I feel kind of bad that my first four purchases of the year have all involved artists who I already know and love (albeit one of them with a new-to-me collaborator, and one in a new-to-me solo guise). But this is Irisarri in his pomp, and I wasn’t going to pass that up, was I?
From the start, we’re in familiar territory: warm, fuzzy, melodic ambient synth drone of epic proportions. There are more strings, perhaps, than we’re used to. But then, at the halfway point of the fourteen-minute opening track (Faded Ghosts Of Clouds… it might be fair to say that the names aren’t the strongest feature of this record) something awesome happens: there is this thrum of bass that is so mighty that my jaw (metaphorically) hit the floor the first time I heard it. This album was apparently built around some processed guitar manipulations, and they are central to the sound. The second track pulls a similar trick — fuzzy strings, with that bassy guitar whomph landing a few minutes in — and I’m not even mad. The third track (Signals From A Distant Afterglow… I warned you about the titles…) features wordless (at least, they’re not words in any language I can identify) vocals which come across somewhere between Belfast and Song To The Siren only more goth: I am, as the saying goes, here for this. The fourth and final track swells up out of a nest of crackles, and it does the fuzzy-fuzzy, and there’s a little rumble underneath, but just when I’m expecting that bass to kick in there’s an ætheral treble instead, and then there’s a warmth to the strings rising up in the midtones, and it’s just full-spectrum awesomeness, but to be honest by this point I’m floating somewhere in the stratosphere and my critical faculties are like ants down there. In other words: swoon.
I bought this from the artist’s bandcamp page.
dogrando writes about some records 