Thursday 11 August 2016, 8pm
“If the sound of angel vox suspended over voids of malevolent tone while tape loops mark cyclical time appeals at all then this is your evening shuttle, with the whole deal floating slowly and serenely into great gulfs of static oblivion. A striking vision of the sound of modern holy music.” – Volcanic Tongue
Blending choral, ambient and noise influences together into his customised array of analogue tape decks, composer/vocalist Ian William Craig moves you over shifting tectonic plates of operatic improvisations, fields of tape hiss, haunting pastoral melodies and billowing clouds of becoming.
Born in Edmonton, Canada in 1980, Craig’s practice runs on a combination of classical vocal training and process-based uncertainty. He received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Alberta, and after moving to Vancouver, began self-releasing albums from his new home on the coast of Canada. Craig turned to his background in musical theatre, avant-classical orchestration and the choral tradition for his first two physical recordings, A Turn of Breath and Cradle for the Wanting, which were issued by Recital Programto critical acclaim.
“To be both wildly experimental and fantastically listenable is a skill that precious few people possess, but Craig has it, as the young people might say, up the ying-yang.” – The Guardian
“Craig uses tape manipulation and the singer’s own vocal range to create a blissfully disquieting choral suite, moving from the corroded cries of counter-tenor ghosts to a kind of abstract Buckleyesque heatrbreak, as if some lovelorn romantic troubadour had been summoned forth from the recording of séances on old shellac 78s.” – MOJO
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
