Ambient music is less about memorable hooks than standout moments, and few practitioners in the ambient/experimental game have produced more memorable works in the last half-dozen years than Ian William Craig. A trained opera singer, Craig loops his voice and various instruments through broken tape players, letting those sounds dissolve into new textures. But he isn’t just rehashing William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. The end result sounds closer to the work of fellow Vancouverite Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz, but Craig has generally focused less on atmosphere than almost-hooks and halfheard melodies.
Centres is Craig’s most lyrical album, both literally and figuratively. There are deconstructed torch songs, an acoustic ballad, and it even opens with an Auto-Tuned verse. “A Single Hope” sounds vaguely like pop music. But for all its listenability, Centres is still wildly inventive, with cloudbursts and electrical storms dotting these soundscapes, and it’s the perfect distillation of the processes Craig has been mastering across nine full-lengths.
—Matt Sullivan
