I love the phrase “seemingly random.” It betrays a sense of mistrust, a disconcerted soft-step of writers and listeners who are wary of the artist’s true intent. It’s also a lateral pass, a suggestion that “Well, I couldn’t find a connection here; can you?”
Ian William Craig’s upcoming album (or rather, album-length collection of unreleased tracks) is called Thresholder. The cover displays “a seemingly random selection of found objects,” much as plenty of the ambient vocalmaster’s music collects a seemingly random selection of sounds and hisses. It seems so. In fact, sonically it seems so similarly. But a “collection” from Craig seems like a ploy from an artist whose true intent lies always beneath a dense sonic cloud cover.
From Craig on the assortment:
All of the objects were collected during significant times over the years, and are talismans of the places from which they came. Little Proustian expansion devices – all arranged in the blackness of space. I think mostly all of the music I make is to contemplate the beautiful doom, forces beyond us, celebrations of our inevitable deterioration.
Premiering below is a new track from this collection, “Some Absolute Means.” (Though what absolute means, we may never know.) Never has Craig’s cloud cover sounded so pure; if I had to guess, I’d say it was recorded closer to A Turn of Breath than to Centres. Mostly absent is his trademark operatic instrument (his voice). Instead, we’re left with the conducting energy of a brief, elongated series of chords until the final minute, when his voice rises solitary like the nighttime moon.
A talisman it is indeed, but as part of a seemingly random memory-box collection, who’s to say of what or where? The answer belongs to everyone and no one. Much like each of us, “Some Absolute Means” is seemingly random, seemingly meaningless, and still the most beautiful thing in the world.
Thresholder arrives November 2 on 130701.