Brad Allen Williams teams up with the soulful vocalist J. Hoard for “the fruit,” where the sweet psychedelia and the intriguing songwriting meet the trippy flute solo by Elena Pinderhughes, leaving listeners hungry for more. Read our discussion with the talented artist below!
Describe your sound in 3 words
gestural
terrestrial
celestial
the fruit is the third from your upcoming album, “Light Rivers.” How does this song fit into the overall narrative of the album?
The whole album is broadly informed by my fascination with imagined or alternative futures, and “the fruit” is a little bit on the darker end. We’re currently living through a dramatic, rapidly-evolving upheaval in the way humans communicate and interact, and I wanted to examine that. What will be the unintended consequences of vanity-for-profit? So far, “an unprecedented flavor of very-online nihilism” seems to be among the valid answers. How will that shape the future?
What is the story behind the album title, Light Rivers?
It was just a phrase that popped up while working on some of the music, and I really liked the visual connotations of it. All visual beauty is light, when you think about it, just from a physics standpoint.
Improvisation is a core musical value in your music. Is improvisation a talent or a skill?
“Talent” is—I strongly believe this—a mythological concept. Whenever “talent” is used, it would be more meaningful to substitute “curiosity.”
When people talk about someone having a “gift,” I believe this gift to be uncommon, consistent thirst for deeper understanding. It’s sensational fiction to imagine some kind of supernatural magical power—what’s usually going on is just a near-compulsive need to learn more, to understand more deeply, that never goes away.
So “talent” and “skill” are part of one continuum. Insatiable curiosity leads to development of skill. Has any human ever had enough pure, incurious discipline to do all that’s required to become John Coltrane or Stravinsky? There has to be a passion for the process, a quest for knowledge. This is the motive force! Any sacrifice made by the artist on this journey is incidental, and usually made eagerly—even compulsively.
Adding up to the previous questions, how do you balance your desire for open, curious, and present improvisation with the need for a cohesive and structured final product?
I just trust that there’s a fully-formed and well-understood aesthetic sensibility behind every impulse. I feel no shortage of clarity about what I like, and this results in a feeling of assurance that it will all cohere—even when the relationships are oblique. Anything I make will come from the same set of life experiences; the same inner world. I think trust—both trust in collaborators and trust in self—is quite underrated when it comes to making any kind of creative work.
Artists and people that have influenced you?
The honest answer—“everything and everybody”—is painfully trite uninteresting, so I’ll curate a small list.
Andrei Tarkovsky. Sam Rivers. Jimi Hendrix. György Ligeti. David Lynch. Verner Panton. Jorge Ben Jor. Wayne Shorter. Panos Cosmatos. James Jamerson. John Coltrane. My Bloody Valentine. Yayoi Kusama. Booker Little.
Let’s arbitrarily stop there; I’m beginning to bore even myself. The common theme is willingness—or even eagerness—to bend (or suspend) reality in service of pure aesthetic beauty. And to occasionally—though not necessarily—provoke thought.
In which place or state of mind do you imagine people might listen to your music?
I’ve never thought about it! I don’t really feel like it’s my business, just like it’s none of my business whether or not anyone likes it. Any type of relationship someone wants to have with the work, I’m just grateful that they’re interested enough to listen! But if I really think about it, maybe it’s more of a solitary thing. I struggle to imagine it as party music… unless it’s one of those silent “record listening parties” for music heads!
Something not many people know about you?
If I hadn’t been an artist, I would’ve been a scientist… a physicist or chemist. I find it so inspiring to imagine this infinitude of tiny, atomic-level interactions going on throughout the universe all around us. Artistic curiosity ultimately became my life’s work, but there’s this whole other range of curiosity that always has persisted in parallel. I can’t imagine ever exhausting the possibilities of the creative imagination, but if I ever felt I had, I know right where I’d pivot.
Thank you!
Follow brad allen williams
Instagram/Facebook
Follow our Spotify playlist Psychedelic Dream Circuit feat. brad allen williams
Secret Eclectic 