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Ian William Craig

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Ian William Craig, “Red Sun Through Smoke” (FatCat, 2020)

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I am generally not someone who believes that everything happens for a reason or that tragedy breeds great art, but I do think that the emotionally fraught and unusual circumstances surrounding the creation of Red Sun Through Smoke steered Ian William Craig in a direction that feels uncannily appropriate for the current moment. 

Craig’s original plan was simply to sequester himself for a couple weeks in his grandfather’s empty house in Kelowna, British Columbia while he wrote and recorded a new album. As it turned out, however, fate had quite a macabre cavalcade of unpleasant surprises in store for him, as Kelowna became surrounded by forest fires, his grandfather died, his parents moved into the smoke-shrouded house, and the woman he loved moved to Paris. Naturally, all of those events resulted in quite an intense swirl of emotions, but at least a correspondingly intense (and beautiful) album ultimately emerged from that fraught period, as the best moments of Red Sun Through Smoke distill Craig’s art to its simplest, most direct, and most intimate form.

When I listened to this album for the first time, one of the thoughts that immediately struck me was how much Craig’s creative trajectory uncannily mirrors that of Grouper’s Liz Harris: both artists initially established themselves by carving out a distinctive style, then set about slowly dissolving that stylistic veil to reduce their palette to little more than a voice and a piano. As someone who loves what Craig can do with his arsenal of wobbly, hissing tape players, I cannot say that I unambiguously prefer this more naked approach to songcraft, but I certainly admire and appreciate his desire to make his art more honest and distilled.

That said, Craig’s transformation is still a work in progress, so Red Sun Through Smoke strikes an effective balance between his experimental/abstract side and his more songcraft-driven side. Both sides yield some wonderful results, but it is definitely the unadorned and heartfelt piano ballads like “Weight” and “Stories” that feel like the album’s true soul and raison d’etre.

Admittedly, I have not historically been thrilled when an experimentally minded musician that I love decides to sit down at a piano to try their hand at nakedly intimate balladry, as people tend to fall into extremely familiar patterns with that instrument. Much like harps and harmoniums, it is deceptively easy to make a piano sound good, but extremely difficult to find and establish a distinctive voice. 

To his credit, Craig solved that problem beautifully in “Weight” by playing in an organically loose and fluid way that is shaped by the central vocal melody. There is a chord progression, but Craig seems far more interested in the way the notes linger and dissolve in the wake of his vocal phrases than he does in creating a structured foundation to sing over. Also, the rhythm feels far more dependent upon Craig’s own breathing patterns than it does with any unchanging time-signature.

As far as I am concerned, “Weight” stands as both the album’s achingly beautiful centerpiece and the culmination of Craig’s evolution as a composer, as it seamlessly merges tender, lilting melodies with hiss-ravaged harmonies in near-rapturous fashion. The following “Comma” is similarly lovely though, as Craig’s voice nimbly swoops and slides around in the higher registers in a way that would make a soul/R&B diva proud. Also, the underlying music captures Craig at his most inventively minimalist and texturally effective, as frayed swells of harmonized vocals provide an unconventionally ghostly and warbling backdrop.

Craig later repeats that delightful trick once more with “Take,” but the remainder of the album is generally an impressively varied suite of songs and vignettes that take his hyper-constrained palette in some very interesting and divergent directions. Granted, some of those directions work much better than others, as I cannot say that I would miss the a capella opener “Random” or the piano instrumental “Mountains Astray,” but the hit-to-miss ratio is nevertheless quite an impressive one overall.

I am especially fond of two of the more tape loop-based pieces, particularly the scratchy, disjointed, and rippling arpeggio layers of “The Smokefallen.” The darker and more spidery “Last of the Lantern Oil” is quite haunting as well, as fragments of Craig’s vocals warble and flutter in a haze of decaying, distorted, and deconstructed minor key piano chords.

Notably, “Last of the Lantern Oil” features some noises from a shortwave radio that Craig remembers fondly from his late grandfather’s days as a ham radio enthusiast. Those sounds are not a terribly crucial part of the piece, but their impact on Craig’s art cannot be overstated, as he has observed that “all of the sounds inherent to that process, from the crackling static to the disembodied voices breaking up to the glissando of the frequency dial searching for connection, have directly informed what it is that I do.” 

Craig’s grandfather also deserves some credit for his decision to partially move away from that aesthetic, however, as Craig notes that his own interest in “themes of decay and forgetting” began to feel false as his grandfather increasingly deteriorated from dementia. I get that, but I personally hope that he continues dabbling with his decaying loops forever anyway, as that is what made me first fall in love with his work. I can certainly embrace Red Sun Through Smoke‘s more poignant balance of openness and emotional depth to abstraction and experimentation for now though. 

Moreover, I suspect that gradual transformation was not easy for Craig (given his reluctance to even sing on his early albums), but that unflinching and fearless examination of what he wants to say and how he needs to say it is precisely why he has blossomed into one of the most gifted artists of his generation. 
I would not necessarily call this album raw, as Craig was very exacting in shaping how these pieces sound, but there has been a significant decrease in the amount of artistic distance that he allows to creep into his work. In fact, Red Sun Through Smoke is quite literally a diaristic album (the lyrics were culled directly from Craig’s journal) and it is all the better for it. While I could probably make a strong case that some of Craig’s other albums have more great songs, none of them have left a deeper mark, taken more chances, or made a stronger statement than this one.

Samples can be found here.

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Ian William Craig, “A Turn of Breath” (Recital, 2014)

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Recently reissued in expanded form, A Turn of Breath was Ian William Craig’s 2014 formal debut, though it was predated by a handful of digital-only and cassette releases. In fact, I am quite fond of his first two Recital Program albums, even if they betray a strong Tim Hecker influence. With A Turn of Breath, however, Craig made a major creative leap forward, casting aside any lingering derivative touches to establish himself as one of the most talented and distinctive sound artists in recent memory. 

Using just his voice as his primary instrument, Craig employs an arsenal of tape players to transform his simple, naked melodies into swooning and warbling dream-like bliss. He later expanded considerably on that aesthetic with the more song-based and shoegaze-inspired Centres, but that vision was already quite lovely and fully formed here—A Turn of Breath just happens to be a more fragmented, flickering, and hallucinatory incarnation of it.

For good reason, it is damn near impossible to find any description of A Turn of Breath that does not use the word “angelic.” There is no word more apt for this album, so there is no point in going through linguistic contortions to find an alternative. Craig, a classically trained vocalist, certainly sings quite beautifully, yet the world is absolutely full of other classically trained vocalists and I generally have no interest in their recordings‚as a great voice is only a starting point. 

Fortunately, Craig had (and has) plenty of great ideas for how to use that voice. His work is special primarily because he has found an especially ingenious way to use tapes and has a singular compositional genius for transforming tape music into something warm, melodic, and lushly Romantic. At its best, A Turn of Breath sounds like the sublimely rapturous recordings of a heavenly choir…if a bumbling recording engineer tripped and the master tapes rolled off the cloud and fell to earth. That is only the first part, though, as it also seem like the tapes probably sat in the sun for a while before Craig found them. 

That last bit is especially crucial, as pieces like “Red Gate With Starling” and “Either Or” seems to retain a divine essence, yet transform that prettiness into something deeper, elegantly frayed, and vulnerable. While that summarizes the bulk of the album, Craig occasionally picks up his guitar as well, earning him several similarly deserved comparisons to a medieval troubadour (albeit one with access to some reverb effects). Admittedly, I am not quite as fond of that side of Breath, but pieces like “Rooms” and “A Forgetting Place” play an essential role in balancing out the vaporous and elusive nature of the more abstract pieces with some clear words and melodies. I am able to fully appreciate the gorgeous fog of this album precisely because there are occasional breaks in it.

The album’s best pieces tend to be ones that blur the lines between those two poles, however. Only “A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold” fully achieves that feat, but it is the album’s two-part centerpiece and the two halves take achingly beautiful and divergent paths. For the first part, Craig weaves an unusually lush and layered backdrop of warbling, fluttering vocal loops that are quite gorgeous on their own. When the main vocals finally appear, it feels absolutely transcendent, like Craig is singing a simple and pure hymn as the heavens open up and cherubim flutter around the rafters. The second part boldly strips away all those underlying loops, reducing the piece to just the unadorned central melody, then adding layers of harmonies until Craig sounds like a one-man choir. It is great, of course, but it gets even better when it unexpectedly erupts into a shivering and lovely coda of lush organ chords and wobbly tapes. 

Speaking of the latter, I am also quite fond of “Second Lens,” which sounds like the tape machine itself has become possessed with the divine spirit. There are still some lovely slow-moving clouds of harmonized vocals, but the real magic of the piece lies in the textural details, as it feels like all of the smallest mechanical sounds have been amplified to become a symphony of hiss, crackle, straining wheels, and flapping tape.

Curiously, it was only with the gift of hindsight that I was able to appreciate what a unique and wonderful album this is: Craig was great when he was just using self-built instruments (Heretic Surface), then he was great when he started singing into tape recorders. It did not seem like a big deal to me at the time, though it is now baffling to think that there was once a time when Craig conspicuously avoided singing. I needed the added context of Centres to grasp that a seismic shift had occurred. I suppose part of that slow realization was because Breath was still primarily composed of soundscapes rather than songs, though “A Slight Grip” is a dazzling exception. This album is far more like a beautiful mosaic rather than a collection of individual highlights—a structure that makes the expanded edition’s inclusion of two additional EPs quite interesting. 

The Short of Breath EP is the less striking of the two, as it simply feels like a seamless extension of the parent album (there is even a third variation of “A Slight Grip”). It is all good, but it is so clearly cut from the exact same cloth as A Turn of Breath that it just feels like the album got a little longer. The Fresh Breath EP, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of a slightly darker, starker, and more experimental album that might have been. It seems like it would have been a good one, but Craig’s instincts were infallible enough to leave me with no regrets about the path he chose. To go back to my mosaic metaphor, what Craig left out of the album is just as important as what he left in: A Turn of Breath is not great solely because he had plenty of wonderful new material—it is also great because he distilled it all to its simplest essence and avoided diluting that by paring away absolutely everything that was not necessary. The extra material is nice, but A Turn of Breath was already an essential release without it.

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Ian William Craig, “Centres” (FatCat/130701, 2016)

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It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to finally acknowledge the sublime brilliance of Vancouver-based polymath Ian William Craig, but he certainly has not made it easy, as every album that I have heard from him seems to showcase a new facet of his elusive aesthetic (classical pianist, distressed tape experimenter, instrument builder, the next Tim Hecker, hallucinatory hymnal composer, etc.). Also, much of his best work was quietly released in limited vinyl editions on Sean McCann’s Recital Program imprint (and the stellar Heretic Surface does not even appear in Discogs), so it was easy to miss. 

With his latest release, however, Craig seems poised to breakthrough to a larger audience. At the very least, Centres is certainly a creative breakthrough, expertly weaving together several different experimental and esoteric threads into an excellent batch of actual songs with hooks. If it is possible to make a largely guitar-free classic shoegaze album, Craig has done it with Centres.

The opening “Contain (Astoria Version)” is surprisingly radical statement of intent, as it not only places Craig’s strong, classically trained vocals front and center, but it goes one step further and runs them through Autotune. It is quite an unusual effect, as it sounds like a very sincere and melodic half-sung poem or a post-modern opera refrain filtered through contemporary pop music. Or maybe like David Sylvian teamed up with Rihanna’s producers to try to break through to the teen market, but then ran out of money before anyone got around to adding beats. 

That is only half the story though, as the surrounding music is a fuzzed-out ocean of hissing bliss, lush grandeur, and loops of angelic female vocals. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously razor-focused and unrepentantly indulgent at the same time, as Craig never loses sight of the strong melodic hooks, yet perversely allows his perfectly sculpted avant-pop gem to dissolve, smear, and stretch into a ten-minute epic. It is an audacious monster of a piece that sounds like nothing else that anyone else is doing. It is also a fully formed synthesis of several stylistic strains that have run throughout Craig’s career, somehow blending his quasi-operatic talents with blown-out Hecker-esque drone and wobbly, hissing tape manipulations without pushing any of them into the background.

To his credit, Craig does not attempt to replicate any similar feats elsewhere on the album, instead seeming restlessly hellbent on moving constantly forward into new vistas. For example, the following “A Single Hope” is a left-field shoegaze masterpiece, as Craig’s elegantly melodic vocals drift over a glacially slow bed of distorted chord swells to basically produce high-grade heroin for the ears. “Drifting to Void on All Sides” follows in a similarly gorgeous and narcotic vein, unfolding as a wobbly chorus of angelic voices floating from a battery of malfunctioning tape machines. 

The comparatively clean and accordion-based “The Nearness,” on the other hand, sounds like fairly straightforward “pop classical,” which makes sense given that Centres is a rare dispatch from FatCat’s classically bent 130701 imprint. Despite its initial form, however, “The Nearness” still ultimately dissolves into crackling and hissing tape-ravaged heaven. The recurring theme throughout the album time and time again is that of strikingly beautiful and serene melodies blearily drifting through a roiling maelstrom of hissing, stuttering, crackling, and quivering distortion and decay. 

On the most immediately gratifying and memorable pieces, the structured melodies manage to heroically assert their dominance, but the pieces (such as “Set to Lapse”) that just wallow in this bliss-storm are quite pleasurable in their own right. In fact, an album of murkily hallucinatory and masterfully textured drone in the vein of “A Circle Without Having To Curve” would probably still be a lock for one of my favorite records of the year.

I suspect that Centres probably could have been condensed from a double-album to just a single LP if the more incidental/interlude-type pieces had been scrapped, but their presence feels crucial in maintaining the sustained and soft-focus altered reality of Centre‘s spell. Also, the recurrent sea of artfully blurred abstraction seems necessary to ensure that each island of fully formed song makes a maximum impact. Seven or eight great songs in a row would be wonderful, but probably also a little numbing: I definitely appreciate the surprise of a simple and pure masterwork like the quasi-hymnal “Purpose (Is No Country)” blossoming forth from the static quite deep into the album. 

Appropriately, Craig saves one last treat for the final piece, reprising the oceanic and fuzzy heaven of the opening “Contain” with just his voice and an acoustic guitar. Naturally, it is wonderfully tender and beautiful, which illustrates exactly why this album is such an absolute goddamn masterpiece: most of these songs were already quite good before Craig unleashed his distressed-tape sorcery and arrangement skills upon them. And as far as texturally and harmonically rich sound art goes, it is amply clear that Craig can hang with just about anyone else around. As far as I am concerned, Ian William Craig is creative supernova at this point in his career. Centres is easily one of the few albums of 2016 that I can safely declare to be an instant classic without feeling dangerously close to hyperbole.

Listen here.