Two different artists are listed on Last.fm under the name Ian Wilson:

1) An American loop artist, keyboardist, and singer/songwriter.

2) An Irish contemporary classical composer.

1) Folktronica musician Ian Wilson belongs to a new class of singer-songwriters who have exchanged backup bands for loop pedals. Using a combination of keyboard instruments and synthesizers, Ian builds complex, atmospheric layers around deeply personal songwriting. And despite defecting from the classical genre years ago, Ian’s piano has never quite lost the accent—you can tell by the sound of it, it’s not from around here. His debut solo LP, This is Water, will be released in May 2012.

This is Water isn’t really about water. Like the David Foster Wallace speech that the title alludes to, water is simply a medium for more elusive messages. The lyrics fixate more on migration, travel, and change—apt themes for an album in which Ian leaves behind the acoustic anchoring of 2008’s The Crater EP for full-on electronic integration. In The Crater’s deft piano and wordplay, the influences of queer music icons Tori Amos or the Magnetic Fields are easily heard. With This is Water, Ian reshapes his songwriting with backbeats and layering, inspired by other classically-trained loop artists like Owen Pallett and Zoe Keating. The new is grafted to the old in the “magnetic guts” of the album, a tall wooden ship with a self-destruct button.

Ian’s earlier work in The Crater EP introduced him to Chicago’s tight-knit community of queer musicians, keeping him busy with its numerous performance series, including the 2011 Alt-Q Festival at Old Town School of Folk Music and Gay Chicago TV’s Out Rock. Soon after The Crater’s release, Ian began a two year stint with orchestral-pop band Canasta—a baptism by fire into the city’s non-stop indie music scene via countless shows around the Midwest, a slot at the CMJ Music Marathon, and live performances on WBEZ’s Eight-Forty Eight and WTTW’s Chicago Tonight. Ian’s eclectic keyboard palette helped shape the burlier version of ork-pop heard on the band’s sophomore album, The Fakeout, the Tease and the Breather. The album was released in 2010 to a wave of critical superlatives including “one of the best Chicago albums of the year” (RedEye) and “so perfect…that you’ll swear you’ve heard it before” (Chicago Reader).

Ian won early recognition for This is Water with the Albert P. Weisman Award at Columbia College Chicago, where Ian is earning his Master’s in music and arts management. He keeps his wits sharp teaching songwriting, keyboards, and voice at School of Rock Chicago, the nation’s premiere educational institution for the corruption of well-mannered and quiet children.

2) Ian Wilson (born Belfast 1964) was the first to be awarded the D.Phil in Composition from the University of Ulster, which in 1993 commissioned his orchestral work Rise in celebration of the tenth anniversary of its foundation.

He has since written over sixty works including orchestral pieces, concertos for organ, cello, alto saxophone, violin (two), marimba and piano, six string quartets, three piano trios, and many other chamber and vocal works. Performances and broadcasts of his music span six continents and include artists such as the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Ulster, Belgrade Philharmonic and Norwegian Radio Orchestras, the London Mozart Players and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Vanbrugh, Vogler and Endellion Quartets, the Psappha, Gemini and Concorde ensembles, Gerard McChrystal and Hugh Tinney. His works have also been featured at many festivals including the BBC Proms, ISCM World Music Days, the Zagreb Biennale, the Cheltenham, Spitalfields and Bath Festivals and the Ultima Festival in Oslo, where Running, Thinking, Finding for orchestra received the composition prize in 1991.

Ian Wilson was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship administered by the Arts Council of Ireland in 1992, and in 1998 was elected to Aosdána, Ireland’s State-sponsored body of creative artists. From 2000 to 2003 Ian Wilson was AHRB Research Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Ulster.

Ian Wilson’s music covers a spectrum that is freely chromatic at one end and diatonic at the other. His earlier leaning towards homophony has adapted to accommodate his increasing focus on linear writing. His sources of inspiration are wide-ranging and include the paintings of Klee, sculpture, and the words of the Bible.

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