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Rafael Anton Irisarri, “FAÇADISMS” (Black Knoll Editions, 2024)

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This latest album from Rafael Anton Irisarri was partially inspired by an overheard malaprop in Italy years ago in which someone at a restaurant mistranslated The American Dream as “The American Myth.”  That unintentionally damning phrase naturally resonated with Irisarri, who hails from Puerto Rico, and it came back to him in 2020 when he was researching brutalist architecture and Potemkin villages (a portable façade built to create the illusion of a real town).  It is not terribly hard to see how Potemkin villages are a perfect readymade metaphor for the illusory promises of The American Dream, of course, but making an anticolonial power ambient album that channels that revelation in an interesting and unique way is quite a bit harder.  Irisarri ingeniously solved that problem by mirroring the “cyclical nature of our tumultuous political history” with roiling storms of distortion and hiss, which he envisions as a series of tempests and receding tides that leave behind only “dust, delusion, and memory.”  Some pieces admittedly pull off that trick better than others, but the best moments beautifully evoke something akin to a glimpses of a flickering mirage through a raging sandstorm.

The opening “Broken Intensification” provides a fairly representative introduction to Irisarri’s FAÇADISMS vision, as it rolls in as a steadily intensifying roar of bass rumble and hazy guitar noise that feels like it is fading in and out of focus.  I imagine it sounds a lot like listening to an ambient album from the window seat of an ascending rocket, as the extreme volume of the fiery liftoff would unavoidably overpower every other sound. The piece does not evolve much beyond that, which I initially found frustrating, as there is no shortage of greyscale ambient albums in the world and they are generally not my favorite thing.  That said, that aesthetic makes perfect sense thematically, as the American empire is itself an all-consuming destructive roar that is ultimately hollow, so I guess Irisarri nailed that bit rather admirably.  Once I grasped that, the album made a lot more sense to me, as I stopped looking for moments of submerged beauty and started focusing on the obliterating elemental power of Irisarri’s noise storms and it definitely seems like that is where he focused most of his attention.  Consequently, the ideal way to experience this album is to crank it up loud or throw on some headphones and feel the full visceral power of Irisarri’s seething hurricanes of hiss and distortion.    

That is not the only attraction, however: the storms may be the album’s most defining and recurring theme, but there are also pieces where the maelstrom is subdued or fitful enough to reveal a bit of what is happening underneath.  Sometimes it feels like glimpsing some flowers defiantly growing in a scorched wasteland, while other times it can resemble a badly damaged, blown-out tape of church hymns or a bruised sunrise slowly burning through a thick fog.  

Notably, most of the strongest pieces fall on the second half of the album, as the album’s arc seems to trend towards decreasing levels of obliteration.  My favorite piece is currently “The Only Things that Belong to Us are Memories,” as Irisarri’s warm chords actually break through to the surface and mostly stay there (albeit in frayed and dissolving form), but the following “Forever Ago is Now” is a similarly fine piece that escapes even further from noise squalls to achieve a sort of cinematic majesty.  
There are also a handful of compelling passages that depart more conspicuously from the hiss-ravaged drones and engulfing roars that dominate the album and they evoke everything from a meditative walk through the forest with a distant towering forest fire as a backdrop, Popul Vuh’s Aguirre theme if it was repurposed to fit a blackened volcanic hellscape, or a disturbingly  apocalyptic planetarium soundtrack.  That said, my one big caveat is that FAÇADISMS would not be the place I would start if I was new to Irisarri’s work, as this is more of a challenging listen than more melodic releases like Peripeteia and The Shameless Years.  Fans of bleary textures, brutalist ambient, veils of noise, and painterly use of hiss and murk will find a lot to immerse themselves in, however.

Listen here.

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Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri, “Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close” (Black Knoll, 2024)

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This collaboration has its origins in a sold-out opening night show from Madrid’s 2023 SoundSet series, as Irisarri and Guido Zen tore the roof off the Condeduque cultural center ambient-style with their encore duet. Naturally, that intense performance (“Waking Up Dizzy on a Bastion”) is included here for the benefit of hapless chumps like me who were on the wrong continent that night, but the experience inspired the two artists to keep their partnership going afterwards (albeit remotely). That continued creative union eventually resulted in a longform studio piece (“Place of Forever”) that is every bit as impressive as the Madrid performance, if not even better. Unsurprisingly, I have been a fan of both artists for quite some time and this album is one of those rare times in which an ostensible match made in heaven actually sounds as absolutely mesmerizing as I hoped it would. This album is pure blackened drone nirvana.

The album opens with the new studio piece (“Place of Forever”), which gradually fades in from silence as a subdued chord progression, a host of pops and crackles, and a bleary industrial drone that languorously pans and undulates through space. If this were a lesser album, I can guarantee that I would be frustrated that it took a full 7 or 8 minutes before the opening piece finally started to catch fire, but such a long, slow build up feels quite confident and earned here: if I know a piece will eventually blossom into something incredible, the slow, simmering ascension to that point becomes incredibly tantalizing rather than an unnecessary lull.

Articulating exactly why “Place of Forever” is so brilliant is a bit tricky, however, as it essentially just sounds like a classic Abul Mogard slow-burner: majestic and melancholy synth swells glacially intensifying over a hissing backdrop of industrial ambiance for 17 glorious minutes. In fact, I am having a hell of a time even identifying where Irisarri’s hand comes into play at all, but whatever he was doing seems to have made quite an impact, as the textures are even more tactile and detailed than usual (aside from guitar, Irisarri is credited with “treatment” and Augustus Loop delay). At its best, the piece feels like time-lapse footage of curling and billowing smoke organically expanding into dark new tendrils. Unlike smoke, however, “Place of Forever” increasingly packs a seismic power that feels damn near elemental.

That would normally be an incredibly tough act to follow, but in this case it isn’t even the main course (in theory), as the album’s very raison d’etre is the Madrid performance. Given that Abul Mogard’s aesthetic can be reasonably described as “subtly manipulating dials and sliders with superhuman patience until it sounds like the fucking earth is seismically shuddering and cracking,” it makes perfect sense that “Waking Up Dizzy” shares a very similar dynamic trajectory with its predecessor: silence steadily intensifies into a howlingly visceral maelstrom of noise-gnawed synths and industrial textures and that slow, psychotropic journey extends for an entire side of vinyl.

That said, there are some significant differences between the two pieces, however, as Irisarri’s bowed electric guitar is newly prominent and there is also a melodic hook of sorts. The album description’s claim that Irisarri’s “melting guitar patterns” recall the “most lysergic moments on Loveless” feels like a bit of a stretch, but certainly not a delusional one, as it merely feels closer to an immense-sounding remaster of Belong’s classic October Language album instead. I do think Kevin Shields would be impressed with how skillfully Zen and Irisarri ravage and submerge their melodic hook with noise and distortion, however. If not, at least they managed to impress me and a roomful of enthusiastically clapping people in Spain, as the best moments of “Waking Up Dizzy” evoke an image of timeless ruined beauty that lies somewhere between streaking comet trails over a burning city and a violent sunset of blood reds and bruised purple: immense, elemental, melancholy, and achingly beautiful all at the same time. In fact, I am genuinely having a hard time thinking of any previous Abul Mogard or Irisarri releases that can match Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close, as this album is about as perfect as heavy electronic drone music can get. Zen and Irisarri are two stone-cold killers at the height of their powers here.

Listen here.