Ian William Craig / Kago – Split Series 24

FatCat

Following numerous delays, the twenty-fourth — and last ever — issue in FatCat’s long-running and much-loved Split 12” series finally arrives. As with previous releases, the notion was to pit different sounds and styles against one another in an attempt to draw out links and similarities, or merely introducing the unknown to a more established name.

Vancouver-based Ian William Craig is up first and provides a single side-long track, an epic velvet-veined drone entitled “Because It Speaks”, whose stumble-caught footfall quickly mutates into a single monolithic focus. A curious creature that’s sent wah-souped and rippling towards a womb-like annihilation; a dry whistle expands the palette, sucks your attention in curling hypnos as decaying multiples disembody, to kookaburra-candy the shuffles and creaks.

And there you suddenly are, a head filled with a massive raspy otherness as vocal chirpings find the distended cliff-edge, a syphilitic symphony that free-falls into the caustic butter of some ethnologic insurgence. It’s as if one of Psychic TV’s Themes were shedding its skin in dirty jack discordance to find a pleasing glitch, then slipping into a gristlised chop-shop of blissful overload, to finally leap into the penumbra of some 1930s music hall.

In contrast, Kago’s seven shorter pieces perspire a folk-drenched gentleness. Tasty Sámi-like vocalisations (that are actually Estonian) rubbing up against a simple undulating accompaniment. The realtime action here is interspersed with pre-recorded riches, something that Kago (AKA Lauri Sommer) describes as dictaphone shamanism, a technique that brings a subtle magic, a strange duality to these tracks.

A potent home-brew that psychedelically funnels the remote world around him; something that teases dimensionally, with the nocturnal dreamscape of “Avovang” or transforms tiny snippets of sound into intricate dance-forms, as with the mechanised slip of “Tetermats” that dad and four-year-old daughter happily duet over. An environmentally weathered sonic whose shifting sands propel “Suure Reede Lapsed” or birdsongs “Kaeed Lahti”on Ulga Kergem Soita’s dulcimer dance in chorusing spaciousness

There is a tactile aesthetic to Kago’s music that draws spooky parallels with first side, and prompts plenty of replay.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-