IAN WILLIAMS | Slow-Motion Apocalypse artwork
IAN WILLIAMS
SLOW-MOTION APOCALYPSE
new album
out 03.11.23
(Slaughterback) Bandcamp pre-order [CD & DL] “Clever, beautiful and inspiring, we could certainly do a lot worse than go out on a high with this playing as the soundtrack *****”
OUTSIDE LEFT includes
CHRONOPOLIS
stream
also includes the single
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
video | buy “Think Vangelis sharing ideas with Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre. Cinematic, with spacey, melodramatic vocals, it is proud, mighty and fearless and has a heroic feel”
TURN UP THE VOLUME 
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence” – Charles Bukowski The new album by London-based musician/composer Ian Williams marks an abrupt handbrake turn away from the minimalism of his previous release, ‘All Becomes Desert’ [2021]. Rather, ‘Slow-Motion Apocalypse’ is all about impact; the epic devastation of a civilisation hell-bent on cutting off its own life-support systems and a furious elegy for the headlong rush to exhaust the planet’s precious resources to enrich a handful of unvisionaries whose main preoccupation seems to be going to Mars, or buying footballers…because that will definitely help. Think of the music itself as a rant, a protest against the beige-ness of the current vogue for music as a tranquilliser for the masses. This is not music to meditate to and it doesn’t provide a safe space for the expression of warm and fuzzy feelings. Instead, it rages. Hybrid electronic-orchestral sculptures carved in the sides of mountains, with gigantic avalanches of rhythm pulled along by an interlocking delirium of melody and noise. Ah, melody…it is the one ideal held sacrosanct here – imagine Aphex Twin mutating into Carmina Burana via a spaghetti western detour, as heard in ‘After We’re Gone’, or ‘Magenta’ with its spaced-out dub as a spy theme floats by, or ‘Chronopolis’ with its skyscrapers full of colossal piano chords to soundtrack the novel Ballard never got around to filming. After all, we might as well enjoy the dying light at the end of the world – what else can we do? The album also includes Williams’ current single, ‘The Light At The End Of The World’. An intoxicating mixture of bubbling sequencers, tribal beats and soaring synths, it has a gorgeous ethereal vocal melody and sounds like a Tangerine Vangelis, while it is accompanied by an interdimensional video shot somewhere between the Orion Nebula and Margate. SLOW-MOTION APOCALYPSE
TRACKLISTING
1 The Long Drift
2 Dragster
3 Chronopolis
4 After We’re Gone
5 Magenta
6 Girl With The Thunderbolt Kick
7 If You Had Only One Bullet
8 The Light At The End Of The World Ian Williams began his music career in Edinburgh in the mid 1980s as a founder of Beautiful Pea Green Boat, whose ethereal, atmospheric sound pre-dated the vogue for dream pop by at least twenty years. Several collaborations with Lebanese choreographer Joumana Mourad and her contemporary dance company Ijad saw him fuse Arabic/classical/techno/ambient styles, following which he changed tack to work with singer Claudia Barton as Gamine, releasing two albums of dark, piano-led torch songs and lullabies. Recent discography: 2019: THE DREAM EXTORTIONISTS – debut solo album of dark piano and electronics which balanced melancholia with melody.
2020: LES BLESSURES INVISIBLES (Invisible Wounds) – an eclectic electronic soundtrack to a documentary film by French director Eric Michel that took an unsettling look at the after-effects of the withdrawal of the uranium mining operation in Gabon (which supplied the French nuclear industry) on the local population. Williams has also recently completed the soundtrack to Michel’s new WW2 spy documentary, ‘Le Mystère Lucie’ (Code Name Lucy), due for imminent release.
2021: ALL BECOMES DESERT – an album of minimalist ambiences and warm analogue soundscapes evoking the wide-open, empty spaces of the great deserts. It consists of a series of electronic improvisations made by Williams three decades earlier processed through the wonders of modern technology. 
IAN WILLIAMS | 2023 photo
Official Site | Bandcamp | Twitter | Instagram | 
