Ian William Craig – Durbē (2017, Canada)
Our next spotlight is on number 250 on The List, submitted by myself (buffyleigh).
A couple weeks ago I began a listening project where I’ll be going through all my old AOTY lists to see if they still hold up, listening to each album on those lists and re-ranking or removing as needed. By coincidence – as I already had this album picked for the next spotlight – the first AOTY list I re-evaluated was my 2016 list that included Centres, a brilliant studio album from the sound artist, composer, and classically trained vocalist we’re listening to today, Ian William Craig. And I sure am glad for that coincidence, as in revisiting that list I realized that (a) I somehow didn’t have Centres in my digital library (only on vinyl), (b) both Centres and Durbē have a couple of the same songs, and (c) Durbē – alternatively titled Live in Durbē – was recorded at a show (in August 2017) that was part of Ian’s tour for Centres (released July 2017).
In my defence, 2016/17 was during a bit of a (pre-pandemic-black-hole) black hole for me, and I was using a listening methodology to approach this artist/album that was rather different from my usual nerdy methodology (see Spotlight, Version B[1]). Also, I have a brain like a sieve, and, if an album only exists in my vinyl collection, it can unfortunately become forgotten. At any rate, my ignorance can perhaps be at least partially excused because one of the shared songs exists in a vastly different form on the live album – while the studio version of “The Nearness” came in at just under 8 minutes, on Durbē it stretches to over 21 glorious minutes. And perhaps this is why my brain latched onto Durbē much more strongly than Centres: the live format really allows Ian the space to do his thing, i.e., some sort of sorcery where tape is looped, delayed, distorted, and further manipulated through various faulty cassette machines, providing a gorgeous bed of decaying, droning sounds for Ian’s beautiful vocals that are sometimes nearly operatic, sometimes also looped and distorted. Without the time constraints of a physical album release, Ian is able to push his initial more controlled studio experiment to its limits and beyond, and to great effect. Indeed, the word “celestial” appears in a couple of the comments on Bandcamp, and, following the literal hundreds of times I have listened to this album, I have to agree with that description.
Anyway, all that is to say that I would highly recommend listening to both Durbē and Centres, in whatever order. For that matter, I would highly recommend listening to Ian’s entire discography. I for one will be revisiting most of it soon, as pretty much all of his releases have ended up both in my vinyl collection and on my AOTY lists.
Spotlight, Version B
Have you ever gotten into an artist because of someone you know, to somehow understand someone you know? I once knew someone in Ian’s close personal circle, via someone in my close personal circle, though perhaps ‘I was once adjacent to’ might be a better phrase to describe our (non-)relationship. In the couple of decades I was adjacent to this person, I never managed to understand a single thing about them. But one of the ways I attempted to understand them (or at least to gain some insight into why I couldn’t understand them) was to take a listen to Ian’s work. For this person, though they talked about Ian’s work semi-frequently, had noted that they were unable to listen to Ian’s work, because it made them think too much, it stirred up too much. And so, to try and parse out what that could possibly mean, I bought an album of Ian’s, then another, then another, and felt that I ended up understanding Ian through his work much more than I understood this person I was adjacent to. I am no longer adjacent to that person and will never be again, but I am grateful for our past adjacent-ness simply because it introduced me to Ian’s work. ↩︎
#ambient #Canada #electronic #experimental #IanWilliamCraig #improvisation #music #soundscape #tapeLoops
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1001 Other Albums
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