Ian Williams began his music career in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s as a founder of Beautiful Pea Green Boat (BPGB), whose ethereal, atmospheric sound pre-dated the vogue for dream pop by at least twenty years.
Also recording other, mostly electronic, music at the time, Williams made a series of five improvisations designed as a utilitarian aid for some tapestry student friends at the city’s Art College. He titled them ‘Soundtracks For Weaving’. “Obviously, this was wishful thinking and they carried on listening to Radio 1 while working, but I liked the music anyway and kept it on a cassette to listen to,” he wryly recalls.
Having digitised the tracks in 2020, he has finally decided to release them as an album in their own right. “There were some problems with the mixes, but thanks to technological advances and the fact that I found the original four-track cassette masters, I managed to have a crack at unmixing and reassembling them.”
With all the original synth parts having been created on a Roland SH-101, the drum programming on a Roland TR-707, plus a dash of guitar, Williams explains that “I’ve resisted the urge to add anything modern and just mixed everything as simply as possible. It still sounds like it is from 1986, only now it is properly finished.”
The opening track on the album, ‘The Vase’, was used as the backing track for a BPGB song of the same name released on a Third Mind Records compilation album entitled ‘Future Tense’ in 1986. It was then re-worked on the BPGB album ‘Get Religion’, which was issued in 1987 and is available via Bandcamp HERE.
Williams relocated to London in the late ‘80s and collaborated regularly with the Lebanese choreographer Joumana Mourad and her contemporary dance company Ijad, fusing Arabic/classical/techno/ambient styles on music created for the troupe. He then changed tack to work with singer Claudia Barton as Gamine, releasing two albums of dark, piano-led torch songs and lullabies.
His solo releases include THE DREAM EXTORTIONISTS (2019), a debut solo album of dark piano and electronics; LES BLESSURES INVISIBLES (2019), an eclectic electronic soundtrack to a documentary film by French director Eric Michel, and ALL BECOMES DESERT (2021), an album of minimalist ambiences and warm analogue soundscapes. Following the release of SLOW-MOTION APOCALYPSE in 2023, he composed the soundtrack to Michel’s WW2 spy documentary, LE MYSTÈRE LUCIE (Code Name Lucy) and issued two soundtracks for it in 2024.