Another music term, possibly another genre – celestial music. Or, maybe it is a combination of music that has already been around wrapped up neatly into one.
On this occasion, it is a tag given to Los Angeles musician Vinyl Williams and his latest album Aeterna.’Yet, essentially, what do we have here?
Actually, the phrase itself was coined by Iasos, a Greek-American musician back in the early 70s, as he studied bossa nova and jazz after he went into the ambient forays.
Vinyl Williams has all those elements here, but, possibly being from Los Angeles, he adds hefty doses of good old psychedelia and baroque pop, obviously having a large collection of records by the likes of Love, Brian Wilson, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and producer/arrangers like Curt Boettcher and Burt Bacharach, as well as Brazilian masters like Arthur Verocai and Lo Borges, with touches of dream pop for good measure.
Having such a widespread set of musical elements involved always presents a dangerous territory if the artist doesn’t know how to handle them properly, but Williams manages to do so admirably, coming up with music that is actually quite individual and, yes, celestial. It makes Aeterna one of the better releases in any of the genres Williams has mashed up here.
