“We captured every roaming shark in our own rotten net… and wore their teeth around our necks. You’re a stranger to me now.”

“You’re a Stranger (to me now)” is “the woozy rant of a jilted lover” from enigmatic Auckland musician i.e. crazy.

i.e. crazy (or maybe it is I.E. CRAZY?) is the new music form and name adopted by Claire Duncan, formerly of Dear Time’s Waste fame.

I say “new” although this name has existed since not long after the last Dear Time’s Waste album “Some kind of Eden” was released at the end of 2012. And I say “fame” although Dear Time’s Waste never achieved the kind of recognition befitting an artist with such extraordinary talents as a songwriter, wordsmith and musician.

However the i.e. crazy/ I.E. CRAZY name is still “new” in the sense that it has taken a while for this first formal release to appear.

Anyway, “You’re A Stranger (to me now)” delivers a rawer shock of sound than the often more manicured Gothic dream-pop soundscapes of Dear Time’s Waste, with the help of some accomplices (Seth Frightening alter-ego Sean Kelly and GPOGP drummer Catherine Cumming) well-qualified in the dark arts of music from the borderlands.

The words continue the writer’s skill for forensic examination of life experiences (whether her own or imagined others’ is unclear and unimportant) with a novelist’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for phrasing. So everything you want from your experience of Dear Time’s Waste is still here, just rubbed raw by the stubborn refusal to conform.

The words of the song are self-explanatory in their own obtuse, coded way. “You’re a Stranger (to me now)” is a bruised/ bruising examination/ exhumation of post-relationship life, expressed and delivered in a way few others would attempt or have the imagination or courage to pull off.

If you need a prologue, an introduction, a pre-amble to orient your mind to the what and the why of all this then there’s a great letter-of-sorts about it all, and about the frustration borne by those with an impulse to create to communicate through un-valued art in NZ’s culture-shaming/ asset-whorshipping society on the artist’s Facebook page.