The chillwave flagbearer of South Carolina, Toro Y Moi (aka Chaz Bundick) has announced a one-week touring schedule in the UK, including Glasgow, Bristol and London’s KOKO, June 4. Having released his third album Anything in Return on Carpark Records January 16 this year, he’s dropped an extra taster with a Dam-Funk “re-freak” of his ‘Say That’ single.
The Los Angeles artist signed to Stones Throw Records lives up to his name by running the wistful tide of a typically Toro Y Moi flow through a jerking groove and the mood for some live tour action. Full dates below.
TORO Y MOI LIVE IN JUNE
4 June – London, KOKO
5 June – Brighton, Concorde 2
6 June – Bristol, Thekla
7 June – Birmingham, Academy 2
8 June – Glasgow, The Arches
Los Angeles is a very weird place. If artist and musician Lionel Williams (aka Vinyl Williams) is anything to go by, the people that live there are even weirder. He boasts a visual aesthetic that is a fantasy of pre-Egyptian imagery immersed in a hazy vision of personalised, two-dimensional Utopias and music that is equally as dreamy and amorphous. Now, following his 2011 album release, Leminscate, there’ll be a new EP, Ultimate World, out on London-based label Warmest Chord, April 9.
Still studying and only 22-years-old, Williams has already exhibited in Berlin, jammed with the likes of Electrelane’s Verity Susman and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Jochen Arbeit and toured South East Asia with US chillwaver Toro Y Moi. And that’s not even the half of it. He has a grandfather in cinema score giant John Williams, responsible for the soundtracks to Star Wars, E.T. and Indiana Jones, and a father in Air Supply and Live touring drummer Mark Williams. There’s also his home in California, the upbringing in Utah and a severe aversion to the Mormon faith as a result. Being Jewish on his mother’s side didn’t help.
Plus, you have a traumatic first gig in front of thousands of people at age nine, a serious fondness for metaphysics and an irrepressible urge to expound on it. Needless to say, Williams, his work and most importantly his conversation are equal parts interesting, outrageous and at times downright exhausting.
