Rafael Anton Irisarri - Fragility and Grandeur

Among the most significant figures in electronic music of the past 15 years, one name impossible to overlook is American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri. Hailing from Seattle, a committed anti-capitalist and environmentalist, he has forged a new ambient-drone grammar - melancholic but never depressive, at once imposing and minimal, almost photographic in its ability to portray landscapes and specific geographic places.

These qualities make him one of the most sincere witnesses of our times. His work is a shining example of expressionist music, in the sense of that capacity to process the sensations conveyed by a landscape or an environment, pushing the emotional dimension as far as possible beyond mere perceptual sensation (visual, auditory). Over the years, Irisarri has proven capable of building imposing sonic cathedrals that depict, in an entirely personal way, landscapes and emotions, crafting soundtracks for a present day teetering on the edge of the abyss. One could say he has achieved with electronics what Godspeed You! Black Emperor achieved with post-rock.

He's often labelled a post-minimalist composer, probably thanks to his debut album Daydreaming (2007), which is genuinely close to that scene, built on a pianism descended from 20th-century classical music (from Satie to John Cage) all the way to post-minimalist Michael Nyman. While it doesn't differ hugely from countless other post-minimalist piano records with electronic undercurrents, Daydreaming still displays a wide range of electroacoustic delicacy, centred on the emotional pull of the piano, around which faint guitar reverberations and liquid sounds - derived from synth technology used almost exclusively at the production stage - surface here and there, shaping small sonic environments that are at once dreamlike and streaked with a dark melancholy: tender, dilated sound-boxes laid over an extremely minimal compositional register.

Irisarri also devotes himself to a side project called The Sight Below, which at various points recalls the sound of Loscil - an intricate project initially geared towards more pervasive rhythmic digressions in an ambient-techno vein, but which soon evolved to foreground dreamy fascinations with a distant shoegaze lineage. It's no accident that the first album, Glider (2008), echoed the title of a My Bloody Valentine EP, or that, following the excellent mini-album "Murmur", the subsequent It All Falls Apart (2010) featured the active participation of Simon Scott, former drummer of Slowdive.

It All Falls Apart could ideally be placed as a lucid synthesis between the claustrophobic depths of Scott Morgan, the dark musings of some drone poet, and the electronic variations of techno-era Wolfgang Voigt. Yet Irisarri (and Scott) condense it all into something throbbing and alive, dotted with reverb and modulation bearing a recognisable guitar imprint, which develop the 90s dreamy/shoegaze legacy into thoroughly contemporary dimensions. The sense of this combined approach, which runs through pretty much the whole record, is most evident in the more expansive tracks of the first half, but finds its most explicit and dazzling outcome in the incredible transfiguration of Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades", stripped of its rhythmic components and left to drift on the emotional currents sketched by hazy guitar filtering and the unprecedented interpretation provided by the ever-evocative Jesy Fortino.

A first shift from the pianism of his early work towards electronics comes with Reverie (2010), an EP under his own name notable for offering a piano-and-electronics version of one of the masterpieces by tintinnabuli master Arvo Pärt, "Für Alina", one of Irisarri's key points of reference.

A few months later came The North Bend (2010), the first in a long series of LPs built around a single connecting thread - be it a geographic region, a lake, an apocalyptic event or a political manifesto - that unfolds track by track, creating highly original instances of instrumental concept albums which, without the aid of lyrics, manage to describe complex scenarios and states of mind almost calligraphically, the way an expressionist painter would with a painting.

The North Bend, in particular, is dedicated to the town where David Lynch set his landmark TV series "Twin Peaks". Although it's only a small preview of the poetics Irisarri would fully reveal in the years to come, several of his typical traits are already present: his classic layering of synths, overlapping guitars, and moments that reconcile decay and epic grandeur ("Passage", "Blue Tomorrows"), or even glimpses of melodies drawn from religious classical music in "Traces".

In 2012 the Seattle composer began a collaboration with Benoît Pioulard under the name Orcas, recording two LPs, Orcas (2012) and Yearling (2014), in which he moves away from his usual stylistic traits to wander along the border between pop and ambient.

If much of his vision had already been sketched out in The North Bend, his 2013 album The Unintentional Sea is the first work in which it all comes fully into focus. A small gem of expressionist ambient in which Irisarri displays overflowing talent. Freeing himself from any trace of Eluvium-style romanticism, drawing partly on the foggy landscapes of Tim Hecker's "Ravedeath 1972", and partly on the dark rains of Loscil's "Endless Falls", Irisarri is ready to make the decisive turn in his career. Once again, it's a landscape that provides the spark for the record's development, tied to the telling of a terrible story - a metaphor for a looming, possible apocalypse - which makes this Irisarri's first political album.

The record, almost like a painting, unveils the story of California's Salton Sea, protagonist of one of the greatest environmental disasters in US history. Formed in the early 20th century after a huge flood caused numerous irrigation canals to overflow, submerging a desert area of just under a thousand square kilometres and fed by various rivers, some flowing in from Mexico, the lake became by the 1950s a genuine natural oasis and tourist destination - only to later be contaminated by wastewater from factories and industries that sprang up along the banks of the rivers feeding it. Today, dead trees and fish carcasses lie on the lake's shores, forming a tragic landscape alongside the remnants of human presence from its heyday. The present-day landscapes of the Salton Sea are a vision of apocalypse: abandoned houses and hotels, the skeletons of old buildings bearing witness to a hypothetical post-human future.

Irisarri entrusts his depiction of it to five long sonic odysseys, steeped in sadness, melancholy and nostalgia. "Fear And Trembling" alone, tasked with scoring a first visual and sensory impact, seeks contact with the macabre, which translates into a swarm of feedback over a bed of murky, fetid drones, before nostalgia floods the wonderful "Her Rituals" with the most delicate glimmers. "The Witness" is a desolate darkness, night falling and dragging silence along with it: there is no life or dynamism of any kind, and even when - in homage to master Harold Budd on "Daybreak Comes Soon" - the first light of day appears, the fog filters out most of its strength.

So too does the record's one concession to piano - on an album that is otherwise, for the first time, entirely electronic - fade out into a web of nebulous textures, only to dissolve, in the finale, into tears via the album's other gem, the desert-like "Lesser Than The Sum Of Its Part". A bow to those flows that Steve Roach explored down to the smallest detail, developing and blending them in every possible combination to score the most disparate landscapes. And the closing burst of noise followed by a synthetic choral passage feels almost like a release, followed by a hopeful prayer - a stance taken on a situation that risks jeopardising the health of the whole of California, absurdly because of what was once, long ago, one of the most beautiful natural sites in the world. Ambient music that, at the peak of its pathos, becomes music for the environment. Sublime, in the most strictly Romantic sense of the word, turned into ambient music.

Raw and utterly merciless towards the humans who allow the destruction of entire habitats and natural oases, The Unintentional Sea is the record that reveals just how different Irisarri is from his contemporaries, while also clarifying his political outlook, with the Salton Sea becoming a lucid metaphor for what could happen on a far larger scale.

Two years later, Irisarri continues his evolution by releasing two EPs and an LP. With Will Her Heart Burn Anymore (2015), he amplifies his use of guitar with increasingly noise-laden distortion, across four lengthy improvisations of disturbed ambient drones. Landscapes of the soul, then, rendered through the contrast between drones and flecks of noise, components that draw on opposing yet coexisting states of mind. Exactly like the (paradoxically) serene darkness that envelops the five minutes of the opening track ("22"). The ensuing explosion, titled "60", seems to represent a "hidden treasure", scorching and impossible to handle without getting burned, but at whose core lies an all-too-familiar feeling, rendered through a harmonic mass concealed by distortion. That same feeling reveals itself in all its humility in the melodic miniature "00", polished and almost stripped of its grandiloquence once the surface "protective layer" is removed. The interlude "PLUS", on the other hand, slowly grows from a subdued base until it grips deep within: a kind of self-defense, a final wall before the definitive entrance.

The following release, Unsaid (2015), consists of a single twenty-six-minute track of menacing drones, foreshadowing the monumental quality that would become typical of his style.

A few months later he releases one of his undisputed masterpieces, A Fragile Geography (2015), an LP that establishes him as a reference point for contemporary ambient music, an undisputed high point in creating moods where melancholy and an apocalyptic atmosphere condense into something monumental, like cathedrals built in a world of ashes. The theme is the contrast and fragility of the precarious balances that govern modern society, the tensions of contemporary America, perpetually caught between the grandiloquence of a great power and the social and political injustice on which that greatness is built. The album tells of an America dominated by the dichotomy of wonder and drama, on a political, social, territorial and, even more fundamentally, geographical level. All while keeping intact the coexistence between impression (now no longer just landscape-based and concrete but also, and above all, spiritual and social) and expression (as a compositional and expository method).

The languid piano-and-stream introduction of "Displacement" acts as a bridge to the recent past and as a separator between Irisarri's organic, picturesque attitude and the emotional transcendentalism of Lawrence English. The sonic manifesto of the record arrives right after, though: "Reprisal" introduces the grandiloquence and drone maximalism that constitute the artist's new aesthetic benchmark. The meeting of present and past is celebrated in the moving "Persistence", with a subdued melody "torn open" by vibrating drones.

But it's "Empire Systems" that represents the apotheosis of this monumental and, at the same time, harrowing ambient music. In many ways, it's a damnably nostalgic piece, almost a tribute to the cosmic music of Klaus Schulze, but although the syntax is similar, the goals are entirely different. The pulsing heart of the myriad stimuli contained within the album, "Empire Systems" is a genuine masterpiece, to be placed alongside Lawrence English's "Graceless Hunter" and Tim Hecker's "Black Refraction" in a glossary of this shared way of understanding atmospheric music. The ending of "Secretly Wishing For Rain" briefly returns to the subdued paths of Daydreaming, reconverting them into a kind of requiem for the present day, a musical translation of the eloquent (and equally splendid) cover art. Standing against it, in hindsight, is the brief "Hiatus", a burst of synthetic light and a possible answer to John Chantler's indirect question: there's "Still Light, Outside".

A distillation of everything expressed so far is finally "Unsaid", twenty-six minutes condensed onto an EP and "gifted" to accompany and complete the portrait painted by the album. Within it, all the feelings from which Irisarri's most anguished and personal record was born seem to compress into a monologue made of shadows, restless drones, layered harmonies and disturbed notes.

The time is now ripe for his most mature work – The Shameless Years (2017) – the one in which he pushes his anti-capitalism, and in this case his anti-Trumpism, to its extreme. It's 2017, Donald Trump has unexpectedly won the US presidential election, and for Irisarri this marks the endpoint of decades of unbridled free-market liberalism, cultural impoverishment, wars, and growing economic disparity between nations and social classes. The shameless years are the composer's new object of observation: years lived firsthand as a powerless spectator whose only weapon is his communicative ability, years of resurgent racism, unchecked capitalism, man's hatred for man, religious extremism and endless wars. Trumpism thus becomes a kind of unwitting symbol of the present day, of illusions of salvific walls, of improbable returns to supposed "ethnic" or "racial" identities, of boundless selfishness that overrides any sense of community.

Irisarri also finds two concrete ways to voice his dissent, becoming himself a proud testament to diversity: he has "Shameless Years" produced by Umor Rex, a label based in Mexico – a country frequently vilified during Trump's election campaign – and records the last two tracks in collaboration with Iranian artist Siavash Amini, a citizen of a state regarded by much of public opinion as a "rogue state".

If the portrait of American society appears merciless and degrading, Irisarri still seems to want to offer a glimmer of hope; but hope, as George Orwell taught us in his masterpiece "1984", cannot come from above – the realm of vulgar wealth that fuels boundless narcissism – but from below. Orwell spoke of the "proles"; Irisarri means the poor populations, continually offended and discriminated against.

As on the previous record, it's the tragic grandeur of the synths that strikes the listener: a grandiloquence that finds its emotional key in flashes of melody ("Indefinite Fields"). The icy distortions of "RH Negative" shatter every certainty and depict, like true brushstrokes, the feelings of those who are aware of living through these "shameless years"; percussion becomes part of Irisarri's instrumentation here, reaching one of the most moving moments of his career. "Sky Burial" heightens the melodic element, stretching the sound of manipulated guitar to its utmost.

"Bastion", on the other hand, once again plays the card of Schulze-like grandeur, but this time with more austere accents typical of Irisarri's earlier discography. The two closing tracks – "Karma Krama" and "The Faithless" – born from a collaboration with Iranian musician Siavash Amini, are considerably darker, the offspring of a dark-ambient poetics that leaves very little room for glimmers of light. Both titles seem to point to that religious component which could become the true primordial soup of a new conflict. The long synths of "The Faithless" (13 minutes), with their apparent stasis, that almost crepuscular atmosphere that seems ready to explode at any moment yet never does, appear emblematic both of this intermediate phase of our contemporary era and of the poetic expressive power Irisarri is capable of.

2017 sees him return to collaborative work, first with the Gailes project (once again with Benoît Pioulard) and the album Seventeen Words, which abandons the ambient pop-folk of the Orcas experience, giving Irisarri's textures a greater influence.

The slow build of "Requiem For An Airport Television Newsreader" is typically Irisarrian in its pacing and development. The cosmic synths of "Surface Variations In The Snowfall" initially evoke the German cosmic masters (Schulze first and foremost), but afterward the manipulated guitar and piano seem to carry us from '70s electronic music to contemporary electronics within a matter of seconds. Here too, the steady build takes on dramatic qualities, albeit steeped in that romantic element dearer to Pioulard.

Meanwhile, Irisarri begins a new collaboration, this time with Argentine musician Leandro Fresco. The first fruit of their partnership is La Equidistancia (2017), another political piece in Irisarri's catalogue, where "equidistance" stands for a meeting point that enhances, rather than diminishes, either of the two musicians' personalities and sensibilities.

An imaginary bridge is thus drawn between the two Americas, the wealthy North and the poor South, a connecting thread that attempts to bring Irisarri's ravenous, Trumpian New York closer to Fresco's desperate, vital Buenos Aires. The hybridization between Fresco's more ethereal ambient element and Irisarri's starker realism – where nature offended by humanity's pervasive presence is very often the protagonist – finds a perfect synthesis at various points throughout the album.

"Un Horizonte En Llamas" is the lead track, a summa of Irisarri's recent poetics, shaped by a nostalgic electronica dense with emotion. The loop of "Cuando El Misterio Es Demasiado Impresionante, Es Imposible Desobedecer" shows the two elements merging virtuously (Fresco's loop and Irisarri's texture). The progression continues with the electronic winds of "Bajo Un Ocaso Desteñido" and with the phenomenal crescendos – culminating in guitar landscapes à-la Ben Frost – of "Lo Esencial Es Invisible A Los Ojos". Alongside these majestic moments sit icier ones ("Entre La Niebla" or "Las Palabras Son Fuente De Malentendidos"), yet the musical coldness of Irisarri and Fresco is always charged with pathos, in a perpetual balance between descriptive power and emotional impact of which Irisarri has, for years now, been the undisputed master.

2018 is an incredibly prolific year for Irisarri, who releases no fewer than three albums under his own name. The first, Midnight Colours (2018), returns to more apocalyptic atmospheres, imagining humanity's final two minutes of life and attempting to describe the colours and moods of the midnight that heralds the apocalypse, from the relentless ticking of the clock's hands to the memory of the possible forks in the road that might have saved us, but where the path taken was always the wrong one (Irisarri is referring specifically to the 2015 Paris climate accords). It's a long electronic requiem heralding the last breaths; the sound is thus deliberately obsolete and degraded, overflowing with old-vinyl crackle that recalls just how much of the old and destructive lurks within the "new" that advances. Irisarri pursues this effect of obsolete, low-quality recording, aiming to recreate the same feeling one might get looking at a crumpled old 1950s newspaper reporting on the H-bomb, one that "reminds us how we're all doomed".

Irisarri's poetics remain constantly suspended between grandeur and depression, between melancholy and power, with cinematic touches, between expansive ambient and a continual attention to detail, in a whirlwind of contrasting emotions that is his main stylistic signature. On Midnight Colours the pulsing element is heightened, as if to underline time's relentless march forward, as if Irisarri were counting down the last seconds before midnight. "The Clock" is the most typically Irisarri-esque track, with a percussive drone stubbornly carving out space over a harrowing bed of synths with even symphonic touches, harking back to much of his earlier discography.

The clock ticks on and the curtain begins to fall with "Curtain Falling", the second track, where the drone is a simple repeated note lending rhythm and drive to synths that are far more ethereal and consoling, akin to a funeral elegy. But the funereal aspect isn't the only one; there's also regret for what was never done despite the various warning signs: "Oh Paris, We Are Fucked" refers precisely to the Paris climate accords, far too lenient toward the great powers, and mocked to boot by Trump, who dismissed scientific studies as mere "theories". Anger gives way to despair with sooty electronic winds reminiscent of Lawrence English's "Cruel Optimism".

With "Every Scene Fades" we move from despair to anxiety, if not outright panic. This time it's industrial percussion, like the slow hammering of a factory, that cuts into echoes of synth and strings. The brief "Two And A Half Minutes" rocks along on dub pulses in the style of Loscil, while "Drifting" and "A Ruptured Tranquility" close things out with a mournful journey into a darkness that grows ever more absolute.

For Irisarri, black is the dominant colour of midnight, though not so dark that one can't glimpse – despite everything – flickers of hope, perhaps precisely thanks to an unconditional love for his own art, testimony to a proud sense of diversity that is the real hope for the future, the first building block of the subsequent Sirimiri (2018), released just three months later and another fruit of his collaboration with the Mexican label Umor Rex.

This time a light seems to rise from the rubble, as in an endless life cycle.

Sirimiri – a Basque word that translates roughly as drizzle or light shower – seems to be the album of atonement and forgiveness, of an ending that is also a new beginning, like a rain that cleanses and regenerates. A kind of redemption in which Irisarri quells his anger and contemplates the past without regret, like an outside observer glimpsing a hopeful second chance. No longer a funeral elegy, then, but a hymn to rebirth.

There's heightened emphasis on a deliberately obsolete recording quality, with overlapping loops of synths and guitars that keep Irisarri's trademark descriptive power at its usual high level. Collaborators include Carl Hultgren of the duo Windy & Carl on "Sonder" and the lesser-known ambient musician Taylor Jordan on "Mountain Stream".

There are just four tracks of rebirth, and among them the opener "Downfall" stands out, poignant in its atmospheres yet damnably nostalgic for Irisarri's earliest sounds. The usual drone builds, asserting itself more and more until it reaches levels of passion and emotion that few ambient musicians can afford themselves. "Sonder" is the longest, most expansive track (14 minutes), where Hultgren's guitar leaves its mark and plays off Irisarri's faint synth embroidery. "Vasastan" and "Mountain Stream" shift tone, becoming the most reflective and hypnotic moments: the former plays on simple background noise and variable, avant-garde pulses, while the latter becomes a contemporary piano version of Brian Eno's "Music For Airports", a kind of music for a new world waiting to be filled with sound and hope. "Mountain Stream" is the track that could mark a new path for Irisarri, an idea that might become the seed for his next chapter.

Rounding out the 2018 trilogy comes El Ferrocarril Desvaneciente (2018), devoted to the memories and sensations of a train journey toward Spain. A journey south that carries the taste of a new world, of hope, of colours and poetry. A solitary path through unknown places, described through majestic loops that confirm Irisarri as one of the most capable poets of contemporary electronic music.

The four tracks form an unbroken whole of swelling synths, rich with the positive feelings typical of a traveller brimming with hope. An optimism that Irisarri had rarely allowed into his discography before. The most powerful experience is certainly listening to it straight through without interruption, but among the four tracks two longer ones stand out: the opening "Transeúntes" and the closing "La Chica De Valladolid".

Just 22 minutes that refresh the American composer's sonic palette; not new insights so much as an enrichment of what Brian Eno would call "a versatile catalogue of ambient music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres". Music that must not overwhelm the characteristics of its environment and thereby erase them (Eno is referring to muzak, which exists to fill a space with elements not already present), but must instead bring them out as much as possible. If for Eno ambient music must create "a space to think", we might say an inviolable space of thought, of estrangement from external stimuli in opposition to the prevailing non-thought, then Irisarri can lay claim to being the master's most sincere disciple.

In 2019 Irisarri returns to focus on environmental themes, this time viewing the subject from the perspective of people who suffer psychologically from their powerlessness in the face of a society hurtling at full speed toward its own abyss. The result is Solastalgia, a word coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to describe the anxiety and existential unease – perhaps the guilt – that some more sensitive people carry as an unbearable weight within themselves. Here, music becomes the cathartic device that makes such anguish bearable. The sound grows even more monolithic and intense, so much so that it appears as an unstoppable flow with no possibility of retreat, as if it were a mechanism now launched at extreme speed, unable either to stop or to slow down.

"Deacy Waves" launches immediately with an intensity typical of Irisarri's poetics, with that impassable wall of sound capable of a disarming expressive force. Layers of guitar and synth coil around one another to rediscover the timbre that is the American composer's trademark. After so much inner torment, "Coastal Trapped Disturbance", like the most solemn of requiems, revisits the grandeur of the sonic cathedrals found in his earlier discography with a hymn to a lost nature screaming out its pain, becoming like the bell that heralds a funeral. As so often happens, Irisarri's greatness is reached in the most ambivalent moments, where emotional intensity, hope and despair seem to walk hand in hand, with neither prevailing over the other. "Kiss All The Pretty Skies Goodbye" is more experimental, with field recordings and extremely dark guitar overdubs. "Black Pitch" closes things out with a relentless synth wind that advances with ever greater force toward the void of an uncertain future.

Irisarri continues his journey into the fears of our contemporary age, confirming himself as an attentive, tireless witness to our times, a total artist capable – through his music – of painting images of extraordinary vividness.

The collaboration with Leandro Fresco resumes in 2020 with Una Presencia En La Brisa. The meeting of the two artists generates a crossroads where cascades of synth collide, alternating reflective moments with more violent ones. Among these, the most imposing track stands out, "Mientras Más Me Alejo De Ti, Menos Me Importa Cuan Lejos Estoy", an alternation of monolithic sonic walls and violent, hammering rhythmic jolts. It's the track (as the title suggests) of the brotherhood between the two artists, bound by an extremely strong connection despite being separated by thousands of kilometres. This human connection can also be found in the melancholy cosmic winds of "El Reflejo Que El Sol Ha Perdido" or in the electronic spirals intersected by the rare piano notes of "El Vacío En Sus Ojos". Whenever a trace of melody emerges, Irisarri submerges it beneath his layers, like the storm that will bury every human artefact and every memory of our existence.

The poetry of Irisarri and Fresco, even as it tries to describe the unbreakable bond between two kindred artists, remains constantly melancholic and disenchanted, as in "Cuando La Rutina Nos Toma Desprevenidos", a reflection on the inescapable passing of time, or in "El Viento Aún Nos Lleva Sumergidos", where the wind definitively submerges every one of our narcissistic ambitions.

In 2020 comes the new sonic evolution of Peripeteia, a Greek word that translates precisely as "turning point". A change that obviously has nothing to do with betraying his own ideas or his own visionary poetics, but rather translates into a renewed spirit of inquiry that inverts object and subject. Whereas Irisarri's music always used to take its cue from the outside, altering the perception of the chosen object to paint, through music, a vision of the world that went well beyond its initial starting point (for instance, the story of the ghost lake of "The Unintentional Sea" transformed into a warning about environmental abuses), creating fundamentally expressionist music (that is, capable of describing an object or a place by giving a personal interpretation shaped by the author's sensibility), now Irisarri reverses the perspective. He no longer starts from the outside but from within, focusing on the personal in order to tell a broader human story. The result is an ambivalent work, born of fluctuating sensations between fleeting moments of optimism ("Arduous Clarity") and unstoppable falls into bottomless chasms ("Fright And Control").

The opening "I Still Have The Sun To Cast A Light" has the typical Irisarrian gait, with the usual layering and distortions that are his main hallmark, with that "sound", that timbre instantly recognisable to anyone who loves contemporary ambient music. It is, to all intents and purposes, yet another of his electronic symphonies, open, airy and imposing. The power quickly gives way to emotion, to the dark electronic winds with synth echoes and distant manipulated choirs of "Mellified", an intriguing fusion of vaguely religious choral atmospheres and claustrophobic synths.

"Arduous Clarity" shifts register entirely, giving rise to new worlds, new visions. Optimism seems to prevail, light overcoming darkness thanks to a quick series of notes that merge with Irisarri's usual layering, with playful synthesizers recalling the video-game soundtracks of C418 (the one behind "Minecraft", to be precise). But the light lasts only briefly: "Refuge/Refuse", one of the American composer's saddest and most intimate tracks, immediately drags us back into horrid places where ghosts survive, screaming their despair, their disappearance and their suffering, with manipulated choirs presumably inspired by the modern tragedies of refugees. The darkness grows ever deeper up to "Fright And Control", a nightmarish industrial journey, and "Vanishing Points", which creeps along slowly only to vanish back into the nothingness from which it came.

Peripeteia is, to all intents and purposes, yet another of his electronic symphonies, open, airy and imposing. It confirms an artist who has always been able to walk the tightrope — far thinner than it might seem — separating impression from expression, finding the most effective ways to tear right through it. His main speciality remains that of giving shape to impressions translated into sound from an exquisitely subjective, personal perspective, charged with feelings that are often contradictory — expressionist, precisely.

In 2022, with Agitas Al Sol he releases a second chapter on the theme of solastalgia, featuring two tracks recorded three years earlier but never released. The title itself, almost an anagram of "solastalgia", signals continuity and a will to keep pursuing the same themes so dear to Irisarri. Both "Atrial" and "Cloak" confirm the style that is Irisarri's trademark — the ambient musician who, more than any other, has managed to create his own sound, his own sonic material recognisable among a thousand others. Two long electronic suites that recall his previous great works without any particular innovation. "Atrial" has that sound which has typically marked Irisarri's career: multi-layered, compact and glacial, while "Cloak" moves slowly but inexorably towards cosmic, distressing scenarios. If, with these two long suites, Irisarri wants to give us a glimpse of the future of the "new world" awaiting us, he is certainly thinking of a bleak future, perceived as an ominous event visible to all, one that is already weighing on our present.

In 2023 Irisarri released on Bandcamp the EP Distance, retrieving two tracks that never appeared in his official discography but which featured in a compilation published by The Wire magazine in 2010.

To understand these eleven minutes of electronic music, one has to look at who Irisarri still was in 2010, a musician truly making his first steps into the world of experimental electronic music with ideas not yet fully formed. Those were the years of The Sight Below, his project bordering on shoegaze and later abandoned, the years of the piano studies of "Reverie" — a tribute to Arvo Pärt — and finally the year of "The North Bend", his debut LP, which already contains much of what would soon become recognisable as Irisarri's typical sound.

From this point of view, "Distance" and "Path", the two tracks dug up from the archive, are a step forward from "The North Bend", almost a connecting point between the latter and "The Unintentional Sea" (2013) and perhaps even "A Fragile Geography" (2015), the record marking the absolute turning point that gave rise to a sound anyone can recognise as typically Irisarrian.

The six minutes of "Distance" truly foreshadow this kind of sound, with imposing strings reaching for powerful landscapes, still confined within a limited space, contained yet close to reaching still-unexplored sonic worlds. "Path", on the other hand, is a different kind of exploration, attentive to detail, likewise anticipating the timbral research of the years to come. The power of "Distance" and the muffled timbres of "The Path", taken together, already contain the embryo of an entire career.

Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close (2024) is his first collaboration with Abul Mogard, a Serbian musician who began his career as a musician very late in life, after working for years as a metalworker.

"Waking Up Dizzy On A Bastion" (nineteen minutes) is a striking example of fruitful interaction between two musicians who — starting from a brief melody — manage to converse (almost in a question-and-answer mode) and steer the music in a direction entirely different from its starting point.

While the beginning and the end are completely different, what strikes most is the absence of any clear dividing line between the sections: everything changes slowly until it finally becomes (from around the eleventh minute) a typical Irisarri composition, a new "Empire Systems" or a new "Indefinite Fields", touching in fact the same nerves and the same endless abysses as the American composer's two masterpieces. "Place of Forever" (seventeen minutes) is somewhat of a scaled-down version, keeping the same structure (with the addition of guitars), but failing to reach the same final emotional intensity.

FAÇADISMS (2024) refers to a type of architecture based on the grandeur of a building's exterior facade, created to conceal interiors in precarious condition. Irisarri's parallel with American freedom and the American dream was born right here in Italy, in Milan in 2016, when he came across a venue called "Il Mito Americano" ("The American Myth"). Irisarri's reflection on how freedom has, over the years, become nothing more than a propagandistic facade concealing a crumbling reality (much like the interiors hidden behind a majestic facade) is plain to see. Irisarri goes on to draw a comparison with the fake Potemkin villages, cardboard villages with actors playing the role of peasants, positioned along the route taken by Catherine the Great.

Irisarri's music thus becomes less imposing, shedding part (though not all) of the epic quality that had so often marked his work, instead growing disjointed, dusty, twisted in on itself, cyclical like a life cycle that keeps endlessly renewing. Cellist Julia Kent and the voice of Hannah Elizabeth Cox lend grandeur and drama to the atmospheres of "Control Your Soul's Desire for Freedom," with the religious fervor of Tim Hecker's "Love Streams" and the tragic choirs of "Aguirre" by Popol Vuh. The drone of "Hollow" is almost unbearable in its darkness, like the unflinching view of what lies behind the gilded facades of every piece of propaganda. The streams of noise spread throughout the record retain the sonic signature that makes Irisarri's music unmistakable and instantly recognizable.

When the guitar emerges from the electroacoustic sea, sometimes even sketching out a melody ("A Little Grace Is Abundance"), it does so only to embroider darkness upon darkness. A sliver of light can be glimpsed in "Forever Ago Is Now," almost modern classical in structure, while the closing "Red Moon Tide" – featuring Kenyan artist KMRU – reaches an apotheosis of power and creativity (a long, distorted drone of voices and electronics), like a scream into the void, a sonic cathedral in the wasteland that contemporary society has created.

Points Of Inaccessibility (2026) brings Irisarri back to imperious, nostalgic sounds, once again serving as a lucid soundtrack to increasingly dark times.

Recorded in the Netherlands at Un Cloud studio, housed within the former Pieter Baan Centre, a forensic psychiatric institution once used to confine perpetrators of violent crimes, the album confirms Irisarri as one of the greatest innovators in the history of ambient music. Perhaps inspired by the desolate location of his recording studio, and by his awareness of the thousand stories that passed through it and still linger as ghosts in those spaces, the Seattle-based composer crafts his most hauntological album yet, unearthing ancient sounds buried in memory and revisiting, in particular, the sonic structures of "A Fragile Geography" (Irisarri recently released its tenth-anniversary reissue).

Irisarri picks up the guitar and plays it with a bow, distorting its sound to create monumental pulses ("Faded Ghosts Of Clouds") that arrive after a slow build of loops that emerge and vanish, growing ever more massive in his signature style, piling on tension until the final climax. As in his finest tracks, the pathos here reaches truly towering heights. These echoes of specters make tangible the idea of a sound rising from nothing, as if it had been absorbed by its surroundings only to resurface like a ghostly figure. As Irisarri puts it: "Memory persists as residue and interference, continually shaping perception even once its source has vanished."

For Irisarri, the poles of inaccessibility verge on the now-unbridgeable distance between human beings, kept apart by a world that has become entirely virtual, where digital technology has erected barriers more impassable than those created by geography in the pre-digital age. "Breaking The Unison" captures this feeling of anger mixed with powerlessness, acting as the melodic fulcrum of the entire album, while "Signals From A Distant Afterglow" is an apotheosis of loops and voice (the tragic vocals of Karen Vogt): a track that seems Basinski-esque but is, in fact, its opposite, being non-linear. The loop doesn't degrade until it disappears, it isn't a creature that is born and dies: it's a circle that repeats infinitely, radiating tension and fragility.

This circularity, a trait that also underscores the closure and the failure of all communication, comes through clearly across the thirteen minutes of "Memory Strands", closed and layered yet overflowing with Irisarri's signature timbre — perhaps the saddest sound ambient music has ever produced.

Contributions by Alessandro Biancalana, Raffaello Russo, Matteo Meda

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