Saul Williams in Paris Catacombs

Saul Williams and his band were filmed exploring and playing music in the Paris Catacombs. It's one of the most inspiring things I've seen in a while.

Volcanic Sunlight...

...is the innermost part of something special.

Saul Williams' new album Volcanic Sunlight comes out on May 2nd (and I'm assuming May 3rd in the States), just a few days from now. I guess I'm a little late with this, but on April 21st, he posted four videos on youtube about the album.

"Explain My Heart" music video

There's a new music video for the Saul Williams song I posted about a few months ago.

It's from his new album Volcanic Sunlight, which will be released this year. There's also a new interview on Dazed Digital where I found the video.

You can still download the song "Explain My Heart" for free by clicking here.

Gluten-Free Saul Pancake Williams

I recently wrote about a new song by Saul Williams, one of my favorite creative people.

Saul was featured in a video on Soul Pancake, the philosophical website started by actor Rainn Wilson and friends. You can watch on the site by clicking here, or watching in the embedded player below:



Although I don't share all of the same beliefs as Saul, this video is quite interesting. I particularly found it interesting when he talked about deep breaths being the relaxing aspect of smoking cigarettes. When he was talking about an innermost power as opposed to a higher power, it reminded me of my own beliefs about many people maybe giving too much credit to God and not enough credit to people. I have faith in the potential of myself and the potential of others.

ExplainMyHeart, a new song by Saul Williams

Apparently, Saul Williams is releasing a new album in early 2011. I seemed to be one of the three people on the whole internet talking about it. That changed when Mr. Williams made a cryptic post on his facebook page with the phrase "De-code My Heart" along with a link called "Volcanic Sunlight".

For reasons unknown to me, I immediately went to youtube and searched for both phrases, and a video came up with one of the images from the Volcanic Sunlight website. It said the video was uploaded "one hour ago". I pressed play, and a song started playing. It was unmistakably the voice of Saul Williams in the song. When the song finished playing, I noticed there was one play on the video. I was possibly the first person on the entire internet to watch it. Here's the video, which is the still image accompanied by a wonderful new song.

It sounds very different from his older music, but I like it a lot.

The percussion in the song made me immediately remember an old Wired magazine interview from November 2008 (almost two years ago now) which was a year after he released his last album. He mostly reflected on that album, but he also talked about some of the newer material that he was working on.

"The focus of the new album is percussion. For all intents and purposes, it’s a discussion of percusson. If I have to label some of the songs, maybe some are dance punk, dicso-y, or prog-rockish, but I really don’t know how to categorize it. Some of it makes me think of De-Loused in the Comatorium, The Mars Volta’s first album — there’s a lot of live instrumentation with a hip hop filter. I lived for a year in Brazil as a teenager, and percussion was always present in my appreciation for music, but not necessarily in my music. So that’s where my head is at."

I imagine he was talking about the album Volcanic Sunlight.

You can download the song "ExplainMyHeart" for free by clicking here. I recommend it. As I said, it's a wonderful song.

UPDATE #1:
It turns out one of the images was a code that needed to be decoded by some fancy device apparently known as a "smartphone" to give you the url to download the song. I have never owned a cellphone, so that all sounds like another language to me.

I also found out that the song or a previous version of the song was featured in a video from over a year and a half ago that I've never seen called Saul Williams: Writer In Residence on Current TV. It's kind of shocking how something can exist for so long right under our noses without us knowing about it.

Update #2:
Saul Williams retweeted one of my tweets regarding my excitement about his new album. :)