Rafael Anton Irisarri is a Seattle-based composer who makes Gas-influenced ambient music as the Sight Below. His candidly titled debut, Glider, efficiently fed different pitches into the same algorithm over and over. The compositions for EBowed and filtered guitars almost always began with clouds of long, singing tones, blossoming and decaying slowly. A muffled kick drum or bass pulse would add definition and momentum, and off we'd go. Small accents-- the scratch of a guitar string, or a reverbed snare-- made big differences. Glider distinguished itself by being indistinguishable-- solid from end to end, with deep replay value.
The Sight Below's latest LP, It All Falls Apart, retains the consistency and heavenly sound while upping the variety, which makes the reclusive composer feel more present as a personality. His tones are allowed to shred and convulse, and an enhanced low range gives them more depth than Glider's sheer planes. The difference is apparent right away: Opener "Shimmer" is a beatless, interpenetrating study in light and dark, with richly corporeal textures at the end. The guitar theme on "Fervent" is abstracted in a bright slush of resonance, but sounds startlingly like a guitar. His music is still austere, but there's a new swerve to it. It's the sound of a perfectionist relenting.
Irisarri sounds confident, coming off of well-received gigs at MUTEK and SÓNAR, not to mention praise from Thom Yorke. He's also got a collaborator now; ex-Slowdive member Simon Scott, who knows a thing or two about massive, weightless sounds. There's a sense of human tension and drama that Glider lacked. There's even singing on "New Dawn Fades", a shoegaze version of the Joy Division song with piercing vocals by Jesy Fortino (aka Tiny Vipers). It's a bit jarring to hear singing-- let alone such emphatic singing-- in this context, but Irisarri wisely keeps the music scaled even bigger than the vocals, so they blend well. And the lyrics of the song connect with the music's new mojo: "Different colors, different shapes." From the tensely syncopated bassline of "Burn Me Out From the Inside", to the foamy distortion of the title track, to the long Excepter-ish unraveling of "Stagger", they just keep coming.
