Ian William Craig, the trained opera singer and painter from Vancouver, continues to establish himself as one of the most original voices in ambient and experimental music. Following the global acclaim of his debut A Turn Of Breath (2014) and Cradle For The Wanting (2015), Craig presents Meaning Turns To Whispers, an album that marked his philosophical shift from wanting to express to simply wanting to explore.
Meaning Turns To Whispers combines piano improvisations with FM feedback loops, recorded across various winters between 2009-2011 and subsequently edited, manipulated, and degraded to reveal hidden sonic spaces. The album emerged from a radical creative process born of frustration and transformation. "I was living with my sister in Edmonton, and during the ridiculously cold winter, I gutted her piano and mic'd it up in a whole bunch of weird ways," Craig explains. "I recorded probably 20 hours of material, and after listening to it I was amazed at how much it sounded like sentimental crap." Rather than abandon the project, Craig embraced destruction as creation. Using reel-to-reel tape machines as instruments of decay, he systematically dismantled any trace of conventional beauty or expected emotion. For Craig, these manipulations became a way of "decaying sentimentality" – whenever his music came too close to meeting his expectations, he uprooted it, creating impervious walls or bursts of modest but stupefying noise. The result is music that exists in the gorgeous neo-classical tradition while being completely transformed by tape manipulations that make it anything but conventionally pretty.
In the album's most compelling moments, listeners can hear Craig imagining the lived lives of his inanimate instruments. Beyond the notes played on piano, there's the sound the instrument makes for itself, its wooden infrastructure revealed, sounding as if it possesses its own motivations. The discrete piano layers mixed with waves of white noise create an intriguing sonic landscape that leaves listeners longing for more.
"I realized at the end of that album that I didn't want to express, I just wanted to explore," Craig reflects. This revelation has become central to his artistic philosophy, transforming his approach from personal expression to pure sonic investigation. Meaning Turns To Whispers stands as both a beautiful neo-classical work and a radical deconstruction of musical expectation, cementing Craig's reputation as a visionary artist willing to destroy in order to discover.
