On Briars on a Dewdrop, Turner Williams Jr. brews up a heady stew of manipulated eclectic string sounds that is truly out of this world.

Available on April 7th through Feeding Tube Records, this album features the Alabama-based artist armed with an electric shahi baajas, gaz  and a whole cornucopia of effect pedals. Williams, of whom you may know from his work under the Ramble Tamble moniker or his work with Elkhorn, improvises here with a psychedelically opened mind, where texture, curiosity and tone appear to be leading each jam.

The sounds and moods of this album were so unique, abstract and evocative, I found it easiest to convey them in the form of a free verse poem. What better way to describe an album that is so amorphous, unfettered and original?

Sandy Bull electric meditations
being played underwater
deep within a shipwreck
30 meters down

Thick bass picks scraping down barbed wire, 
pulled taut and rusty
as
whirring alien drones screech and sing
in twisted futuristic harmonies

Frantic bowed fantasias
play like a violin shivering
with explosive anxiety,
moaning in hypnotic darkness

Conjuring the ghosts
of John Cale’s VU days
all needle grey, warm as blood

Solos incinerate like Zamrock guitar attacks
dripping in fuzz
alive with distortion
somewhere, Neil Young is smiling

Metallic shredding erupts
and the record’s simmering haze rises
to a storm of electric static
as
towering waves of sludge frequencies
crest and crash with tsunami strength
revving up like a mechanical titan
rising from the depths

Norse fiddle-like sighs, 
stern and strange,
mutate into iridescent wails
while reversed Fender scuzz
scorches with Saharan heat
and Mascis tones, all hairy and jagged

Follow the springing vibrations
to another dimension
far from time.

Click here to preorder the album on vinyl in the US, or here to get it digitally.

-KH