Ian William Craig - Sentimental Drift by FatCat Records

Vancouver-based singer/composer Ian William Craig returns with a first track from a gorgeous new LP of material commissioned to soundtrack the computer game Magnesium 173. Released on double vinyl and digital formats, ‘Music for Magnesium_173’ offers another tour de force display of Craig’s peerless power as an improvising composer able to summon and shape the sublime via an arsenal of modified tape machinery, electronics and his own gorgeous voice, with the results forging a unique kind of choral-based, heavily-abrasive take on ambient composition.

Created by Graham Johnson, Magnesium_173 launched in August 2021 and is described as “an elegant puzzle game inspired by quantum mechanics", which uses a branching series of puzzles to explore a set of rules, with new ideas constantly introduced, examined and twisted. Ian’s music is likewise rippling with possibility and continually in flux. With delays in the game’s development, his original attempts at a score ended up being released back in 2018 as the ‘Thresholder’ EP. A new set of material was composed but then lost when a computer containing the mixes was stolen. Ian was then forced to try and recreate that music from the stems and some old Logic file versions, resulting in this released version - its form only fixed down as one of numerous possible outcomes with the accidents of the partly-controlled, part-random collaboration of his machines playing their part.