Ian William Craig: A Turn Of Breath LP (Recital, 2014)

December 7, 2014 at 7:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Ian William Craig: A Turn Of Breath LP

One of the most startlingly original albums I’ve heard all year. I’m not entirely sure how this guy is doing what he’s doing, but he’s making really strange unsettling decayed tape and piano loops and singing heavenly quasi-operatic vocals over them. The way that incorporates decaying loops and static into the fabric of these compositions is truly mindblowing. I guess the extremely lazy comparison would be that it’s somewhat similar to The Disintegration Loops turned into songs, but these songs just simply don’t have similar structure or composition to anything else I can think of. Guitars make a few appearances, as do organs and circuit-bent instruments, but mostly it’s pianos and heavy distorted tape loops that catch your ear. Vocals tend to just blend in with the sounds as another instrument, but the two songs where lyrics stick out the most are both parts of “A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold”, with multi-tracked vocals about allowing heaviness and feeling something shift. And the way the pianos sort of curdle and corrupt under all the tape hiss in songs like “The Edges”… unreal. This is totally the type of album that will probably stay far below the radar, but over time I think people will discover how truly original and breathtaking it is.

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