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.

The post Ian Wayne – Molloy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Verheyen asked that the leg be preserved, so that he might keep it in his possession. But soon he found himself plagued by mysterious sensations, phantom pains in a limb no longer present. He began to dissect the leg in search of answers. The process led to the scientific discovery of a number of components, not least the Achilles tendon, but no explanation was found for the mystery sensations. The moment of amputation was clear and final, and surely the leg did not long for its return, but the body from which it had been removed still sensed it near—as though to be alive is to continue to feel, even when the source has gone.

Risking Illness, the forthcoming album from Queens-based songwriter Ian Wayne, confronts an absence of its own. Pivoting away from the tongue-in-cheek sound of debut A Place Where Nothing Matters, the record locates a far more sombre atmosphere, a change that has been attributed to the circumstances under which is arose. Wayne was touring with his band towards the end of 2017 when he received news that a young family member was gravely ill, and when they passed a short time later, the cruel arbitrary nature of the event opened up a void.

Wayne insists that Risking Illness is not an album about that one particular experience, and that any interpretation of the listener should be divorced from this context in any case. “I believe that these songs should be untied from my purpose in writing them,” he writes as explanation. But the story does hold relevance, not in its specificity but rather its shared experience. Just one more manifestation of loss, impossibly personal and life-changing. Elsewhere on the record, other versions emerge—lost relationships, connections never realised—and the lasting impression is not the detail within Wayne’s catalogue of grief, but rather the simple fact that he too has such a catalogue. Just like ours, yet as intimate as a fingerprint.

The effect is achieved not only in the writing but the recording process itself. With Keith Nelson (keyboards), Andrew Stocker (bass) and Dan Knishkowy (drums), Risking Illness was tracked live. The resulting songs are charged not only with an immediacy but a sense of captured transience. Each a fleeting thing that came together at a certain place and time, captured as it arrived, preserved before it could leave again. Visitations that stepped out one by one then commingled, much like grief itself. The beauty and sadness of such things lies not in their purpose or meaning, but the very fact that they appeared at all. These visitations, from somewhere beyond our world or some folded dimension within it, coalescing into an enduring whole.

Today, we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Winter’s’, the final single from the record and the one from which it derives its title. Perhaps the most overt confrontation with the personal tragedy of 2017, the song finds Wayne reflecting on the strangeness of loss. How it is so big and so small, changing everything while the world remains the same. So sudden and so nebulous, the amputation and the phantom pain. And how death is so tightly bound with its opposite, so reliant on the continued motion of life. “How does what does not exist cause me pain?” Tokarczuk has Verheyen ask of his amputated leg. Is it a sign of something deeper or higher than us, some mystery beyond our comprehension? Can such fundamental components of ourselves ever truly be lost? “Why do I feel this lack, this sense of absence?” Tokarczuk continues:

Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole? If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces—does something great, powerful and infinite remain a whole in this?

The post Ian Wayne – Winter’s appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Restorations – Nonbeliever
Goshen Electric Co. – The Grey Tower
Horse Culture – Follow
Yowler – Where Is My Light?
Desert Liminal – Gauze Cave
Anamon – In 3
Adeline Hotel – Lightning
Lea Thomas – Upstream
Scott Orr – No Phone
Advance Base – Christmas in Nightmare City
Blue Wilson – Golden Eyes
The Sofas – Nothing Major
Lazy Legs – Nosebleed
All Boy/All Girl – Bomb
Strange Ranger – New Hair
Elly Swope – Idea
Dweller – Running
Will Henriksen – Halo
Knuckle Pups – Bottom Baby
Ian Wayne – Guessing
Massage – Crying Out Loud
Recluse Raccoon – Mother America
Interbellum – Ink
Marc Ferrino – Like a Spark
Katie Kuffel – As the Crow Flies
Emily Brown – Sometimes
KASHKA – Holding Steady
Philippe Bronchtein – Me and the Moon
Spencer Segelov – Sacred Songs
Annie Dressner – Fades Away
Belaver – Grave Robber
Of The Valley – Ride Alone
Hour – Give thanks in a special way

The post October 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As such, those who appreciate the sardonic pop of CHUCK and Frog will find a new hero in Ian Wayne. Lead single ‘Revelation’ serves as the perfect example of his style, with PopMatters describing the sound as existing “somewhere sonically between the driving force of indie rock, low-key folk, and ruminative jazz,” and the tone that of wry wit, a vibe that extends beyond the music and into the track’s video.

Today we are lucky enough to be able to share a new single from the record. ‘Guessing’ flickers to life from probing guitars, its half-paced beat lending a sentimental air of bittersweet melancholy, though the track does not stay settled within this groove. Rather, the midway point sees the song climb to new heights, propelled by marching drums and a cacophonous energy, leaving Wayne to wail with abandon before eventually descending the other side of the peak and back to the original languorous flow.

The result is a song that feels governed by its own forces, left to accelerate and pull back as it sees fit, and the spirit of spontaneity and experimentation informs the basis of the track. As Wayne explains:

[‘Guessing’ is] about trying hard to find your voice, in particular by thinking about why you love the music you love. It’s also about friendship and the camaraderie of loving and sharing music with friends. The idea is that we can scrutinize records to figure out how to write a good song and dedicate ourselves to music-making in any number of ways, but ultimately we’re just guessing when it comes to songwriting. To me that’s a humbling, peaceful thought – that you never really know if the songs are going to work.

Photo by Julian Master, album art by Ian Wayne (with help from Adam Sultanov)

The post Ian Wayne – Guessing appeared first on Various Small Flames.