Oh. Hello. You might remember Vancouver-based singer/composer Ian William Craig from such previous internet encounters as every other goddamn DAY for the last five years or so on Tiny Mix Tapes. Yeah? Ringing any (fabulously tintinnabulous) bells?
I sure hope so. Because it’ll make it a lot easier when I tell you that THAT SAME DUDE is back again with yet another new album of warm, hypnotic tape loops and dusky, soothing vocal melodies for our collective cult-ish veneration.
This latest collection (which follows-up 2016’s Centres and its subsequent Slow Vessels EP — but you already knew that, right?) is entitled Thresholder, and it’s due November 2 via Fat Cat Records’ Fraiser Crane-approved 130701 imprint.
The eleven-track album was “produced and mastered by Craig himself,” with recording taking place variously at his former studio on Vancouver’s UBC campus, at home, and on tour “in a giant secret underground cistern in Sweden.” Conceptually, it was born of “sessions for some commission work” and “inspired by concepts of quantum physics, black holes and space.”
Wow, cool! And nerdy! And…kinda vague? Don’t worry though; here’s Craig with that whole “artist giving grand additional explanations” thing:
This was the lens through which the tracks were assembled: a great boundlessness of space, the sound of the big bang, the spookiness of the quantum world, vacillations of different kinds of conflicting time. I started by making a 20-minute piece that was just stitching together the sound of the decks and the equipment as they went about their business, almost like one was wandering through the different parts of a spacecraft. I then used this piece to coax together the rest of the tracks, envisioning the whole thing as a single 40-minute space which would become the soundtrack of being held in place by a great unknowable force while still being able to meander through the chaos and beauty of that expanded instant.
To further help wrap your head around all that, listen to the album’s first single “And Therefore The Moonlight” down below. Then, go ahead and pre-order Thresholder from 130701 here. After that, congratulations; you’re all done! …At least until like two weeks from now when IWC returns AGAIN with his next slab of life-altering music news.
Thresholder tracklisting:
01. Elided
02. Some Absolute Means
03. TC-377 Poem
04. Mass Noun
05. Idea for Contradiction 1
06. And Therefore the Moonlight
07. The Last Wesbrook Lament
08. Discovered in Flat
09. Sfumato
10. Idea for Contradiction 2
11. More Words for Mistake
More about: Ian William Craig
