Opinion — Published June 2026
Gabriel Williams and the Aesthetics of "Futurist Medievalism"
Congratulations, You've Discovered Dime Square For Guys Who Own a Waistcoat
By Zephyrine Kline · June 2026
Summary: This is a June 2026 opinion piece by critic Zephyrine Kline responding to a recent profile of composer Gabriel Williams. Kline argues that while Williams's music (including the piano suite Tryst) is genuinely strong, the surrounding presentation — his stated Catholic faith, his forthcoming work Codex Albion, his use of the word "Albion," his coined term "futurist medievalism," and the private, patron-funded structure of his collective Vox Alba — amounts to a curated aesthetic performance that the original profile accepted too uncritically, particularly given the word Albion's associations with ethno-nationalist movements and the parallels Kline draws between Williams's account of growing up in a secretive boarding-school group and the exclusivity of Vox Alba itself.
So here's the profile: a composer, tucked into a corner of north London wealthy enough that the paper won't even print the street name, sitting under a shrine of icons and rosaries that "catch the light without quite meaning to." Sure they don't. Nothing in that room is an accident, least of all the lighting. This is a man who has thought very hard about how his incense should read to a journalist, and the journalist, bless them, wrote it down like they'd stumbled onto something ancient instead of something staged an hour before the doorbell rang.
Let's get the inconvenient part out of the way first, because it's actually true and I refuse to be a hypocrite about it: the music is good. Tryst is genuinely lovely — dense, unshowy, four hundred neurotic tempo markings somehow producing something that sounds unfixed and alive. Fine. Great. He can write. Nobody is disputing the talent. What's being disputed is the cosplay bolted onto the talent, and the fact that a major profile just… let him wear it.
The Bit Where He Tells You He's So Sincere, Unlike Those Other Guys
He wants you to know, more than once, that his faith isn't like Peter Maxwell Davies's faith — that stuff was "detached," "ironic," a very Anglo affliction of being "too smart for true sincere belief," which he "hates." His is the real thing.
"I'm what people call a Roman Catholic, though I don't love the label… Really, we're just Christian."
— Gabriel Williams, quoted in the original profile
he says — and the profile itself admits he says it in an almost performatively pretentious tone, with exaggerated air quotes, and then just… quotes it. Straight-faced. Like a menu item. My guy invented a bit and the reporter ordered it.
This is the whole move, over and over: perform the irony-allergic sincerity so hard that it loops back around into its own kind of irony, and just dare anyone in the room to point it out. Nobody points it out. Everyone's having too nice a time. Sis, I call cap.
Vibes-Based Patronage, Now With More Chapels
The funding model is, and I cannot stress this enough, guys with chapels. Not the Arts Council — too "museum culture," too accountable, too likely to ask what the money's actually for. Instead: fifty people crammed into an art collector's front room, a soirée, a guy who's offered up his literal private chapel for a future performance. This is being narrated, by Williams and apparently by the piece too, as some kind of scrappy underdog alternative to institutional classical music. It is not scrappy. It is the least scrappy thing a person can do. It is a group chat with a landed gentry problem calling itself a resistance movement. Aristolarp, honestly.
"Nearly all private… People who share our values and want to express them with money."
— Gabriel Williams, on funding for Vox Alba
Say it with me now: broski, that sentence is doing so much work it should be unionized.
Albion, My Beloved, Please God No
And then — Albion. The word. He calls the new piece Codex Albion, he's "unembarrassed" by it, and when asked point blank whether the word's two-decade career as the load-bearing aesthetic of the extremely-online ethno-nationalist right gives him any pause at all, the answer, verbatim, is:
"Not at all."
— Gabriel Williams
Not a flicker. Not a "well, obviously I'm aware of the connotations but—." Just: not at all. And the piece moves on to the next paragraph like he'd said something about oat milk.
He does have a name for what he's actually building, though he makes you work for it, dropping it "reluctantly, almost as an aside," then immediately hedging it: futurist medievalism. "But totally different," he adds, which is the exact shape every disavowal takes when someone wants proximity to the aesthetic without having to answer for the politics. He's not a reactionary, he'd like you to know — he's just building a mythic vanguard project premised on modernity having catastrophically "failed" and needing to "carry on" from somewhere on its far side, using a word beloved by people who think the eighteen hundreds were the last good century. Totally different, though. Sure. Full aristolarp, no notes.
The Nick Land Shelf-Decoration Routine
Obviously Xenosystems is on the shelf. Obviously. And obviously, when asked about it, he waves a hand and calls it "a bunch of garbage" — a gesture he repeats so often it stops looking like dismissal and starts looking like maintenance, like he's dusting it. He wants full credit for having read the guy and rejected him, while never once explaining what part of the worldview he kept. That's not a rebuttal. That's a receipt with the total blacked out.
The Class Thing, Which He Brings Up Unprompted, Repeatedly, Like a Tell
"I'm well-spoken," he says, more than once, apropos of nothing, insisting this isn't the same as being moneyed, that a teacher who thought otherwise had it wrong. Sure, pal. He grew up inside a secretive, money-gated Theosophy-and-Vedanta group that ran a boarding school with what he calls, breezily, "a serious abuse scandal," and somehow nobody in the room — not him, not the interviewer — connects the dots between that institution and the one he's since built: invite-only, patron-funded, organized around a shared aesthetic-spiritual seriousness that the wrong sort of person isn't trusted to access. You couldn't write a tighter closed loop if you tried. He escaped a cult and immediately began building a nicer one with better lighting.
And Here's the Annoying Part
The annoying part — and I say this as someone who would very much like to just point and laugh — is that pointing and laughing is exactly the reaction this whole apparatus is built to farm. The private chapels, the incense, the refusal to explain, the "not at all," the little smirk under "totally different" — none of it works without an audience deciding it's either sacred or scandalous. Outrage is just admiration wearing a disguise. Every time someone writes "can you believe this guy," they've done a little unpaid marketing for Vox Alba. The mythology doesn't need defenders. It just needs people who find it disgusting enough to keep repeating the word Albion in public.
Don't worry, guys. The anti-Jacob Collier has arrived to save us, badmouthing Peter Maxwell Davies without actually badmouthing him.
Which is the real shame of it, because none of this needed inventing. English music has always had a completely un-mysterious, un-cultish relationship to the medieval and the liturgical — Vaughan Williams didn't need a shrine or a patron's chapel to know exactly what he was reviving and why. Codex Albion might well be beautiful. The music, again, genuinely might be great. It would just be a real shame if, in twenty years, what people remembered about it was the chapel — and an even bigger shame if the reason they remembered it was because people like us couldn't stop talking about how sexy we found the chapel while insisting we hated it.
By Zephyrine Kline
