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Rafael Anton Irisarri – A Fragile Geography (2015)
Review by Joseph Burnett:
A Fragile Geography’s cover artwork sums it up entirely: a faded, scratched and blurry black and white photograph of a distant manor house shrouded by trees and obscured by what looks like rain or fog as it sits on a small rise, its windows staring out like sightless eyes. It’s a visual archetype that has become synonymous with the ambient/drone scene of recent years, the culmination of ambient moving away from Eno’s early minimalist ideas and the softening of drone’s harder edges. Ambient drone’s ability to act as a vehicle for everyday alienation and painful emotions was evident 40 years ago and remains a constant well for artists like Rafael Anton Irisarri to draw upon.
If you’re a fan of wistful ambient drone, this album will be right up your street, even if it comes without any surprises. Plaintive guitar drones, billowing clusters of synths bathed in crackle and hiss, maybe a hint of piano here and there: these are familiar tropes, all useful tools for building up atmospheres that resound instantly with the heart rather than the head. Familiarity is not a bad thing: even for those of us who turn instinctively towards art that upsets norms and preconceptions will eventually drift back to talents like Rafael Anton Irisarri, not just because there’s comfort to be found in the immediately identifiable, but also acute pleasure (William Basinski is the prime example of an artist from whom I always know what to expect yet always fall in love with whatever he puts out). A Fragile Geography’s pleasure are manifold, best encapsulated on the ten-minute “Reprisal” as minor chord melodic shifts underpin a gradual increase of tension that builds to an aching climax as clouds of tone and texture swirl around the listener’s consciousness. Played at full volume, the emotional effect is alternately angry, melancholic and elegiac.
Irisarri has intimated that A Fragile Geography evolves between the personal and wider political and social concerns. The latter seem to be embodied by a very obvious gravitas, with deep, but quiet, underlying bass suggesting a turbulence that is in constant threat of bubbling to the surface. More immediate is the clear impact of having everything from his audio archives to his personal studio stolen whilst moving from Seattle to New York. Such a return to basics has clearly focused Irisarri’s mind, but instead of dwelling on frustrations he uses them to tend towards an incremental build-up on each track that, when it culminates, borders on the redemptive (such as on “Empire Systems”).
A Fragile Geography is an album that takes all the preconceptions you might have about a genre like ambient drone, underlines them and then makes you realize just how brilliant a form it is in its very essence. There’s no denying Irisarri uses techniques and instruments we’ve all heard a million times before (at just about every gig I saw at London’s Cafe Oto there’d be an earnest opening act who spent his or her whole set behind a laptop with a guitar making just this kind of music), but with his taste for restraint and clever composition, he makes the familiar both relevant and beautiful. — dustedmagazine
Track List:
01. Displacement 04:16
02. Reprisal 09:39
03. Empire Systems 08:44
04. Hiatus 02:38
05. Persistence 07:03
06. Secretly Wishing for Rain 08:11
07. The Outer Circle (Bonus) 5:53
08. A Fragile Geography (Full Album Integrated Track) 39:39
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, classical, electronic
Origin: New York, New York, USA 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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