Monday 12 September 2022, 8pm
Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer living in New York. Described by the press as “one of contemporary ambient music’s most celebrated practitioners,” Irisarri‘s music often has a mournful, elegiac quality where ostinato phrases tap into minimalist ideals while atmospheric layers of effects suggests a more cinematic approach. In all, his compositions are deeply emotive and epic, like a symphony recording that’s been rescued from attic entombment after half a century.
“Sensual, propulsive, and shrouded in mercurial darkness...irisarri’s ability to make evocative music is both a gift and a learned skill.” – Popmatter
Irisarri concerts at museums, churches, synagogues, and other non-traditional performance spaces explore the physicality of sound. Combining an array of heavy metal bass amplifiers, multiple loudspeaker configurations, synthesizers, bowed guitars, notebook computers, video images, and lighting, Irisarri decontextualize the audience’s relationship to the venue, creating an immersive, otherworldly environment.
Irisarri’s recorded works are widely published internationally, made available through Ghostly (USA), Morr Music (DE), Room40 (AU), and Umor Rex (MX), among dozen others.
Rachika Nayar is a Brooklyn-based composer and producer, who crafts her music from processed guitar along with other synthesized and multi-instrumental sounds. She composed her full-length NNA Tapes debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, over four years by digitally mutating her improvisational guitar loops, and combining the contorted textures with shimmering synths, orchestral strings, and piano. In that fluid but always deeply felt form, her music eschews single genres and binaries, as it wades through influences spanning both experimental (ambient-electronic, neoclassical) and popular vernaculars (Midwest emo, post-rock, and beyond). An EP “fragments” followed on RVNG Intl’s imprint Commend, a companion piece to her debut that offers a glimpse into the types of raw guitar loops that form the foundation of her songwriting process. Her music has been featured in venues and publications including The New York Times, Pitchfork, NPR, New York Magazine, the Berlinale International Film Festival, and The Shed in Hudson Yards.
“...illuminates the forces that shape us and the forces that push us away from our centre. Listening is like remembering what we wanted to forget while driving down the highway into twilight.” – The Wire
