Dear friends
Covid-19 is dangerously impacting the social-economic category of musicians. No concerts, poor political and social consideration, uncertain earnings. As a consequence, an ever-growing number of musicians, especially those from the experimental area, are trying to promote their music on BandCamp in digital format only. It is increasingly difficult for me to follow and review this incredible flow of music. I therefore decided to open this section on my blog Neuguitars where I propose music in digital format that I consider particularly interesting and worthy of attention. I hope you like it. Let’s support musicians. They need it.
Andrea Aguzzi
Urban Driftwood by Yasmin Williams, BandCamp, 2021 on #neuguitars #blog
https://yasminwilliams.bandcamp.com/album/urban-driftwood
http://yasminwilliamsmusic.com/
Yasmin Williams sits on her leather couch, her guitar stretched across her lap horizontally with its strings turned to the sky. She taps on the fretboard with her left hand as her right hand plucks a kalimba placed on the guitar’s body. Her feet, clad in tap shoes, keep rhythm on a mic’d wooden board placed under her. Even with all limbs in play, it’s mind boggling that the melodic and percussive sounds that emerge are made by just one musician, playing in real time. With her ambidextrous and pedidextrous, multi-instrumental techniques of her own making and influences ranging from video games to West African griots subverting the predominantly white male canon of fingerstyle guitar, Yasmin Williams is truly a guitarist for the new century. So too is her stunning sophomore release, Urban Driftwood, an album for and of these times. Though the record is instrumental, its songs follow a narrative arc of 2020, illustrating both a personal journey and a national reckoning, through Williams’ evocative, lyrical compositions.
released January 29, 2021
Urban Driftwood was engineered and mixed by Jeff Gruber at Blue House Productions in Kensington and Silver Spring, Maryland and mastered by Charlie Pilzer at Tonal Park Studios in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Album art photography by Louis Munroe. Layout design by Sally Anne Morgan.
All songs composed and performed by Yasmin Williams, with additional performances by Taryn Wood (cello) and Amadou Kouyate (djembe and cadjembe).
Released by SPINSTER
www.spinstersounds.com
spinstersounds.bandcamp.com
NeuGuitars 