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The Sight Below: Seatown songs
Gas clone? Not exactly. Todd L. Burns finds that the four-four thump that underpinned the Seattle-based producer's debut album has little to do with a love for techno, and much more to do with a love of shoegaze.
The music of The Sight Below is like catnip to writers. The adjectives just start flowing: Frostbitten, warm, serene, somber, dark, spacey, caressingly, hypnotic, pulsating, edgeless, atmospheric. Some of them—like the first two—are almost directly contradictory. But that's the beauty of Rafael Anton Irisarri's alter ego. Devoid of guideposts like lyrics and without obvious instrumental flourishes, these are songs that lend themselves to daydreams, guessing games and flights of rhetorical fancy.
There are solid connections to be drawn. There was no denying the sonic link between Glider, The Sight Below's first album for Ghostly International, and the music of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. Sartorially too. Voigt is among techno's most well-dressed men, and you rarely see Irisarri without some sort of scarf protecting his neck from the cold. Or, in the case of Detroit's Movement Festival last May, sunburn. (Maybe the contradictions had more truth to them than we knew.) But the similarities are now beginning to fray with the imminent release of the second album, It All Falls Apart. "New Dawn Fades" has vocals. Some tracks don't have beats at all. We're not in The Black Forest anymore; this is the sound of the American Pacific Northwest.
 Projections from The Sight Below's live show
That, and shoegaze. Irisarri's love of the equally-as-fun-to-write-about genre has been well documented. Glider, of course, is a reference to My Bloody Valentine's EP of the same name. And it's also been easy to hear in the music that he makes under his own name as well, albeit tangentially. Simon Scott, one of the many ex-drummers from the vaunted Slowdive, got in touch with Irisarri after the release of Daydreaming, his debut full-length under his own name. "It was a MySpace message, so at first I didn't realize exactly who it was. But then I was like, 'Holy fucking shit! The drummer from Slowdive?! You've got to be kidding me,'" exclaims the normally reserved Irisarri from a phone line in Seattle.
After exchanging messages, the two quickly decided to work together, leading to Scott's inclusion in dates on The Sight Below's European tour in 2009. Things went well, and he's continued to lend a hand, contributing ideas to the sessions for It All Falls Apart. As Irisarri tells it, Scott was an important sounding board for what became the first draft of the album, a number of songs that you likely won't hear for some time.
"It was a nice evolution from the first album to [the first draft of] the second album. And I liked that a lot. We had a track we wanted to add vocals to. There was a track that Simon had played drums on. It felt a lot like a band record in a way. The tracks are incredibly nice, and Sam [Valenti IV, label boss of Ghostly International] wanted to release them. But when I got back from tour in Europe, I started to work on more music. I made 'It All Falls Apart,' 'Stagger' or 'Fervent'—one of the beatless tracks—and then I thought that this was the direction that I really wanted to go. So I started to make a lot of tracks in this style, very guitar-oriented, beatless."
 The Sight Below at Node in Modena, Italy
"Glider was all live. I would plug in my guitar, had a bunch of effects ready and would hit record on a two-track machine. I found out later on that it was a huge problem afterward. When we were thinking about getting things remixed from the album, we didn't have any parts to send to people. It was just one guitar file. I really wanted the guy from Seefeel to remix something, but he couldn't do anything with it."
When asked whether playing at Berghain and dance music festivals such as Sonar and Movement has inspired him, he instead cites gigs at churches and other sit-down venues as the impetus for the sound of the new record. "I don't really [listen to much contemporary techno]. It's more the dub stuff, people that I listened to when I first got into electronic music. Basic Channel, Rhythm & Sound, Chain Reaction. I was lucky enough to meet Mark Ernestus at the Wax Treatment party while I was in Berlin. That was one of the best moments of the last trip that I made. I really enjoy Pantha Du Prince a lot, though, his new album is fantastic."
Like Prince's new album, one track in particular stands out from the rest by virtue of having vocals. Prince employed Animal Collective's Panda Bear, and Irisarri has gone the indie rock route as well, getting Tiny Vipers' Jesy Fortino to contribute a rendition of Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades." Unlike the Prince/Panda collaboration, however, "New Dawn Fades" is hardly a nod to the world of pop. Peter Hook's propulsive bass is nowhere to be found, replaced by a slow moving drone, Fortino somehow sounding even more unearthly and desperate than Ian Curtis. Despite Irisarri's fears—"I had to take out a lot of tracks that I liked to make it fit"—it sounds completely natural as part of It All Falls Apart, a testament to the producer's sure hand when compiling the album: "I have a ton of music that hasn't been released. Four songs that Simon worked on didn't make the album….But I wanted the album to work [as an album]. And I don't like albums that are too long."
Irisarri's restraint is one quality that is perhaps underrated by the majority of adjective-spilling army of writers eager to get a foothold into how the music feels. As AllMusicGuide's Andy Kellman pointed out in his review of Glider, this is the type of music that lends itself to a bit of self-absorption, yet The Sight Below's tracks rarely reach over six minutes in length. The tight compositions are likely a vestige of Irisarri's love of classical music. He's had no formal training, aside from a few music theory classes in college, but the principles seem to have stuck.
 Playing at Sonar in Barcelona, Spain
More obvious, however, is Irisarri's debt to more modern composers such as Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. Under his own name Irisarri will soon release a version of Pärt's "Für Alina" on Immune Recordings, but the commitment to repetition, the almost casual compositional flow, the epic import given to the tiniest of details is all there in his work as The Sight Below as well.
In the run-up to his first album as The Sight Below, Irisarri asked that his identity be kept a secret. "Originally I didn't want people to think about The Sight Below in a certain way because of my previous output. The music is extremely different." You can see what he's saying to a point. Listen to Daydreaming, his debut album as Rafael Anton Irisarri, and you're confronted with piano-led compositions with guitar only rarely adding abstract color in the background. But those who see The Sight Below less as the producer of Gas albums we never had and more as a direct descendant of Slowdive should have room to love both equally. And, for those who have been to Seattle, they'll know that both projects evoke the rainy city perfectly. In fact, it's almost enough to warrant an adjective or two. Can you blame us?
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Published / Monday, 15 March 2010
 8 Comments
Photo credits /
Sonar - Ariel Martini
Node - Jacopo Saffioti
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