Yasmin Williams

When guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams sits down to compose music, she doesn’t scour her subconscious for unheard melodies or clever chord progressions. Instead, she goes granular—fixating on a single note. She’ll play it over and over, sustaining it, varying the attack or the release to change its essence, eventually adding notes to form chords.

She has a name for this. She calls it “ruminating” and describes it as a key part of her writing. “I’ve learned a little about how to sit with a note, and to give things time,” the Virginia native says. “You find some tiny idea and just play it over and over again until something else pops up … You have to trust that sometimes a note will take you to where it wants to go next.”

This intuitive process led Williams to the breathtakingly tactile and rivetingly understated Acadia, her Nonesuch debut. Its nine original songs expand, dramatically, on the sonic space Williams created with her acclaimed 2021 album, Urban Driftwood. In addition to the crisp fingerpicked guitar that helped establish her as a fast-rising star of instrumental folk, Williams plays kora, harp guitar, banjo, and electric guitar and bass—all with authority. And where her two previous records have been mostly solo, Acadia finds Williams collaborating with artists across a wide stylistic range, including the vocalist Aoife O’Donovan, violinist Darian Donovan Thomas, the folk quartet Darlingside, synthesist Rich Ruth, and jazz alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.

Visit: yasminwilliamsmusic.com

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