July 15, 2019
Rafael Anton Irisarri
Today we have a guest recommendation from Headphone Commute, an anonymously-run website that highlights interesting ambient, modern classical, and experimental music. We've found several gems via Headphone Commute and are honored to publish one of their recommendations here.
I think by now it is fair to say that in the last decade, New York-based Rafael Anton Irisarri has established his very own staple sound, making enough of an imprint on the evolution of a particular flavour of ambient music, to have it be called Irisarriesque. Consistency in the quality of his output, attention to every minute detail, and the careful crafting of the dynamics, subsequently pillared by the impressively present Room40, have put this musician on the map of the influencers in the genre, forever solidifying him in our hall of fame. For his latest studio album, titled Solastalgia, Irisarri conjures grey dense fog of a morning, graciously chilling the hot summer lands, dampening dry withered roots with their sonic-drenched molecules, until everything simply dissolves in a white-out of noise, while the melody still carries on. Somewhere, deep in this granular haze of a sound, far past distortion of melodic bliss, long through the time it unfolds through confinements, lies that neologism called ‘solastalgia’, waiting for your existential distress. Revealing the elements of this sonic post-ambience is like slicing through a thousand-year-old piece of a thick heavy bog – its deep marshy layers preserving all of its histories, all of its change, all of its past, disclosing the struggles it all left behind. Throughout the album, factors of randomness, organic development and non-intervened automation, weave through the harmony clearly in place. This type of record requires deep listening, loud deep listening, played in the dark. Highly recommended!
Solastalgia by Rafael Anton Irisarri (80m) Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Google Play / Tidal
Midnight Colours by Rafael Anton Irisarri (40m) Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Google Play / Tidal
A Fragile Geography by Rafael Anton Irisarri (40m) Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Google Play / Tidal