Rafael Anton Irisarri (Interview)

Today we’re listening to Rafael Anton Irisarri, an American ambient composer and sound engineer based in New York. We recommended his music in summer ‘19 and summer ‘20. Growing up, he moved geographically (“Florida, New York, and Puerto Rico”) and journeyed musically (folk accordion tunes, Spanish crooners, metal, dub, post-punk, shoegaze, ambient). “The sounds we’re surrounded by growing up don’t just fade away,” he told us. “They stick around and can shape how we hear the world and what we create.” His latest record, FAÇADISMS, is a collection of huge ambient compositions – distorted, reverbed guitars and synths that convey intensity and profundity. We’re also revisiting his 2010 record, The North Bend. A conversation with Rafael follows the streaming links.

FAÇADISMS - Rafael Anton Irisarri (49m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

The North Bend - Rafael Anton Irisarri (41m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

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Tell us about where you grew up and your early memories of music.

I spent my childhood bouncing around a mix of places (Florida, New York, and Puerto Rico), each with its own vibe that seeped into the way I make music today. My earliest memories of music are thanks to my grandfather. He’d whip out his accordion and play old folk tunes by ear, no sheet music, just played straight from memory – straight from the heart. Our home was always filled with sound. Spanish legends like Rocío Jurado and Raphael, or Joan Manuel Serrat echoed through the rooms. Then there was my mom, who loved her English-language pop. She’d play The Police, Men at Work, Phil Collins, and Peter Cetera on repeat. In San Juan, the streets themselves were alive with music – Latin pop and Afro-Caribbean beats poured from every corner.

We didn’t have much money growing up, so my music collection was mostly hand-me-downs from cousins and friends. When 1988 arrived, I was ten years old and sitting in my cousin’s living room watching Guns N’ Roses on TV. They were playing live at The Ritz in New York. That was it for me. I wanted to swear like Axl and shred on guitar like Slash. By the time I reached eleven years old, I was deep into metal and listening to lots of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Motörhead – you name it! I soon got my first electric guitar, and a buddy showed me how to tune it. I taught myself to play it by ear and by using borrowed guitar tab books. Later on, my uncle flipped the script by handing me some mixtapes of reggae and dub he’d recorded off British Virgin Islands radio. I didn’t even know who the artists were, but the sound pulled me in. I picked up a bass and taught myself to play along with them.

Those mixtapes from my uncle opened up a whole other world for me, and one that I didn’t fully understand at the time. For the most part, I never really knew who the artists were. I would find that out later. Back then, discovering new music wasn’t as easy as it is now to just type a name into a search bar. We didn’t have an algorithm to spoon-feed us music. We relied on local record stores, a cool older friend, or someone with access to a mail-order catalog.

When I was fifteen, a friend from the industrial music scene played me some music by The Orb for the first time. I was totally floored. “What is this?” I asked, and she said, “Ambient.” That one word sent me down a rabbit hole over the next few years while I eagerly devoured music by The Cure, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, Kraftwerk, Cocteau Twins, Talk Talk, Slowdive, Harold Budd, and artists whose sounds changed everything for me. Textures, atmospheres, rhythms – I soaked it all up.

The sounds we’re surrounded by growing up don’t just fade away – they stick around and can shape how we hear the world and what we create. For me, it’s always been about pulling all those threads together – those early influences, the stuff I’ve discovered since – and turning them into something that feels like mine.

Where are you based now, and how did you get there?

For the past ten years, I’ve been living a quiet life in the woods of the Hudson Valley, New York state, with my family and my cats. I set up a professional mastering studio here at my home called Black Knoll. I spend the majority of my time doing mastering work, and then any extra time is spent working on my own projects. I’ll head into the city for shows occasionally, but I’m mostly in the studio and keeping to myself.

Living out here in rural New York is a huge change from my time in Seattle, where I spent the most part of a decade being deeply involved in that local music scene. Back then, I was always busy with organizing shows and curating for a major electronic music festival. I even started up my own festival (Substrata), which I ran for five years.

Moving to New York wasn’t easy, though. In fact, during the move, every single thing I owned, including my entire studio with all its equipment, was stolen. The moving truck got jacked in Seattle, of all places! It was an incredibly stressful time and really set me back financially and with my work. Rebuilding the studio and starting from scratch took me years to do. Looking back, I’ve learned some valuable lessons: nothing is permanent, and nothing is truly ours. Things are always shifting, and trying to hold on too tightly only causes stress and heartache. I’ve learned to let go and not be weighed down by the baggage of old ideas.

Tell us about your studio setup now.

How much space do I have to tell you? Haha. I’ll keep it brief, but I’ve got a ton of gear that I have collected over the last decade, and way more plugins than I’ll ever need! They’ve all piled up from years of working on different projects. When I’m making my own music, though, I mostly stick to my guitars and basses, running them through custom looping setups that I’ve built with a mix of hardware and software. Sometimes I’ll throw in synths or other instruments if the vibe calls for it. It just depends on what is happening and what I’m working on at the time.

For my latest album, FAÇADISMS, I had my studio set up to record improvisations. I’d be using my Travis Bean guitar tuned to Drop A and I’d run it through a 100-watt Sunn Sceptre head and cab. I’d have the sound cranked all the way up in my studio. Most of the distortion on the album is just the amp screaming at full blast with a Rangemaster treble booster connected between the guitar and the amp. That particular setup became the backbone of the whole album.

I ditched the click track early on because I wanted to follow my gut for the tempo. I’m glad I did because it gave the music this natural, alive, organic feel that is way more human compared to most of the overly tight, quantized music out there. The whole vibe of this album ended up being quite raw and gritty. It felt like a kind of brutalist architecture: rough, but full of personality. I recorded everything live – just letting it flow out as it was. Happy accidents were found everywhere, with little melodic bits or unexpected moments that felt right. Because of how I had everything set up in my studio, I was able to capture these and record them as they happened.

Later, I went back through all those recordings and picked out the good stuff to really start shaping the tracks. Once I had a structure, I layered in more sounds and fine-tuned the MIDI to tie it all together. Working without a set tempo was a headache, though. Trying to sync sequencers with my guitar playing nearly broke me! I spent way too many hours tweaking MIDI notes and adjusting tempos to make it all fit. But in the end, it was totally worth it. The sound feels human, messy, and alive – exactly what I was going for.

What were the origins of FAÇADISMS – the influences, ideas, and life experiences that led to this awesome record?

This record was years in the making. I was on tour in northern Italy in 2016, months before you-know-who got elected, and I was just wandering through this chill neighborhood in Milan when I came across an American-style diner called Il Mito Americano. I know enough Italian to get that they were trying to say “The American Dream,” but what they actually wrote was “The American Myth.” I literally stopped in my tracks and thought, “Damn, that’s exactly it. It’s a myth!” That little translation slip became the catalyst that would set off a whole chain of thoughts and actions that eventually would become the album FAÇADISMS. It’s crazy how one random moment can spark an entire album.

There is so much more that I could say about my new album, FAÇADISMS, and I have spoken about it in some detail in a few interviews already. But I feel like much of what I was trying to talk about has already happened here in the U.S., and it has led us to this point where we are now as a country. I was feeling all of that in real-time and just channeling all the energy, frustration, anger, disappointment – all the feelings into that album.

How do you discover new music these days? What have been some of your favorite recent discoveries?

I discover a ton of new music through my mastering work at Black Knoll. I listen to everything that comes my way, and honestly, I only take on a project if I genuinely like it. That’s how I’ve stumbled across some amazing stuff – Spanish bands like Somos La Herencia, Pumuky, and, without a doubt, Mint Field (easily one of the best bands out of Mexico in recent years). Just a few examples, but they’ve stuck with me. That said, I still find music the old-school way too with recommendations from friends, fellow artists, and catching live shows while I’m on tour. One recent discovery I can’t get enough of is Creation Rebel - not exactly new (they’ve been around forever), but new to me. Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) tipped me off about them at Le Guess Who? Festival in the Netherlands, where we were both playing. He knows I’m obsessed with dub, and man, that show blew my mind! Adrian Sherwood was at FOH doing live dub mixes while the band played – it was on another level!!

Another recent favorite discovery is Gibrana Cervantes. She’s a musician from Mexico, now based in London, and her live performances are incredible. I was lucky enough to see her play live twice this year when we shared the same bill, and she blew me away in both shows! We even got to do a little improv together in London, which was such a cool experience.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

Robert Ryman. He was an American painter known for his minimalist works that were almost always in white. What was cool about his art is that he didn’t just focus on what he painted, but on the paint itself: how it looked, how it felt, and how he put it on the canvas. Sometimes he left it thick, other times he’d go super thin, almost like you could see through it.

He never reached the fame of guys like Donald Judd or Frank Stella, but his influence on modern art is huge. His work still resonates with collectors and art lovers who get that chill, laid-back minimalist vibe. The way he saw painting as not just an image - but as a sensory experience, totally changed my perspective.

He played around with texture, thickness, and transparency in ways that made me realize art can be a hell of a lot more than just what you see at first glance. The simplicity and calmness in his works really stuck with me and gave me a fresh way of thinking about creation. He influenced me a lot, actually. So much so that I’ve applied similar concepts of his art to music-making: the focus on texture over rhythm or combining layers that force the listener to look underneath the noise to find melodies, motifs, etc.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on a really special reissue version of a much-loved album from my back catalogue that will be released next year. It’s a record that means a lot to me – especially since it was the first music I wrote after losing everything I’d ever made and every recording, every track – all gone. My plan is to remaster the original recordings and do something different with this particular release. It gives me great pleasure to revisit parts of my back catalogue and give them the time and energy that they didn’t get back in the day. Also, now after 15 years of doing mastering myself, I see it all through different eyes, and it makes me want to really take back full control of things. I can, now that I have my own label with Black Knoll Editions. I have much more trust in my skills and my ability to make past releases sound how I always imagined they could sound, and to present them in a way that I am happy with and feel proud of.

Some of this remastering and revisiting older works of mine is going to involve giving the music a whole new life and bringing out things I couldn’t do in the original version. I’m a huge fan of Arvo Pärt, and I love how he reworked pieces like "Fratres" into all kinds of different arrangements with string orchestra, violin and piano, and more. Each version brings out something unique, and that approach has always stuck with me. I want to do something similar here: take the music in a new direction while still staying true to its core and original sentiment.

Something else I'm working on right now is my plan to tour in the spring – either solo or possibly with Abul Mogard. We’re still figuring out the logistics of it at this stage. We’ve got a show lined up in Prague on March 17, and we hope to build a small European tour around that. Our recent duo concerts have been really well-received, and performing together live is such an exciting experience. I usually play by myself, but it’s just a different experience when you are playing with another musician because you both bring a certain energy to the performance. Although there is a basic structure for the set, we do a lot of improvisation, so every performance ends up sounding completely unique. If you listened to all of the performances we did back-to-back, you’d notice how certain elements are shifting around each time. For example, a guitar melody I might have played with a bow in one show could be done with a slide in another. It’s kind of like a Rashomon effect, where you’re seeing (or hearing) different angles of the same material.

On another note, I’m really excited to keep developing my Black Knoll Editions label. As well as releasing my body of work, my goal is to release music that I love from other artists and to make sure that they are paid fairly and treated respectfully. After all that I’ve been through to get my own catalog back, I’m hyper-aware of how important it is to have contracts that aren’t exploitative of the artists. I want to create conditions that not only protect the artists who trust me with their work, but genuinely honor them and their work. This is really important to me and also how I want to build strong foundations and fair ethics for my label.

Lastly, I’m pretty much always in the mastering studio – it’s my main gig, and I honestly love every second of it! Sure, things can get tricky with how the economy is these days, but I’m so grateful to be doing work that I truly love. One of the best parts is getting to work with some of my musical heroes. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of someone you admire telling you how much they appreciate the work you’ve done on their album – it’s absolutely priceless. I don’t want to ever take that for granted, or lose sight of how valuable and meaningful it is to me.