ian william craig: meaning turns to whispers

Aguirre Records present Ian William Craig's Meaning Turns to Whispers. Ian is a trained opera singer and painter out of Vancouver, Canada. Over the last few years he has proved to be one of the most original artists active in the ambient/experimental genre. His debut A Turn Of Breath (2014) and the follow-up, Cradle For The Wanting (2015) received high acclaim. Meaning Turns to Whispers is a combination of piano improvisations and FM feedback loops, recorded over various winters from 2009 to 2011 and edited down, manipulated and degraded to reveal some of their hidden spaces. The discreet piano layers mixed with waves of white noise are intriguing making you long for more. Meaning Turns to Whispers is a record rooted in a gorgeous neo-classical tradition, but totally fucked up by tape manipulations that made it anything but pretty. For Craig, the use of reel-to-reels is a way of decaying sentimentality: any time his music has come too close to meeting his expectations, he uproots it, creating impervious walls or bursts of modest but stupefying noise. In choice moments on Meaning, you can hear Craig trying to imagine the lived lives of his inanimate instruments; you hear him beam down on the piano, its wooden infrastructure revealed, sounding like it has its own set of motivations. "I was living with my sister in Edmonton, and during the ridiculously cold winter, I gutted her piano and mic'd it up in a whole bunch of weird ways. I recorded probably twenty hours of material, and after listening to it I was amazed at how much it sounded like sentimental crap. At that point I was really trying to express something, and afterwards I thought the only way through would be to destroy the recordings, and that's what Meaning Turns To Whispers is. It's completely mangled to remove that struggle for expression. I realized at the end of that album that I didn't want to express, I just wanted to explore." Mastered by Sean McCann at Recital. Lacquer cut by Christoph Grote-Beverborg at Dubplates & Mastering. Edition of 500.