Browse by Artist: IRISARRI, RAFAEL ANTON

Artist:	IRISARRI, RAFAEL ANTON
Title:	Hopes And Past Desires
Label:	IMMUNE
Format:	7"
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	IMMUNE 003EP

"Rafael Anton Irisarri's music is a dual perspective close-up focus on the micro textures of rustling static-filled sonic surfaces with the wide-open, distant tree-lined horizons of sunset at dusk. Submerged piano melodies, reverberating guitar tonalities and electronic punctuation all contribute as the converging elements, but it's his hand at electro-acoustic composition that offers the listener the often breathtaking vantage into this sonic world. The combined effect is one of time passing in introspection, remembrances of landscapes and the nature of our relationship with things past as we move toward those yet to come. Plaintively yearning, his music never resigns itself to the stoicism of the melancholic, but is asking, moving, and drawing us into a state of hearing, seeing and recognizing the scale, scope and richness of the natural world and ourselves in the everyday. This music draws as much on modern genre progenitors like Brian Eno, Robin Guthrie and My Bloody Valentine as it does from the more historic traditions in neo-classicism from Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen. It's this intersection of sounds, both traditional and modernly avant, that make for the balancing act that can be described as something beyond just 'ambient' or 'cinematic' in his music; it brings the listener to a state somewhere between emotionally entranced and psychologically adrift."

Artist:	IRISARRI, RAFAEL ANTON
Title:	Daydreaming
Label:	MIASMAH (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	MIA 004CD

Originally released on the Miasmah label in 2007. Seattle-based multi-instrumentalist Rafael Anton Irisarri is the latest in a growing number of electronic musicians returning to that hallowed of instruments -- the piano. It has become something of a cliché now for the electronic musician to turn to the humble keys in the hope of adding something organic into the mix, but it would be frivolous to pass Daydreaming off in such a manner. Rather than an electronic album with elements of piano, Daydreaming sounds like a record written for piano which somehow manages to utilize current technology in its production. As the drifting synthesizers lap around the feet of a majestic piano part in the album's opening track "Waking Expression," it is startlingly clear that there is more to Irisarri than mere stereotyping. Rather, this is a carefully-constructed soundtrack to your most intriguing dreams, the dreams you might remember for a split second before losing everything, only to have images creep up on you some time later. Those of you left spellbound by Deaf Center's haunting and beautiful Pale Ravine album will be pleased to know that Daydreaming continues in the tradition of murky, theatrical and deeply imaginative music quite wonderfully. Even Lynch is hinted at again with the album's clear highlight "Lumberton" (possibly a reference to Blue Velvet's troubled small-town) and as the emotive piano shimmers around radio static and lightly picked guitar, it is impossible not to get drawn into the shattered American dream. This is rich, visual music showing a dark, melancholic side to American life and captured perfectly by an artist unafraid to bear his soul to the world. Uncluttered and subtly realized, Daydreaming is maybe best summed up as it draws to a close with a gaseous ambience, drawing you in for the last time before the inevitable repeat play. Pure, uninterrupted bliss.

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