Turner Williams Jr. - vipérine

Turner Williams Jr.
vipérine
mistralph0ne
France, 2026
LP

BACK IN STOCK!

A visionary new album from Turner Williams, Jr., an American in Marseille who has collaborated with Shelter & Orion on the epochal Les Disques Omnison imprint and released some heady solo albums on labels such as Feeding Tube and Working Man Lay Down. On vipérine, he comes into his own, crafting mysterious, otherworldly compositions for shahi baaja (an electric 15 string keyboard zither), cetera (an acoustic baroque Corsican lute), and FX.

On opener “jonquille,” a single, implacable riff echoes indefinitely while ever-shifting counterpoint swirls around it like a complex orchestral arrangement. It’s stately, measured, knotty, and majestic—timeless as in out of time.

A bit jarring then, when “st. loup”’s spritely riffing quickly devolves into a web of tangled looping—a shot across the bow to assure you how far out he’ll go.

But then we snap right back with the plangent hammer-ons of “sauterelle,” sketching out a new conception of jaunty, psychedelic court music. 

And so the album goes—hovering between the graceful and the sublime, the right on and the far out, the earthly and the absolute. It’s one of the most rearranging things I’ve heard in a long time, eye-opening and assumption-shifting, an arrival and a major statement.