Vancouver-based singer/composer Ian William Craig explores a style of distorted drone folk music using tape loops, analog instrumentation, and his operatic voice. The latter element reveals itself more with each of his releases. Craig's most intimate and skeletal album to date, Red Sun Through Smoke was recorded on a piano in his grandfather's house as wildfires raged across British Columbia; the smoke caused his grandfather's pre-existing condition to take a fatal turn. Songs present a tragic and beautiful atmosphere where "love and death, memory and mystery, hope and wonder all intertwine, the artist straining to see the sun through the smoke," says A Closer Listen. Out on FatCat's 130701 imprint.
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