'Live' by Chris Williams Quintet

Chris Ryan Williams is an interdisciplinary artist based between NYC and LA and most at home collaborating with contemporary improvisers and experimentalists. He has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe, most recently with Pink Siifu and Negro'6.

Williams has collaborated with creators Greg Tate's Burnt Sugar Arkestra, gabby fluke-mogul, Jessica Ackerly, Jason Nazary, Eyvind Kang, Joanna Mattrey, Miriam Parker, Bennie Maupin, Nicole Mitchell, Fay Victor, Wendy Eisenberg, Luke Stewart, Marjani Forte-Saunders, Eric Revis, and recently Patrick Shiroishi in their duo on Astral Spirits' 'Sans Soleil' (2021).

'Live' is the first release under his name as a leader. It is also the first release of cow: Music, the audio branch of the cow arts program. cow: Music is currently a subsidiary of Astral Spirits Records.

South African writer/ scholar Nombuso Mathibila says of 'Live':

"LIVE is a product of trusted musicianship and spontaneity where the central desire is to see what people do with space collectively under conditions where there is no prescribed direction. This is a white label release under a subsidiary label called cow: Music and it comes off two hours of recording and roughly twenty-eight minutes make it into the album. Throughout this record, Williams plays a frugal acoustic role and much of his contributions take shape in the post-recording phase mainly through editing and the inclusion of electronic sound arrangements that connect the recording into a cohesive improvisational album. He is quite clear that “there is a certain amount of composition in between the improvisation and this can be heard in the layered rhythmic arrangements in the first half of ‘side A’ before the session moves into a picking improvisational style where sound bounces across instruments in an aesthetic fashion that centers the cinematic character of each instrument."

As a subsidiary of Astral Spirits Records, cow: Music is the musical branch of the cow arts program. It was officially founded in 2020 after a long period of thought on how to curate music, writing, and visual art from an ever-changing humanistic lens.