Ian William Craig - 'Centres'

Vancouver based avant-garde singer and composer Ian William Craig released his new album Centres, which is out via Fat Cat, and you can listen to it below. A lush, enveloping listen, Ian experiments with tape (the album is recorded on “broken cassette players, thrifted reel-to-reels and desiccating tapes”) in ways that recall his stated inspiration William Basinski, as well as other, less famous members of the avant-noise community (the Jason Lescalleets of the world), but with strong pop overtones provided by his catchy melodies and strong, opera-trained voice. With elements of shoegaze and dream pop layered atop the dense noise-scapes, this is a pretty unique listen. As Ian puts it to Rolling Stone:

I guess my setup at this point would be a little bit different than it has been because I’m planning for a tour through Europe, so one of the challenges there is to shrink things down. I’ve actually been trying to modify smaller cassette decks to do the same kind of things that the larger cassette decks do. I modify the tape decks so they don’t work properly…. Because it’s tape and not digital the effects are quite unpredictable. You’re dealing with magnetism. Sometimes when you try and layer another sound on top of it it doesn’t quite work very well or it smashes into the old sound in a really interesting way. That’s how most of the kind of decaying motifs are achieved.

Ian is, as he says above, planning a European tour. All of those dates are listed, along with the album stream, below.

Ian William Craig — 2016 Tour Dates
Aug 8th – Fuse, Bradford, UK – TICKETS
Aug 10th – Cafe Kino, Bristol, UK – TICKETS
Aug 11th – Cafe Oto, London, UK – TICKETS
Aug 12th – Glad Cafe, Glasgow, UK
Aug 14th – Flow Festival, Helsinki, FI – TICKETS
Aug 22nd – Feeerieen Festival, Brussels, BE – TICKETS
Aug 23rd – Venue TBA, Prague, CZ
Aug 24th Acud Macht Neu, Berlin, DE
Aug 25th – Jazzhouse, Copenhagen, DK