You mentioned via email that you’ve got a full-time job outside of music.

Yeah, I work at the University of British Columbia. I run the printmaking studio there – letterpress, silkscreen, lithography.

I saw online that you described yourself as a visual artist and musician – which came first?

They kind of developed at the same time, but I guess professionally I was an artist first and then a musician afterwards.

Do you develop your album art independently from the music or as a single concept?

My practice is to kind of make and then see what happens, see what fits. I’m definitely a better editor than I am a musician, I think – that’s where the arts happens. It’s easy to generate a whole bunch of ideas, but refining them into something is where the heart of it is.

Do you apply the same process towards creating an album? Say for A Turn of Breath, do you have some idea of what you’re striving towards or do you just make a lot of things in a certain headspace for a while and then reduce them into an album?

I suppose the latter a little bit more than the former, but lately I’ve been finding that it’s really useful to set a set of parameters first, and have some parentheses, and see what happens from that. I just finished another album for Recital, and I told myself that it was just going to be vocals and tape. So I generated within those restrictions. A Turn of Breath was fascinating as well because it started out as an entirely different album and then Sean McCann approached me to do something for Recital and we took the previous work and chopped it in half and made a bunch of new things to go along with it. I don’t want to say it was like Frankenstein, but it was, I guess, two albums squished together, both of which had their tension. Lately I’ve been trying to work towards being more confined or within a set of parameters.

Is there a method in paring tracks down and ordering them to prepare an album?

There is. When you are yourself, it makes perfect sense to you to do things that you do, right? You’re privy to your own self-consciousness and your creative processes, so to me it seems like I’ve made the same album over and over again because I’ve got some sensibility that seems to require things in a particular way. So you ask if I’ve got a thematic bent and I’d say the thematic bent is really just when it clicks. They all seem to follow some kind of arc, though, like there’s a really archetypal narrative that’s going on. I don’t know if it translates at all for somebody who’s listening from the outside, but for me it’s like oh, shit, I’ve made the same thing again!

Is the listener’s experience of that important to you? If you’re producing listener inputs, are you hoping for a given output or conclusion?

Yeah, so I’m definitely a process-based artist. That’s the beauty of it to me – it’s kind of weird making things or having a finished thing because it all just seems subject to time anyway. Like even when you finish something you still have to listen to the album and so it’s a new experience each time. Without meaning to get all new age-y about it, I definitely bias the process as far as album-making goes, or making things in general. So as far as directing somebody towards a particular theme, I guess that’s what I try to present, or to run the balance beam of illuminating the process at the same time as having a finished thing that seems like it’s continually in-process. That’s an important theme for me to convey.

Do you do much collaborative work, or would you like to?

No, I don’t do much collaborative work. I think my ego’s too big for that [laughs]. I aspire towards being a generous person, but there’s something about the creative process that takes over, some kind of weird perfectionism. My pedigree is having gone through art school, so I saw the huge importance of dialogue – we’d get together for critiques and the work really blossomed because of that. That’s definitely a form of collaboration, but as far as getting together with somebody in a room and saying ok, the two of us are going to make something I’m not a collaborator. That being said though, there’s all kinds of hidden collaborations that occur that I’ve tried to be a lot more open to. For example, Sean edited down the work that I was doing quite a bit and I was really grateful for that. It was really hard to do at first, but I also saw the way in which that was helping out. You get so far up your creative ass – you’re trying to say something so hard that you forget that you haven’t said anything at all, or you’ve said too much, and it’s really useful to have an outside ear.

It sounds almost like you’re very open to critique but need the final say over whether or not it’s applied.

I like having veto power for sure. That’s like the quintessential mark of the perfectionist auteur. Like this far, sure, but no further.

Every time someone writes about you they talk about your operatic training, even if it’s no longer too descriptive of the music you’re making. Is that something you did in childhood, or later in life?

It was like my late teens, early twenties and throughout my university career. I wasn’t training in university, but I was always participating in choirs and surrounded by the choral tradition. I did actually apply to go to music school, which didn’t happen mostly due to laziness, but it’s funny hearing people identify me as an opera singer at this point because I’d never call myself that. I mean I can do it, and it’s kind of impressive to just blast at people, but I also know the degree to which opera is so hardcore, and I definitely wouldn’t garner any starring roles or anything like that. It’s been neat to come back to – my first stabs at making albums didn’t have any voice on them at all, and it was just sort of chance that I decided to start re-incorporating it. It’s been neat to see people latch onto that and go oh, ok, that’s what people respond to.

Here’s a stock question since your music is under the leaky umbrella of noise – do you find more inspiration in contemporary music, early music, or something else entirely?

It’s definitely an emotive thing for me. That’s really what I respond to. There are little pockets of history that bias that over others, like the post-Romantic period is super beautiful. Noise can do that too – there’s a lot of really emotional noise. It doesn’t resonate with me so much when it’s all about the surface of things, or the tweakery. I think there always should be something underneath, and that’s what really gets me. I think as far as noise is concerned, I really love Kevin Drumm’s work for example, because I feel like even though it’s totally batshit crazy there’s still a human underneath it that’s trying to express stuff. So there’s that certain something that pops up from time-to-time through the ages. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into saying I like this or that type of music or era, but I think there are waves of when that sensibility really comes to the fore. I really like searching after that thing and being surprised when it shows up in a completely unexpected place.

I read somewhere that Julianna Barwick, to whom you’re frequently compared, was born in Louisiana and credits these huge gospel choirs as a big inspiration in her music. Do you have any sort of formational relationship like that with opera or choral music?

Yeah, I’ve been called the male Julianna Barwick, which I’m super honored by. I’ve never really thought of it that way, but I guess it was musical theatre for me. I had really shitty musical tastes when I was young – not shitty, I mean you gotta own it. I can identify that I would never listen to some of that stuff now, but it got me at that age and I’m grateful that it did. I got to be Sancho Panza in high school, we did Man of La Mancha. It’s a great musical, like the perfect musical – it’s not cheesy whatsoever, has all of these meta-layers, it’s the story of Don Quixote but kind of a play within a play. Being up on stage, belting it out was just really beautiful. So as far as a point of origin goes, that was one of the first times. I’d been singing in choirs up to that point, but something about it really fleshed it out. I think it was the combination of narrative and choral stuff and theatre… it was a perfect storm of all these really beautiful ideas. And then I vowed to listen to better music thereafter [laughs].

It looks like 2012 was the inception date for your current musical projects. Were you creating music before that in a different style, or under a different name?

Oh, yeah. Not under a different name but I never released it or anything like that, and I’ll deny that any copies of it exist if people go looking. I always thought I was going to be a boy with guitar, singer-songwriter. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a lovely tradition. But yeah I was a bedroom guitar guy, writing songs. I recorded some of that in like the late 90’s, and it’s interesting to see some of that still pop up. I don’t really write songs like that anymore, but it’s neat to see how every once in a while it’s appropriate to do something like that, and use it as a tool to help the story along in a particular album. I’ve got a new record coming out on Desire Path at some point that’s definitely a lot more song-based material, or something that finds a meeting point between the noise aesthetic, the choral aesthetic, and the more traditional song-based aesthetic.

What galvanized you to start making music again in 2012?

One of the things that I learned in art school was that a printmaking degree has zen tenets written into its constitution, if you will. The school was really based in meditative art-making, very procedural art-making. I don’t know if you’re familiar with printmaking at all but it is very procedural. You have a process that you can throw yourself into. For example when you’re doing an etching you can control what might happen on the surface but then when you throw it into the acid anything goes. One of the things I’m most grateful for in that degree is that I started to take myself out of the expressive process and shift myself more to a responsive mode of art-making. I don’t know if I got there or not, but the music I’m now making is attempting to incorporate that a lot more. That seemed like the most responsive way to say what I needed to say at the time.

Printmaking sounds a lot like what you were talking about for making music – construct a framework within which entropy can operate freely.

Yeah, totally. I don’t think I was really happy with any of the singer-songwriter stuff that I was doing because I kind of knew what it was going to be like when I started it. That killed the process for me, there was a joylessness there. It was just going into the studio trying to get a take, and it wasn’t fun. You couldn’t respond to it in any way, like it was done before it started. The process couldn’t shine. Entropy is actually something really lovely to me – it’s more fun to go into the studio and kind of muck about instead of just going ok, I’m going to make a song today!

Do you put much thought into how you name your music? Either individual songs or your artist name.

That had more to do with my art degree, because there was already an Ian Craig in the UK making art. I’ve always secretly thought that it’s a bit pretentious to use your middle name, but one of my best friends was making art under his full name and I thought well ok, maybe this is possible. So here we are, mostly out of necessity and laziness. I do spend a lot of time thinking about putting words to stuff, because words can be both really concrete and really abstract.

I think you did ok – I. William Craig or I. W. Craig would be a whole lot worse.

Well the W got killed by the Bush Administration. Too many syllables, too – Ian William Craig is long enough, forcing people to say Ian W. Craig would be too much. I don’t mind IWC actually.

To frame the question a bit, I was just talking to Jenny Hval and she said that your own name is something you don’t have any say in and therefore doesn’t yield anything to the listener by which the music could be mis-characterized.

That’s actually very interesting, and now that you’ve said it out loud I think that’s it. One of the reasons I spent so long trying to find the perfect band name and never quite getting it is that you’ll never quite get it – it’ll always be full of some kind of affect. There is sort of a relief in just being Ian William Craig, although I don’t like when people just call me that on the street. Ian William Craig kind of became the affect, or the banner under which I’m sending music out into the world, so I would self-identify as just Ian Craig. Putting the William in there was the band name.

Your album includes both songs with lyrics and fully choral tracks. When you’re doing a lot of vocal manipulation or obscuration, is there ever lyrical content in that or purely melody?

Yup! Sometimes a bit of both. I write poetry a lot, so I’ve been trying to incorporate that. You were asking about song titles, and so usually if I’ve used words that I’ve written, even if they’re really obfuscated, they’ll end up in the title somewhere. I like having that as the fuel, like things become a lot more poetic when you put them behind a veil. I was always really self-conscious about my poetry, so it’s been really empowering to use it and kind of honor it, but also to totally obliterate it. I think it forms a certain kind of intention. I’ve used just nonsense words as well, pure sound, and the result ends up quite different. Even if you can’t hear the words at the end, they still form some kind of structure that maybe shows itself poetically in the end product. It’s a double-edged sword though, because words can be really cruel too. Singing a phrase of nonsense, or in another language, you focus a lot more on how it sounds. There’s a bodily aspect as well, and I think those two things are what people respond to when they hear the voice without any lyrical texture. As soon as you sing something, it’s like oh, that’s what this person is trying to say and there’s a literal expression and those surficial qualities go away. The vessel kind of disappears. And if that’s what you want to have happen, then cool, but they can also take something really lovely and turn it into reason.