Ian William Craig
Red Sun Through Smoke

LA RECENSIONE

§ 1. Red Sun Through Smoke.

A red sun glimpsed beyond the smoke.

Transparent.

Doing little.

Or rather, doing nothing.

Abandoning the path of voices to their somnambulant pace: this is the incipit of Ian William Craig's latest work.

To touch, gently (without hesitation) the right keys, just enough—neither more, nor less—and wait for, after the initial bewilderment fades, everything to reach its own calm.

§ 2. A Colorful Jumble.

I wasn't prepared. I simply didn't expect it.

It isn't, I'll tell you right away, one of those cases where you already know what you will find once you've sounded the ground a little.

In fact, this dizzying ascent is followed by an interlude, then an immersion, and finally a resurfacing.

A finding oneself elsewhere, even if in a familiar elsewhere.

Familiar because it was already there from the beginning, even if hidden.

And again, a slight—imperceptible—change of forms.

§ 3. Unclassifiable.

Genres.

What are genres if not cages?

Taxonomies.

Definitions in a protean world.

Damned sound-catchers, nothing more!

The fact is that, among the meshes of their nets, what is too subtle escapes.

It passes through them, going to settle in that gray area where the astonished finds a home.

§ 4. A Box of Crayons.

It happens, fortuitously, to have in hand:

- apneas in depths of noise

- pieces that would make Thom Yorke bite his fingers

- a cappella songs

- overdubs

- cosmic discomforts

- tunes for solo piano

- silences

What to do with them?

Twelve tracks.

How to recombine these fragments?

In the form of a kaleidoscope.

To do what?

A map of those same depths.

§ 5 Muffled and Sharp.

These twelve tracks have, variously intertwined within them, these elements.

Their composition—their intangible juxtaposition—is what makes the whole muffled and sharp: one comes after the other as if transparently, without sharp cuts, without noticing.

As if they were made of the same dough, as if one were the shadow of the other.

This polyphony does not, however, confuse those who watch it flow before them: the whole sounds, strangely enough, unified.

According to a hidden harmony, which makes these glass fragments an undeciphered mosaic, acquiring its physique only gradually, only when seen from a certain distance.

§ 6 Between Wakefulness and Sleep.

This physique (a stain, a will-o'-the-wisp, a red jellyfish?) has the aftertaste of a falling asleep, the warmth of a dream.

Of a place within which, tired and blinding, to lie down.

§ 7 Appendix: with the words of Cattafi

You sit yourself

you lie down

you recline

and a conversation begins

between me lying down

and you in vertical development

until the heavy skin of the eyelids

with a single gesture

says goodbye

tall creatures

beams of light

no longer sees you who feels the sweetness

of the hundred

of the millipedes.

(Bartolo Cattafi, Con un solo gesto, in Marzo e le sue idi, A. Mondadori, Milan, 1977, p. 37).