architecture and exotic locales all enveloped in a rippling, lo-fi haze of psychedelia.

For his third full-length album, Williams explores a world both real and imaginary. Brunei, his second LP for Company Records, follows the flight of an incorporeal being from Xol, the gravity cluster orbiting the star Alnilam, the center of the Orion constellation. The record explores the ideals of peace and harmony with maximal pop tones, shoegaze textures, and krautrock rhythms. The album features collaborations with Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick and Medicine’s Brad Laner.

Vinyl Williams began releasing music in 2010 and following a handful of well-received EPs and singles, his debut album, Lemniscate, appeared in late 2012. Following a South Korean tour with Toro Y Moi, Williams and Bundick collaborated on the Trance Zen Dental Spa EP. Released in late 2014 via BitTorrent (to date it has been downloaded more than one million times), Williams and Bundick weaved sound and visuals together into a highly psychedelic, interactive music experience. In 2015, Vinyl Williams’ second full-length, Into, saw his dreamy avant-pop become something more lucid, with his deliberately smeared musical brushstrokes utilizing far more vivid colors.

Unlike the pomp and circumstance of the film scores by his famed grandfather (composer and conductor John Williams), Lionel’s songs are introspective and visceral, often reflecting the same pulsing psychedelia and mysticism of his collage-based artwork. Pulling from ambient, electronic, krautrock, space rock, and shoegaze influences, Vinyl Williams effortlessly blurs the line between melodicism and experimentation, making for warmly transcendent music that’s as beguiling as it is inviting.