Released back in 2020 on Whatever’s Clever, Ian Wayne‘s critically acclaimed album Risking Illness was something of a index of loss. It was a record built around untimely deaths, broken relationships and connections never realised, though with the intention of divorcing itself from the specific to explore the phenomenon more generally. “The lasting impression is not the detail within Wayne’s catalogue of grief,” we wrote in our review, “but rather the simple fact that he too has such a catalogue. Just like ours, yet as intimate as a fingerprint.” Unsurprisingly, this manifest as a sparse and intimate sound, each track an empty room, somehow both cavernous and confined, possessing a stillness even in its crescendos as though any motion was happening on the inside.
If the album was an evolution of Ian Wayne’s debut A Place Where Nothing Matters, then his new record represents a clear break from the lineage. Out later this month on Ruination Record Co., I Can’t Sleep is a varied and often adventurous record which reaches for a whole host of influences, from languid post-rock grooves to krautrock weight and dynamism, through psychedelia, minimalism and avant-garde experimentation. Wayne cycles through these points of reference with seamless changeability, each influence worn as heavily or lightly as he sees fit in any given moment. What results, perhaps counter to the title, is a hi-fi album stitched together with a kind of dream logic. An intuitive grasp and release of styles which weaves something almost inexplicably complete.
This turn toward instinctive craft is what marks this new era of the Ian Wayne project, though it is not without precedent. Prior to recording under his own name, Wayne released an album under the moniker Cereal (an “ambitious one-man Ableton experiment,” as the label puts it), and I Can’t Sleep revisits this record and the freedom it represented. To work once again with no predetermined aim or imagined audience, instead following the creative process’ innate rhythms in whatever direction they happen to flow.
Today we have the pleasure of sharing the latest single, ‘Molloy’. Perhaps not the most sonically vivid song on the album, but the one Ian Wayne considers his finest recording to date. A drifting track of pattering rhythms, various elements shuffling around one another as though promising to coalesce into something tangible, or else in the process of dematerialising from such a prior state.
Named after the novel of the same name by Samuel Beckett, the track lays an interior monologue over this sound, a spoken word musing delivered in a tone at once mundane and strange. The result captures the Beckettian style in all of its profound, absurd detail, as embodied by a line near the beginning of the track. “When at last I did fall, I awoke.” The sentence is plainspoken on first passing, evaporates into space on the second, evoking the porous line between waking and dreams. In this manner, the line serves as the key not only to the single but the album as a whole. The kernel around which the rest of I Can’t Sleep was built. For Ian Wayne has crafted a world within the fertile interstitial space between things, where the physical leeches into the imaginary, and conscious and unconscious no longer exist in tension, but are instead allowed to overlap.
