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01. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Broken Intensification
02. Rafael Anton Irisarri - A Little Grace is Abundance
03. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Control Your Soul's Desire for Freedom
04. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Hollow
05. Rafael Anton Irisarri - The Only Things that Belong to Us are Memories
06. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Forever Ago is Now
07. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Dispersion of Belief
08. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Red Moon Tide
ARTIST
TITLE
Facadisms
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
BKE 019LP BKE 019LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
11/29/2024

The seeds of composer Rafael Anton Irisarri's latest LP were first planted during his 2016 tour in Italy, months before that Autumn's unexpected presidential election. The linguistic glitch of an innocuous diner in Milan named "il Mito Americano" -- meant as "The American Dream" but translated literally to English as "The American Myth" -- sparked a series of ideas, both conceptual and musical. Amid the chaos of 2020, while exploring the stark world of brutalist architecture and inspired by the false fronts of Potemkin villages, a vision started to take shape: Façadisms. Composed over three years, it's a late capitalist lament of simmering electric despondency. Irisarri's obsession with repeating motifs mirrors the cyclical nature of a tumultuous political history. The album's eight tracks heave and storm like a tempest being drained of its rage. This is the sound of majestic dissipation, of morning afters, fashioned from a mournful haze with cavernous guitars and granular twilight. A euphony of a receding tide as one sifts through the remnants of what remains: dust, delusion, and memory. Façadisms moves fluidly between moments of absence and abandon. Ashen swaths of electronics billow above smoldering embers of melody, guitar, and scattered streaks of processed strings and voice, as on the rapturous doom of "Control Your Soul's Desire for Freedom," featuring Julia Kent on cello and Hannah Elizabeth Cox on vocals. Co-written with Kenyan sound artist KMRU, "Red Moon Tide" surges from flickering elegy to celestial disquiet, roiling waves of hymnal descent, and bristling noise. The effect is unsettling and unmooring: a soundtrack for the soul leaving the body, only to discover a void. It's the sound of the center not holding, of shared illusions being dissolved in a tunnel of white light. The cover photograph captures a profound sense of desolation. Taken in the historic shanty town of La Perla, Puerto Rico, where Irisarri spent his childhood, brutal colonial mysteries are lost to time. A skeletal concrete structure decays against an expansive blue horizon. Only the shadow of its shell ripples on the empty sea. Has the American myth finally run its course? Also available on blue (BKE 019BL-LP) and clear vinyl (BKE 019PE-LP).