Craig, Ian William: Thresholder LP

Eighteen months on from his last new release, Vancouver-based singer/composer Ian William Craig returns to FatCat with an (album-length) EP of eleven brand new tracks. Entitled Thresholder, the record sees Craig return towards the smudged and scoured beauty of his 2016 opus, Centres, a record which was universally acclaimed, making many end-of-year lists. For Craig the focus of the album was a great boundlessness of space, the sound of the big bang, the spookiness of the quantum world, and vacillations of different kinds of conflicting time. Besides as the often-quoted William Basinski reference point, the music here recalls the visceral media-decay of early ‘00s operators like Fennesz, Belong, Desormais, Philip Jeck or Pimmon. "Idea for Contradiction 2" is like a massively over-driven or sandpaper-scoured version of Brian Eno's "An Ending" or some shredded Colin Stetson stem. The ending of"And Therefore the Moonlight" - is reminiscent of Sigur Rós while "Sfumato" exists in the same dimension as The Caretaker's haunted ballroom with its reverb-drenched and occluded distant vocals.