8 Tracks: Of Centralisation With Ian William Craig

The whole Xerrox series is golden. I am a huge fan of density and texture, but I find usually those things are achieved through layering sounds one on top of another – Xerrox is unique in that it layers through time as well: a single idea reproduced and deteriorated like a sonic photocopy so many times that it becomes something else entirely, like a bit-crushed version of Basinski’s Disintegration Loops.

Beautiful things can never really be repeated, because what makes them beautiful is how present they are, and how risky and relevant they are in relation to what is happening at that moment. This piece sounds like a joyfully lost alien trying to build Chopin out of slow atonal lego, and as such makes it all sound fresh and new again, which to me is pretty magical.

I think the video description says it all: “Couldn’t really find artwork to match all the range of emotion conveyed in their piece, so I settled for electronic fish.”

Monk’s work is canoe rides with camomile tea into the void, hypnotic jellyfish, long train rides into unknown places, but is still unmistakably steeped in the ghosts of serialists and spectralists from the 20th century. She moves me with how she turns all of these on their head though – the modernist and the sentimental alike – and finds ways into the honestly resonant and melodic.

Collected here are most of the buttons on a MIDI keyboard you are not supposed to push that somehow combine into a holy little universe of “cedar trees” and “tables aloud with memory.” Ah what a lovely image that is! This is my gleeful and nourishing anthem for dark hours.

The heartbreaking sound of everything that once worked not working anymore, one great final roar of a lost idea, not even finished before both the composer and the sentiment passed away. I am in awe, even after infinite listens to this Adagio, at all of the chords that go so horribly wrong and shake against the walls but still land steadily on their fraying romantic tightrope.

Just Björk, always and forever. This song does everything, it just simply does everything, it is all the feelings and sounds and grace, a miraculous compositional triple-point she holds in actual reality for us that we are actually able to walk out into, a whole complete world in ten short minutes, it is impossible, it is healing, it is an ocean, she is a treasure, thank you Björk.

I think people who grow up in the Canadian prairies are laced to some degree with a sense of our own mortality – it is a gift from the deep deep winter cold that exists there, because when it exists there it exists everywhere there, and will kill you outright if you’re not respectful of it simply because it is what it is, but at the same time it is stunning and silent and sublime. Bell Witch evokes the feeling of holding oneself as long as possible in the burn of such forces to see what longing secrets are there.