Rafael Anton Irisarri

Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American artist, producer, and mastering engineer who composes ambient, drone, and post-minimalist music. His recordings heavily utilize field recordings, bowed guitars, strings, and electronics, creating dense clouds of blurry, hypnotic sound that often have a mournful, elegiac quality. In addition to studio work and live performances, he has mastered recordings by Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Grouper, MONO, and many others. He also records shoegaze-influenced ambient techno as the Sight Below, and collaborates with dream pop singer/songwriter Benoît Pioulard under the name Orcas. His solo discography includes releases on Room40 (such as 2013's The Unintentional Sea), Umor Rex (2017's The Shameless Years LP and several cassettes), and Dais Records (2020's Peripeteia). His own Black Knoll Editions has issued releases such as 2024's Façadisms and 2026's Points of Inaccessibility. Irisarri's debut release was the full-length Daydreaming, issued by Miasmah in 2007, a haunting album of slow-moving, atmospheric piano works reminiscent of composers such as Harold Budd. The following year saw the release of the Sight Below's No Place for Us EP and Glider full-length, although the project's identity was kept anonymous at the time. Its synthesizer-free combination of steady, minimal techno beats and atmospheric guitars struck a chord with listeners, receiving critical acclaim as well as attention from Radiohead's Thom Yorke, and the Sight Below performed at several music festivals throughout Europe and North America, in addition to touring with Ghostly labelmate Lusine. The Sight Below toured with Slowdive's Simon Scott in 2009, and released the Murmur EP (including remixes by Scott as well as Biosphere and Eluvium). The year 2009 also saw the release of Irisarri's "Hopes and Past Desires" 7" single on the Immune label. Arriving in 2010, It All Falls Apart, the Sight Below's second album for Ghostly, was a full collaboration between Irisarri and Scott. The album also featured guest vocalist Jesy Fortino (Tiny Vipers) on a cover of Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades." Also that year, Irisarri released the Reverie EP on Immune under his own name, followed by the full-length The North Bend on Lawrence English's Room40 label. As the Sight Below, he remixed Pantha du Prince and Biosphere in 2011. The self-titled debut by Orcas, Irisarri's dream pop collaboration with Benoît Pioulard, was released by Morr Music in 2012. Room40 issued The Unintentional Sea, Irisarri's third full-length under his own name, in 2013. Orcas' sophomore album, Yearling, appeared on Morr Music in 2014. Following the release of Yearling, Irisarri relocated from Seattle to the East Coast and shifted his focus toward a more expansive studio practice. During this period he continued working under his own name and as the Sight Below, issuing new material and remixes while performing internationally. In 2015, Irisarri issued two EPs under his own name (Will Her Heart Burn Anymore and Unsaid), and Room40 released A Fragile Geography, his darkest, most intense work to date. Irisarri's collaboration with Argentina-based ambient composer Leandro Fresco, La Equidistancia, was released by A Strangely Isolated Place in 2017. The solo album The Shameless Years appeared on Umor Rex the same year. This was followed by Midnight Colours, which was released by Geographic North in 2018. Two Umor Rex cassettes, El Ferrocarril Desvaneciente and Sirimiri, also appeared in 2018. Solastalgia was issued by Room40 in 2019. A second collaboration with Fresco, Una Presencia en la Brisa, appeared at the beginning of 2020. Peripeteia, Irisarri's first release on Dais Records, was released four months later. In 2022, Irisarri released Agitas al Sol on Room40, and Sacred Hatred on his own Black Knoll Editions. A remastered edition of Midnight Colours appeared in 2024, as well as the Abul Mogard collaboration Impossibly distant, impossibly close and a third Orcas album, How to Color a Thousand Mistakes. Façadisms, described as a late capitalist lament, was released in November; the album included a collaboration with KMRU as well as contributions by Julia Kent, T. R. Jordan, and others. Live at Le Guess Who?, with Mogard, and a tenth anniversary edition of A Fragile Geography (as well as A Fragile Geography: Reworks), arrived in 2025. Points of Inaccessibility, an album about feelings of disconnection in an age of connection, appeared in February of 2026. ~ Paul Simpson, Rovi