Rafael Anton Irisarri – The North Bend

Photographs can tell a story. With just a simple picture of a person or a place, a whole story can unfold. Thoughts and feelings are evoked and remembered, nostalgic moments can happen…

One picture of one tiny fragment of a moment passed can hold an entire lifetimes worth of living. Similarly for music; certain songs hold on to certain times, emotions and such and you are reminded of them with each listen. Music can also be a narrative. It can create new emotions and thoughts or communicate stories and ideas. It’s common place to think that for a song to hold any of these things though, it has to have words. Pop/rock music is dominated by story driven music where the stories are almost entirely depicted by the words the singer has written. Instrumental music is often looked upon as being shallow and lacking narrative or depth due to it being just that; instrumental. I argue that this is wrong. As with a picture; instrumental music carries with it acres of feelings and memories without the need for words. A picture can tell a thousand stories, as can a single note in a piece of music. The grain, reverberation, melody. They all tell stories just as much as words do.

Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American composer and media artist; someone whom I’m sure knows exactly what I’m talking about. In fact according to Irisarri himself, this album is an “audio postcard” with the aesthetics and imagery of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States in mind.

“The record is inspired by this region, and not just with the fairly obvious ‘rainy, gloomy skies’ clichés, but more in the folk, cultural traditions and pop-culture references (think of David Lynch and his television-defining narrative Twin Peaks). They sort of helped me create an audio postcard of this beautiful area of the United States.”

Irisarri’s work so far has gained high praise from almost every one and deservedly so. “Daydreaming” released on the Miasmah label was one of those albums that stood out high above others with its combination of drone ambience and delicate subtle classical instrumentation. Mini album “Reverie” developed this combo even further, bringing the ambient layers to the forefront. The inclusion of a mind blowingly majestic cover of Arvo Parts Fur Alina made people who had previously over looked his work take note.

New album “The North Bend” released on the Room40 label sees Irisarri fully realise the sound hinted at on the “Reverie” mini album; focusing heavily on textures and drones. The classical sound is still there (appearing on one track) but it’s more refined and subtle and is shown mostly in the melodic development and subtle textural elements of the tracks. It’s that melodic aspect that makes this album so warm and vivid, overflowing with imagery. Each track on the album paints a picture and tells a story, unravelling slowly and carefully to reveal its complete depth. It’s hard for me to imagine exactly what this audio postcard looks like that Irisarri was going for; I’ve never visited the states and I’m not a Lynch fan, but I can imagine my own version of it incorporating the same ideas and influences but from areas of the world that I am familiar with. That’s what this album has in abundance; familiarity in the sounds. It’s like the feeling of remembering something heart warming from the past that you had once forgotten about, be it a person or a place and looking back at a photo or postcard to remind yourself.

Accurately describing the music on this album is difficult. It’s not that it is extremely abstract; it’s more to do with the overall feeling. Plenty of artists have intertwined classical elements with drone orientated ambiance (Eluvium springs to mind) but none of them have captured this bleak yet someone uplifting sound that Irisarri has conjured. There are big textures and big melodies here and lots of development that many artists in the drone style fail to create. With every play through I discover another element hidden under the grain and the haze and it makes me want to go back to hear it again, and again until I discover another layer of hidden wonder.

The final track of the album “Deception Falls” is possibly one of the finest pieces of music I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. The chord progression, the crackle and hiss, the fragments of rhythm; it’s fantastic. It’s heart breaking yet addictive and beautiful.

It’s easy for artists to get lost in this genre these days. So many pop up creating the same old sounds that it’s hard to really care sometimes. However it’s artists such as Rafael Anton Irisarri that inject such warmth into their work that they stand way above the rest. His previous out put has been building up to this and I feel this could be his break through. This is a special album that will stand the test of time and surely be on the top of many end of year lists.

- Review by Daniel J. Gregory for Fluid Radio

Available from Room40 store
Also Experimedia

www.room40.org
www.myspace.com/rafaelantonirisarri