Rafael Anton Irisarri

Rafael Anton Irisarri functions as an American musician, producer, and mastering engineer specializing in ambient, drone, and post-minimalist compositions. His works draw extensively on field recordings together with bowed guitars, strings, and electronics to produce thick layers of indistinct, trance-like textures frequently marked by a sorrowful, commemorative atmosphere. Live appearances have placed him alongside experimental, electronic, and indie performers such as Fennesz, Greg Davis, Grouper, and Lawrence English. Beginning in 2007 he has jointly programmed numerous experimental music events and festivals, among them Seattle’s Decibel Festival and Substrata as well as programs connected to the Ghostly International imprint. Irisarri has also supplied live visuals for Lusine, Solvent, Simon Scott, and additional artists. Under the alias the Sight Below he produces shoegaze-tinged ambient techno, while his partnership with dream pop singer/songwriter Benoît Pioulard operates as Orcas. Solo output has appeared on Room40, including the 2013 album The Unintentional Sea, on Umor Rex with the 2017 LP The Shameless Years and several cassettes, and on Dais Records via the 2020 release Peripeteia; his own Black Knoll Editions issued Façadisms in 2024.

His first recording, the full-length Daydreaming, emerged on Miasmah in 2007 as an evocative set of slowly paced, atmospheric piano pieces echoing composers such as Harold Budd. The next year brought the Sight Below’s No Place for Us EP and Glider album, both initially issued without revealing the project’s identity. The music’s avoidance of synthesizers in favor of steady, minimal techno rhythms combined with atmospheric guitars resonated widely, earning praise and notice from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke; the Sight Below consequently appeared at festivals across Europe and North America while touring with Ghostly labelmate Lusine. In 2009 the Sight Below shared bills with Slowdive’s Simon Scott and issued the Murmur EP, which incorporated reworkings by Scott, Biosphere, and Eluvium. That same year saw Irisarri’s own “Hopes and Past Desires” 7" single surface on the Immune label.

The Sight Below’s second Ghostly album, It All Falls Apart, arrived in 2010 as a complete collaboration between Irisarri and Scott; guest vocalist Jesy Fortino of Tiny Vipers contributed to a cover of Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades.” Also in 2010 Irisarri released the Reverie EP on Immune under his own name, followed by the full-length The North Bend on Lawrence English’s Room40 imprint. As the Sight Below he supplied remixes for Pantha du Prince and Biosphere in 2011. The self-titled debut from Orcas, Irisarri’s dream pop project with Benoît Pioulard, appeared on Morr Music in 2012. Room40 issued The Unintentional Sea, Irisarri’s third solo full-length, in 2013, while Orcas returned with the sophomore album Yearling on Morr Music in 2014.

During Memorial Day weekend of that year, as Irisarri and his wife prepared to relocate from Seattle to New York, their possessions were stolen, among them musical equipment valued above $50,000. Ghostly organized an online fundraising effort that ultimately collected more than $18,000; the campaign also encompassed an extremely limited vinyl pressing of Unfurled, an EP containing the final Sight Below track recorded in Seattle along with remixes by Markus Guentner, Loscil, Yagya, and others.

Throughout 2015 Irisarri put out two EPs under his own name—Will Her Heart Burn Anymore and Unsaid—while Room40 released A Fragile Geography, his most somber and concentrated work to that point. The collaboration with Argentina-based ambient composer Leandro Fresco, titled La Equidistancia, came out on A Strangely Isolated Place in 2017, the same year Umor Rex issued the solo album The Shameless Years. Midnight Colours followed on Geographic North in 2018; two further Umor Rex cassettes, El Ferrocarril Desvaneciente and Sirimiri, also appeared that year. Solastalgia emerged on Room40 in 2019. A second joint project with Fresco, Una Presencia en la Brisa, surfaced early in 2020, and four months later Peripeteia marked Irisarri’s first release on Dais Records.

In 2022 he issued Agitas al Sol on Room40 and Sacred Hatred on Black Knoll Editions. A remastered version of Midnight Colours arrived in 2024 together with the Abul Mogard collaboration Impossibly distant, impossibly close and a third Orcas album, How to Color a Thousand Mistakes. November saw the release of Façadisms on Black Knoll Editions, characterized as a late capitalist lament and featuring a collaboration with KMRU along with contributions from Julia Kent, T. R. Jordan, and others.