Ian William Craig - Music For Magnesium 173

Ian William Craig returns with a gorgeous new LP of material comissioned to soundtrack Magnesium_173, an elegant puzzle-based PC game inspired by quantum mechanics. The album comprises of 12 bold and immersive pieces, totalling 80 mins of new music, with Ian using modular synthesis for the first time. Anything but passive/reserved background sound-beds, it possesses a real weight and power, displaying his peerlessness as an improvising composer able to summon and shape the sublime via modified tape decks, electronics and his beautiful voice, and forge a unique kind of choral-based, heavily-abrasive take on ambient composition. Craig is described by MOJO as "a trained opera singer manipulating analogue recordings of his own voice to conjure up bewitching traceries of phantom arias... creating something elegiac and profound" and by The Guardian as "like a collaboration between between Bon Iver and William Basinski", and by Pitchfork as "like Tim Hecker producing the outré Jónsi Birgisson album many expected but never got."