Articles
Rafael Anton Irisarri
Slow Six

Albums
Another Electronic Musician
Balmorhea
Celer
City of Satellites
Cylon
Deadbeat
Kyle Bobby Dunn
Eluvium
Ent
Ido Govrin
Danny Paul Grody
Chihei Hatakeyama
Wyndel Hunt
The Internal Tulips
Keepsakes
The Knife
Kshatriy
Lali Puna
Francisco López
Mask
Melodium
Monolake
Clara Moto
Myrmyr
Nos Phillipé
Ontayso
Outputmessage
Pleq
The Q4
Schuster
Shinkei + mise_en_scene
The Sight Below
Sphere Rex
subtractiveLAD
Bjørn Svin
Tamagawa
Ten and Tracer
Trills
Trouble Books
Yellow Swans

Compilations / Mixes
An Taobh Tuathail Vol. III
Does Your Cat Know My...
Emerging Organisms 3
Moment Sound Vol. 1

EPs
Brim Liski
Ceremony
Eric Chenaux
Abe Duque
Hieroglyphic Being
Rafael Anton Irisarri
Manaboo
Monolake
Mr Cooper & Dday One
Pleq & Seque
Nigel Samways
Santos and Woodward
Simon Scott
Soundpool
Stimming, Watt & Biel
Stray Ghost
Ten and Tracer
Stuchka Vkarmanye

Rafael Anton Irisarri: Reverie
Immune

Reverie: never was a recording more aptly titled. One could also think of it as the beatless counterpart to the music Rafael Anton Irisarri issues under the alias The Sight Below. Not that they're mutually exclusive, however—a similar sensitivity to textural detail is heard in both cases, and Irisarri's primary instrument, the electric guitar, is used as a textural soundscaping generator as much as it is a vehicle for voicing melody. Reverie, the follow-up to 2009's Hopes and Past Desires (also on Immune) and 2007's Daydreaming full-length on Miasmah, includes three tracks, the first two modest in length, the third a fourteen-minute meditation. The style is ambient soundscaping and the mood ponderous, as Irisarri uses his guitar as a strings-like symphonic element to generate atmospheric masses.

Wrapped in a blanket of omnipresent hiss, “Lit A Dawn” couples elegiac swathes of guitar haze and the sparsest piano melody imagineable into five heavenly minutes. Speckled with tiny bits of static and grime, “Embraced” blossoms like an ambient symphony recording that's been rescued from attic entombment after half a century. In the longest piece, Irisarri's interpretation of Arvo Pärt's “Für Alina,” the focus on piano and textural grime at the outset aligns it more to Library Tapes than to The Sight Below. Gradually the guitar textures appear to form a sombre counterpart to the wistful piano explorations, but even then the spotlight remains most of all on the piano playing. In all, it's beautiful stuff by Irisarri and a natural complement to It All Falls Apart, his recent venture under The Sight Below name. Just as it finds that project's style gravitating in a more ambient soundscaping direction, so too does Reverie. If anything, it's an even more full-bore embrace of the soundscaping genre.

March 2010