Yasmin Williams - Urban Driftwood - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Composer and guitarist Yasmin Williams releases her new album, Acadia, on October 4, 2024, via Nonesuch Records. The album, her Nonesuch debut and her most sonically expansive work to date, comprises nine original, mostly instrumental, tracks written and produced by Williams, and features her on various guitars, banjo, calabash drum, tap shoes, and kora. Williams is joined on the album by an eclectic cast of collaborators-including Immanuel Wilkins on saxophone, Dom Flemons on rhythm bones, Aoife O'Donovan on vocals, William Tyler on guitar, and many others-creating a folk music that reflects the wide range of musical influences that have inspired her throughout her life. Of the album, Williams says InchAcadia has several meanings a place of rural peace and pastoral poetry (Italian), a refuge or idyllic place, (Greek and Italian), fertile land (Mi'kmaq), a place of plenty (French)... all of this relates to the ethos of this album. The songs are seeds I planted, and the seeds grew into the album, Acadia a place of peace, a place where creativity can blossom, a place where everyone can fit in together and collaborate effectively, a place where the fruits of my own labor in music can fully flourish without judgment or prejudice. One of my visions for this record was to expand the potential for current folk music to encourage collaboration across various genres. Blurring those somewhat arbitrary lines has been a natural tendency for me since I started writing music at twelve years old and Acadia is a full circle moment. Inch

... As Fernando Pessoa wrote, Inchno nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existedInch. Francesco Ciurlo, in this overview of his works, frees us from this condition and invites us to another state - the state of exactness, which does not comprise only of precision. The sound objects are there, exact, reiterated, and are what is needed to give the idea of a place we live in at the precise moment in which it shows itself in all it's parts. Not only a memory of a supposed listening, but a hic et nunc listening. The sound concretions always stand out precise and in forefront, without masking, with no prospective distances, and without nebulosity. In this collection, a sort of evolution towards a clear and consolidated maturity of the composer is undoubtedly illustrated, defining and radicalizing the strong and unambiguous signs of a vision of music a substantial coldness of the texture; a ruthless cleanliness of the images; a InchnarrationInch which is only present in watermark and therefore to some extent unnecessary and, in fact, once the subjection for it is gloriously overcome, Francesco Ciurlo focuses on ignoring it; furthermore, a disregard for decorative nuances, even within an obsessive richness of writing; an objectivity of things which is neither emotional nor of epicironic detachment; a fundamental renunciation of expressiveness; a theatre of sound within a theatre of cruelty, with a cruelty that however causes no pain but is rather cruel in the sense that it rejects everything that turns out to be extraneous or discordant. In a substantially denied narration, the complex processes appear with no resolution. This condition places us even more in front of the presence of InchthingsInch precisely at the moment of their manifestation and their repetition. Nothing more than this or rather, nothing more behind this.

With Dar Williams' EMERALD, a timely and brilliant album of new songs and collaborations with friends such as Jill Sobule, Richard Thompson, Jim Lauderdale, the Milk Carton Kids, the Hooters, Lucy Wainwright Roche and her mother Suzzy Roche (among others). EMERALD will be heavily promoted in 2015, as Dar will be touring for the rest of the year. 42 North American shows! The CD is packaged in a heavy cardboard, four panel, tube jacket, with an eight panel poster-style color insert. 'Dar Williams, one of America's very best singer-songwriters. Her songs are beautiful. Some are like finely crafted short stories. They are, variously, devastatingly moving, tenderly funny, subtle without being in any way inaccessible, and utterly fresh, not a cliche or a clunker in her entire songbook.' -The New Yorker.