Ian William Craig

I know that this piece is true to Ian William Craig because I’ve deleted about ten incarnations of this opening paragraph—twice as many of this opening sentence—already. I’ve realised something listening to his music, that deleting your work is trusting in it: Put it through a vessel that isn’t alive enough to have bias about it, throw it in the recycling bin and then restore it, or wipe it out, backspace it, and then rewrite it. Get your tape decks and loop your way back into existence—I don’t know. Happy holidays: Welcome to another repetitive, incongruent season where everything feels the same but a little different.

Cradle for the Wanting, Craig’s second album—or umpteenth; researching his discography brings up disparate results, as if the actual amount of his work has been reassessed over and over—is mulled. I’ve been listening to it against windows of rain and up in the midst of heavy winds. It’s felt a lot like warmth, but only because it seems to need to survive its own freezing landscapes—and when it’s dark, Craig must see too, and so he offers us extra lighting. Last year’s A Turn of Breath was its own seasonal set piece; its many renewing melodies and fractures of noise suggest the growth of Spring followed by the fluttering, nimble deaths of Autumn. But this album, this one is constantly pushing the scornful aggressions of Winter on us. A distorted loop of IWC’s voice, for example, plays out like wind pushing against pedestrians on “Habit Worn and Wondering,” with his central operatic hum cut up and stuttering as if he’s holding his hands up against the torrent. As much as IWC is making the sounds above us, he’s also living under them with us.

And yet, IWC is our fucking guardian angel on this record. His voice flows towards us through crackles and the percussive breakage of tape, meandering in and out like he’s just contentedly existing, a lifetime of crucial moments passing by. Unlike A Turn of Breath and its accidental obsession with narrative bookends, proper songs, and even guitars, Cradle for the Wanting can go songs without Craig saying anything, his voice a mere rumination at times, ambient wallpaper at others. This record is his daydream, and he only occasionally wakes to try to talk about it. The lyric that finally weaves its way towards us on “Empty, Circle Tremble,” after a term of humming and trembling, is a mantra-less mantra so summative it speaks of all of Craig’s work up until that point: “It is half heard and fleeting.”

When I talked to the musician in January, he cited John Cage as a ruinous and unwelcome inspiration on his work: “Here’s this guy talking about, ‘Well no, actually, everything is just happening and art is everything and everything is art.’ He just ruined stuff.” For an artist working in an erudite genre, with an even more erudite musical instrument to hand (the operatic vocal), it’s important to remember that Craig’s maximalism comes from the back doors—from sparsity, economy, and, miraculously, from accidents. He’s creating these vast musical ecosystems and giving them a perfect sense of place, but on Cradle for the Wanting, he’s doing it with nothing more than his voice and decks. His music is a testament to potential, to hard work, to how big sound-worlds can grow, and to how much can come from close to nothing. I love Craig’s work, because that’s exactly what it is: work. If you do anything enough, you will eventually do it well. Have a nice winter. Have a few more.